Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/443

XI.] growing out of that communication which men must and will have with their fellows. True it is that the individual mind, without language, would be a dwarfed and comparatively powerless organ: but this means simply that man could develop his powers, and become what he was meant to be, only in society, by converse with his fellows. He is by his essential nature a social being, and his most precious individual possession, his speech, he gets only as a social being. The historical beginnings of speech, therefore, were no spontaneous outbursts, realizing to the mind of the utterer the conceptions with which he was swelling; they were successful results of the endeavour to arrive at signs by which those conceptions should be called up also in the minds of others.

These considerations, if I am not mistaken, will be found to relieve the remaining part of the problem we are considering of not a little of its perplexity. Recognizing the external and non-essential nature of the bond which unites every constituent of language to the idea represented by it, and also the external nature of the force which brings about the genesis of the sign, we are enabled to reduce the inquiry to this form: how should the first language-makers, human beings gifted like ourselves, with no exceptional endowments, but with no disabilities other than that of the non-development of their inherent capacities, have naturally succeeded in arriving at the possession of signs by which they could understand one another? Before we take up and examine the theories which have been proposed to explain the first processes of sign-making, however, we must look for a moment at one or two preliminary points, of a more general character.

Our first point concerns the office of the voice as instrument of expression. If the tie between idea and sign be so loose, it may be asked, why is the sign always a spoken one, and language, as we use the term, a body solely of articulated utterances? In answering this, it is sufficient to point out the superior convenience and availability of spoken signs, as compared with those of any other kind. These qualities, and these alone, designate the voice to its office. There is