Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/437

XI.] but also state it with perfect intelligibility. That the dog and many other animals make no very distant approach to a capacity for language is shown farther by their ability to understand and obey what is said to them. They are able so distinctly to associate certain ideas with the words we utter as to govern their actions accordingly. Even the dull ox knows which way to turn when his driver cries gee or haw to him; and the exceeding intelligence with which some dogs will listen to directions, and even overhear conversation, has been the subject of many striking and authentic anecdotes. It is vain and needless to deny a correspondence up to a certain point between men and other animals in regard to the phenomena of mental activity, as well as the other phenomena connected with animal life, like digestion, motion, enjoyment and suffering. But their power of thinking is not, like ours, capable of free and indefinite development by education, whereof language is the chief means, as it is the sign also of a capacity for it. There is, it need not be doubted, no small difference between the thought of the most intelligent of the lower races, and that of the least cultivated speechless human being. Yet what a chaos of unanalyzed conceptions, undefined impressions, and unreasoned conclusions the mind of every one of us would be without speech, it is well-nigh impossible for us to have even a faint idea—for us who have so long enjoyed the advantage of expression, and so accustomed ourselves to lean upon it, that we can now even differ and dispute as to whether thought and its instrument are not one and the same thing. The mental action of the wholly wild and untrained man is certainly less unlike to that of the beast than to that of the man who has been educated by the acquisition and use of language. The distinction of the two former is mainly that of potentiality; they are like the fecundated and the unfecundated egg: the one can develop into organized life; the other cannot. Let us look at an illustration which shall set forth both their correspondence and their difference.

It has been often remarked that the crow has a capacity to count, up to a certain number. If two hunters enter a hut and only one comes out, he will not be allured near the place