Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/470

448 all races and all ages, forcing the whole of mankind to contribute to the education and endowment of every individual. Moreover, there is in many respects so close a parallelism and analogy between the histories of these two sister arts, that, were it only for the value of the illustration, we should be justified in turning aside for a time to follow out the growth of letters.

As in the case of language, it may be remarked, so also in that of writing, we hardly realize, until we begin to investigate the subject, that the art has had a history at all. It seems to us hardly less "natural" to write our thoughts than to speak them: such is the power of educated habit, that we take both alike as things of course. But what we have above shown to be true of spoken language is still more palpably and demonstrably true of written; it was a slow and laborious task for men to arrive at the idea and its realization: more than one race has been engaged in the work of elaborating for our use the simple and convenient means of record of which we are the fortunate possessors; many have been the failures or only partial successes which have attended the efforts of portions of mankind to provide themselves with such means. As it is impossible to trace the history of our own alphabet back to its very beginning, some review of those efforts will be our best means of inferring what its earliest stages of growth must have been, and will prepare us to understand what it is, and what are its advantages.

We have first to notice that the force which impels to the invention of writing, which leads men to represent thought by visible instead of audible signs, is the desire to communicate to a distance, to cut expression loose from its natural limitation to the personal presence of him whose thought is expressed, and make it apprehensible by persons far away. Even the intention of record, of conveying the thought to a distance in time also, making it apprehensible by generations to come, shows itself only secondarily, as experience suggests