Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/463

XII.] and not merely gregarious beings. As it is the product, so it is also the means and instrument, of community. It converts the human race from a bare aggregate of individuals into a unity, having a joint life, a common development, to which each individual contributes his mite, receiving an untold treasure in return. It alone makes history possible. All that man possesses more than the brute is so intimately bound up with language that the two are hardly separable from one another; and, as we have already seen, are regarded by some erroneously, but naturally and excusably, as actually identical. Our endowments, so infinitely higher than the brute's, need also, as being so much freer and less instinctive, to be brought to our knowledge, to be drawn out and educated. The speechless man is a being of undeveloped capacities, having within him the seeds of everything great and good, but seeds which only language can fertilize and bring to fruit; he is potentially the lord of nature, the image of his Creator; but in present reality he is only a more cunning brute among brutes. There is hardly to be found in the whole animal creation any being more ignoble and shocking than those wild and savage solitary men, of whom history affords us now and then a specimen; but what we are above them has been gained through the instrumentality of language, and is the product of a slow progressive accumulation and transmission. If each human being had to begin for himself the career of education and improvement, all the energies of the race would be absorbed in taking, over and over again, the first simple steps. Language enables each generation to lay up securely, and to hand over to its successors, its own collected wisdom, its stores of experience, deduction, and invention, so that each starts from the point which its predecessor had reached, and every individual commences his career, heir to the gathered wealth of an immeasurable past.

So far, now, as this advantage comes to us from the handing down, through means of speech, of knowledge hoarded up by those who have lived before us, or from its communication by our contemporaries, we appreciate with a tolerable degree of justness its nature and value. We know full well that we