Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/858

836 slipped into errors and faults, but which nevertheless had a degree of fixedness, for these languages were transmitted from generation to generation for ages. "When we consider how much trouble it takes now to learn these languages, we are surprised. But we must recollect that education in the maternal language has the advantage that it is going on all the time and everywhere, that it is stimulated by necessity, that it addresses itself to fresh minds, and that it offers the unique characteristic of associating words with things, and not the words of one language with those of another. The same conditions are in play in all mother tongues, and in all the child's mind achieves a triumph. Our modern languages, while less encumbered with formal apparatus, are still not far from it; and the complication bears upon another point, consisting in the use of words of slight meaning, and so abstract and servile that we never think of them, while we always put them in their proper places. In this we observe intelligence passing to a condition of instinct. This is not through any kind of a notion of the value of the word, but by virtue of a certain number of locutions which memory retains, and which serve as models. Our intelligence derives the same services in daily operations from language that we derive from calculations. In consequence of the infirmity of our understanding, it is easier for us to deal with the signs of ideas than with the ideas themselves. Before the invention of writing, men counted with pebbles. Doubtless this idea must come first; but it is vacillating, fugitive, hard to transmit. Once incorporated into a sign, we are sure we have it, and can direct it at will and communicate it to others. This is the service performed by language; it renders thought objective.

If I had to say in what the superiority of the Indo-European languages consists, I should not seek for it in the grammatical mechanism, or in the compounds, or in the syntax; but in the facility with which those languages, from the most ancient times of which we know, have created abstract nouns. If we observe the suffixes which serve this purpose, we shall be surprised at their number and variety. It is the presence of these nouns in large number, as well as the possibility of making others after the same type, that adapts the Indo-European languages so well to the expression of all the operations of thought.

Accustomed as we are to language, we do not easily conceive of the accumulation of mental labor which it represents; but, to satisfy ourselves concerning it, we have only to take up some book and eliminate all the words which, not corresponding to any objective reality, summarize a mental operation. Hardly anything would be left of the page thus pruned. The peasant who talks of time and seasons, the tradesman who expatiates on his stock of goods, and