Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/639

No. 6.] The reader will have noticed that many of the signs which Mr. d'Estrella reports himself to have used are regular conventional gestures of the deaf-mute sign language. Some of these may be used habitually by the Mexicans, others the poor boy probably captured out of the social atmosphere, so to speak, in the way in which needy creatures so generally find a way to the object which can satisfy their want. It will be observed, however, that his cosmological and ethical reflections were the outbirth of his solitary thought; and although he tried to communicate the cosmology to others, it is evident, since the most receptive of his friends could only say 'yes' or 'no' to him in return, that the communion must have been very incomplete. He surely had no conventional gestures for the causal and logical relations involved in his inductions about the moon, for example. So far as it goes, then, his narrative tends to discountenance the notion that no abstract thought is possible without words. Abstract thought of a decidedly subtle kind, both scientific and moral, went on here in advance of the means of expressing it to others. To a great extent it does so in all of us to-day, for nothing is commoner than to have a thought, and then to seek for the proper words in which to clothe its most important features. The only way to defend the doctrine of the absolute dependence of thought on language is so to enlarge the sphere of this latter word as to make it cover every possible sort of mental imagery, whether communicable to others or not. Of course no man can think without some kind of mind-stuff to think in. Our general meanings and abstract conceptions must always have for their vehicle images more or less concrete, and 'fringes' of tendency and relation which we feel between them. To a solitary untaught individual (could such a one exist) such unverbalized images would be rationally significant, and a train of them might be called a monologue. But such a monologue is not what any one naturally means by speech; and it is far better to drop the language-doctrine altogether than to evaporate its meaning into triviality like this.

Mr. d'Estrella's reminiscences also help to settle the question of whether moral propositions are 'intuitive' or not. He