Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/462

440 action, more than in any other, lies that deficiency in the powers of the lower animals which puts language beyond their reach, we need have little hesitation in answering that it is the inferiority of the command which consciousness in them exercises over the mental operations: in their inability to hold up their conceptions before their own gaze, to trace out the steps of reasoning, to analyze and compare in a leisurely and reflective manner, separating qualities and relations from one another, so as to perceive that each is capable of distinct designation. That many animals come so near to a capacity for language as to be able to understand and be directed by it when it is addressed to them by man, was pointed out in the last lecture  ; nor can I see that their condition is destitute of analogy with that of very young children, whose power of understanding language is developed sooner and more rapidly than their power of employing it; who learn to apprehend a host of things before they learn to express them. In respect to speech, it is very evident that the distance from the oyster, for instance, which no amount of training can bring to the slightest apprehension of anything you may wish to signify to it, to the intelligent and docile dog, is vastly greater than that which separates the dog from the undeveloped man, or from a man of one of the lower and more brutish races.

But once more, why do we speak? what is the final cause of the of language to man? in what way is the possession of such a power of advantage to us? These inquiries open a great and wide-reaching subject; one far too great, indeed, for us to attempt dealing with it, in the contracted space at our command, otherwise than in the briefest and most superficial manner. A detailed reply can be the more easily dispensed with, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the worth of speech is too present to the mind of every one to need to be called up otherwise than by a simple allusion; and as, on the other hand, our previous discussions have brought more or less distinctly to view the chief points requiring notice.

The general answer, in which is summed up nearly the whole array of advantages derived from language, is this: that it enables men to be, as they are intended to be, social,