Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/471

XII.] such use; and as for the advantage which the individual himself derives from recording his thought, so as to be able to con it over, to apprehend it and its relations more distinctly, as well as that other incalculable advantage which the individual and the race derive from the transmission and accumulation of knowledge by this means—these are matters which are still farther from the minds of the earliest inventors. Here is a first most notable analogy between the histories of spoken and written speech: the satisfaction of a simple social impulse, arising out of the ordinary needs of intercourse between man and man, brings forth by degrees an instrumentality of supreme importance to the progress of the whole human race. The earliest writers, like the earliest speakers, wrought far more wisely than they knew.

Again, the conveyance of thought by means of writing was not primarily conceived of as a conveyance of the spoken language in which the thought would be expressed: it dealt immediately with the conception itself, striving to place this by direct means before the apprehension of the person addressed. Speech and writing were two independent ways of arriving at the same end. We may add that, so long as it remains in this stage, writing is a tedious and bungling instrumentality; the great step towards its perfection is taken when it accepts a subordinate part, as consort and helpmate of speech.

A first feeble effort toward the realization of the fundamental object of writing is to be seen in the custom—not infrequent at a certain period of culture, and even retained in occasional use among peoples of every grade of civilization—of sending along with a messenger some visible object, symbolical of his errand, and helping both to authenticate and to render it impressive. Thus, the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah, ch. xix.) is directed to take an earthen bottle and break it before the ancients of his people, to signify the sudden and irremediable destruction with which he is to threaten them. Thus ambassadors and heralds in ancient times were charged with the delivery of something typical of the peace or war they were sent to proclaim. And the knight's glove, thrown down in defiance and taken up by him who accepts