Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/467

XII.] could perform any of the higher work of which it was capable. But as each generation transmitted to its successor what it had itself inherited from its predecessor, perfected and increased by the results of its own mental labour, the accumulation of language, accompanying the development of analytic thought and the acquisition of knowledge, went steadily and successfully forward; until at last, when one has but acquired his own mother-tongue, a vocabulary of terms and an understanding of what they mean, he already comprehends himself and his surroundings; he possesses the fitting instrument of mental action, and can go on intelligently to observe and deduce for himself. Few of us have any adequate conception of the debt of gratitude we owe to our ancestors for shaping in our behalf the ideas which we now acquire along with the means of their expression, or of how great a part of our intellectual training consists in our simply learning how to speak.

One thing more we have to note in connection herewith. The style in which we shall do our thinking, the framework of our reasonings, the matters of our subjective apprehension, the distinctions and relations to which we shall direct our chief attention, are thus determined in the main for us, not by us. In learning to speak with those about us, we learn also to think with them: their traditional habits of mind become ours. In this guidance there is therefore something of constraint, although we are little apt to realize it. Study of a foreign language brings it in some measure to our sense. He who begins to learn a tongue not his own is at first hardly aware of any incommensurability between its signs for ideas and those to which he has been accustomed. But the more intimately he comes to know it, and the more natural and familiar its use becomes to him, so much the more clearly does he see that the dress it puts upon his thoughts modifies their aspect, the more impossible does it grow to him to translate its phrases with satisfactory accuracy into his native speech. The individual is thus unable to enter into a community of language-users without some abridgment of his personal freedom—even though the penalty be wholly insignificant as compared with the accruing benefit. Thus, too,