Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/252

234 means, so that those who see our signs shall perceive our meaning.

When, however, encouraged by our ready success in making out the nature and action of these ruder methods, we turn to the higher art of speech, and ask how such and such words have come to express such and such thoughts, we find ourselves face to face with an immense problem, as yet but in small part solved. The success of investigation has indeed been enough to encourage us to push vigorously forward in the research, but the present explorations have not extended beyond corners and patches of an elsewhere unknown field. Still the results go far to warrant us in associating expression by gestures and pictures with articulate language as to principles of original formation, much as men associate them in actual life by using gesture and word at once. Of course, articulate speech, in its far more complex and elaborate development, has taken up devices to which the more simple and rude means of communication offer nothing comparable. Still, language, so far as its constitution is understood, seems to have been developed like writing or music, like hunting or fire-making, by the exercise of purely human faculties in purely human ways. This state of things by no means belongs exclusively to rudimentary philological operations, such as the choosing expressive sounds to name corresponding ideas by. In the higher departments of speech, where words already existing are turned to account to express new meanings and shade off new distinctions, we find these ends attained by contrivances ranging from extreme dexterity down to utter clumsiness. For a single instance, one great means of giving new meaning to old sound is metaphor, which transfers ideas from hearing to seeing, from touching to thinking, from the concrete of one kind to the abstract of another, and can thus make almost anything in the world help to describe or suggest anything else. What the German philosopher described as the relation of a cow to a comet, that both have tails, is enough and more than