Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/168



are both masters and servants of our words. How they serve us has been seen. Their mastery over us begins with infancy and ends with death. They are our first teachers, our last counselors.

The necessary influence of language over mind becomes clearer when we reflect that we are born dumb. The mother-tongue must be learned at the cost of long and continuous effort. Will-power makes possible the effective concentration of attention through several faculties in synchronous operation. The attention becomes habitual, almost subconscious. Changes are wrought in the brain by a complicated process. When we have learned to speak, we have become in a manner artificially reconstructed, physiologically