Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/445

XI.] degrees the superior capacities of spoken signs, and by degrees worked them out to a sufficiency for all the ordinary needs of expression; when gesture was relegated to the department of rhetoric, to the office of giving individual colouring and intensity to intellectual expression—as, in all well-developed languages, has been the case with tone also. We do not need to enter here into any detailed inquiry as to the modes and reasons of the special adaptedness of vocal utterance to the uses of expression. The fact is palpable, recognized by every mind, and illustrated by the whole history of human communication. We feel that those who learn to talk well without speaking are to be compared with the mutilated beings who, deprived of hands, learn to make their feet do the ordinary and natural work of hands. Many of us have seen toys constructed, figures cut out, pictures painted by such beings, with the help of instruments grasped by the toes, which we who possess the most supple of fingers might try in vain to imitate: and in the possibility of such things we note the controlling power of the true actor, the human mind and soul, which, in the direction of its special gifts, can work out beautiful and wonderful results with instrumentalities that appear to us awkward, feeble, and inefficient. The voice, the articulating power, was the appointed and provided means of supplying the chief want of man's social nature, language; and no race of men fails to show, by its possession of articulate speech, that the provision was one natural, recognizable, and sufficient.

Our second point concerns the general class of ideas which should have first found incorporation in speech. What we are brought by our historical analysis of language to recognize as the beginnings of speech was set forth in the seventh lecture. Roots, directly significant of quality or action, were there shown to be the starting-points, the germs, of our whole vast system of nomenclature, for qualities, beings, and relations. Many minds, however, find a difficulty in accepting such a result. They are unwilling to believe that language can have begun with the expression of anything so abstract as a quality; they feel as if the first words must have been designations for concrete things, for the