Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/469

XII.] by instruction of the petty arts of living, and the scantiest adaptation to the changes of external circumstances, are all they ask of the divine gift of speech. Through such a condition as this we may suppose that all human language has passed; but while in parts of the world it still stays there, and gives no prospect of a higher development except through the influence and aid of races of better gifts and richer acquisitions, it shows elsewhere every degree of progression, up even to the satisfaction of the wants of an advanced and advancing culture like our own, where the knowledge of the past, aiding the understanding of the present and preparing for the future, is laid up in such abundant store, that he who studies longest and deepest, and with most appreciative and inquisitive industry, hardly does more than realize better than his fellows how little he can know of that which is known; how short is life, compared with the almost infinite extent of that series of truths, the infinite variety of that complication of cognitions, which life puts within our reach, and whose apprehension constitutes one of the highest and noblest pleasures of life.

Such full development as this, however, of the uses and advantages of speech would be impossible by the instrumentality of spoken speech alone; it demands a farther auxiliary, in the possession of written speech. The art of writing is so natural a counterpart and complement of the art of speaking, it so notably takes up and carries farther the work which language has undertaken on behalf of mankind, that some consideration of it is well-nigh forced upon us here: our view of the history and office of language would otherwise lack a part essential to its completeness. Speech and writing are equally necessary elements in human history, equally growing out of man's capacity and wants as a social and an indefinitely perfectible being. He would be, without language, hardly man at all, a creature little raised above the brutes; without the art of record, his elevation would soon find its limits; he could never become the being he was meant to be, the possessor of enlightenment, the true lord of nature and discoverer of her secrets. Language makes each community, each race, a unit; writing tends to bind