Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/432

410 and hear poisson so often, that it should become more intimately associated with its conception than fish, and should come more readily and naturally than the latter into my mind on presentation of the conception: I should then have learned, as we phrase it, to think in French instead of English. How futile, I say again, to talk of such a thing as identity between thought and the expression which sits so loosely upon it, and can be so easily shifted! As well compare the house of the hermit-crab—which, born soft and coverless, takes refuge in the first suitable shell which chance throws in its way, and thenceforth makes that its home, unless convenience and opportunity lead it to move to another—with that of the turtle, whose horny covering is a part of its own structure, and cannot be torn off without destruction of its life.

Is there not, in fact, something approaching to palpable absurdity in the doctrine that words and thoughts are identical, that the mind thinks words? Words are not mental acts; they are combinations of sounds, effects produced upon the auditory nerve by atmospheric vibrations, which are brought about by physical agencies—agencies set in operation, it is true, by acts of volition, but whose products are no more mental than are pantomimic motions voluntarily made with the fingers. We know well, indeed, that there is a language composed of such motions instead of uttered words: namely, the language taught as means of communication and expression to those whose ear is numb to the ordinary signs of thought. Nothing brings more distinctly to light the true nature of language, as a system of arbitrary signs for thought, learned and made auxiliary to the processes of thought, than a consideration of the modes of speech practised by the deaf and dumb: whether their general language, which intimates ideas by significant gestures, possessing in the main a certain degree of evident relevancy, but conventional in their special application; or their finger-speech, that most strange and anomalous mode of representation of ideas at second hand, by wholly arbitrary contortions of certain appendages of the body, standing for another kind of signs, namely articulate sounds, of the true nature of