Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/468

446 each generation feels always the leading hand, not only of the generation that immediately instructed it, but of all who have gone before, and taken a part in moulding the common speech; and, not least, of those distant communities, hidden from our view in the darkness of the earliest ages, whose action determined the grand structural features of each tongue now spoken. Every race is, indeed, as a whole, the artificer of its own speech, and herein is manifested the sum and general effect of its capacities in this special direction of action; but many a one has felt through all the later periods of its history the constraining and laming force of a language unhappily developed in the first stages of formation; which it might have made better, had the work been to do over again, but which now weighs upon its powers with all the force of disabling inbred habit. Both the intellectual and the historical career of a race is thus in no small degree affected by its speech. Upon this great subject, however, of the influence reflected back from language upon the thought and mind of those who learn and use it, we can here only touch; to treat it with any fulness would require deep and detailed investigations, both linguistic and psychological, for which our inquiries hitherto have only laid the necessary foundation.

The extent to which the different races of men have availed themselves of language, to secure the advantages placed within their reach by it, is, naturally and necessarily, as various as are the endowments of the races. With some, it has served only the low purposes of an existence raised by its aid to a certain height above that of the brutes, and remaining stationary there. Their whole native capacity of mental development seems to have exhausted itself in the acquisition of an amount of language even less than is learned by the young child of many another race, as the first stage upon which his after-education shall be built up. Their life is absorbed in satisfying the demands of the hour; past and future are nothing to them; the world is merely a hunting-ground, where means of gratifying physical desires, and of lengthening out a miserable existence, may be sought and found; its wonders do not even awaken in their minds a sense of a higher power; the barest social intercourse,