Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/464

442 were born ignorant, and have by hearing and reading possessed ourselves in a few short years of more enlightenment than we could have worked out for our own use in many long centuries; we can trace, too, the history of various branches of knowledge, and see how they have grown up from scanty beginnings, by the consenting labour of innumerable minds, through a succession of generations. We are aware that our culture, in the possession of which we are more fortunate than all who have gone before us, is the product of historical conditions working through hundreds, even thousands, of years; that its germs began to be developed in the far distant East, in ages so remote that history and tradition alike fail to give us so much as glimpses of their birth; that they were engendered among exceptionally endowed races, in especially favouring situations, and were passed on from one people to another, elaborated and increased by each, until, but a thousand years ago, our own immediate ancestors, a horde of uncouth barbarians, were ready to receive them in their turn—and that this whole process of accumulation and transfer has been made possible only by means of speech and its kindred and dependent art of record. What we are far less mindful of is the extent to which we derive a similar gain in the inheritance of language itself, and that this very instrumentality is in like manner the gradually gathered and perfected work of many generations—in part, of many races. We do not realize how much of the observation and study of past ages is stored up in the mere words which we learn so easily and use so lightly, and what degree of training our minds receive, almost without knowing it, by entering in this way also into the fruits of the prolonged labour of others. To this point, then, we owe a more special consideration.

Learning to speak is the first step in each child's education, the necessary preparation for receiving higher instruction of every kind. So was it also with the human race; the acquisition of speech constituted the first stage in the progressive development of its capacities. We, as individuals, have forgotten both the labour that the task cost us and the enlightenment its successful accomplishment brought us: the whole