Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/158

146 example, not by any inward impulse. Some of us, indeed, know that the word has a curious history—that it is akin to beech, and for the reason that beechen staves or tablets were the first material used by our rude ancestors for cutting runes upon. But this is merely a matter of learned curiosity; our knowledge or want of knowledge, our belief or disbelief in the explanation when given us, has nothing to do with our use of the term book; we use it because others—those with whom it is our lot to have to do in life—also use it, because we can communicate with them by means of it. If we, though of English blood, had happened to be born at Paris, at Rome, at Cairo, at Peking, we should either have learned to use a different word from this, or another besides it, in the same sense and for the same reason—even as in English-speaking communities, especially in America, descendants of half the races under heaven use book as their "native" sign, knowing absolutely nothing of any other.

But what is thus true of book is true also of every other sign of which our language is composed, unless we may have committed in a few instances that rare act, the coining of a word. And this is already of itself enough to show that in a perfectly proper—indeed, in the only genuine—sense, our words are arbitrary and conventional signs: arbitrary, not because no reason can be given for the assignment of each word to its use, but because the reason is only an historical, not a necessary one, and because any other of the hundred current, or of the ten thousand possible, signs might have been made by us to answer precisely the same purpose; conventional, not because it was voted in a convention (what that we call "conventional" ever was so?), nor because men came to an explicit understanding about it in any other way, but because its adoption by us had its ground in the consenting usage of our community. There is no way of denying these two epithets to language, except by misunderstanding their meaning.

Moreover, it is not the case that the learner gives birth first to an independent and adequate conception of a book, and then merely accepts from others the name by which he shall call it. For the "inner form," not less than for the outer sign, he is dependent on his teachers. He would not, indeed, even begin to use the word if he had not formed some sort of an idea of a thing which it stood for; but he knows next to nothing about the thing; it is to him a mystery of which he only later obtains the key, and which he does not fully understand till after he has studied the history of civilization, a whole chapter of which is, in a manner, epitomized in the single term. And all this is given him in measure, as he is prepared to receive it, by the teaching of others. A further example or two will show this dependence still more clearly. The idea of planet came down to us as defined and named by our instructors, the Greeks, and named from the most superficially obvious property of the objects designated, that of "wandering," or moving amid the other stars. No uninstructed