Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/458



last inquiries, into the origin of language and the nature of its connection with thought, brought us to conclusions accordant with those we had reached in the course of our earlier discussions, and foreshadowed by them. As we had found before that the only forces immediately concerned in the growth and changes of language were human, so now we saw that there was no reason to regard any others as having borne a share in its origination: in its incipient stage, no less than in its succeeding phases, speech has been the work of those whose needs it supplies; it is in no other sense of divine origin than as everything which man possesses is a divine gift, the product of endowments and conditions which are not of his own determining. As further, we had recognized the arbitrariness and conventionality of the means whereby each individual among us signifies his conceptions to his fellows—namely, utterances learned by each from those among whom his lot chanced to be cast, he being forced to speak as they were in the habit of