Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/11



first of all was a physical function. Even to-day, a man is known less by his looks than by his words. Language gradually became a mode of conduct, a symbol of emotion, a crude means of expression, and at the same time a social convention or the flowering of a gregarious instinct, as it were.

Then, as all things change under new angles of vision, language turned into a delicate, if not precise, instrument of reflection and expression. For as vision grew keener and broader, the ever-shifting points-of-view increased in number until language became so complex that man's greatest and rarest achievement is the simplicity of speech.

Finally, language long has been more than all that; if it remains the fine yet inadequate measure of individual thought, it also has