Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/34

 social. The smile, the laugh, the frown, the handshake, the rubbing of noses, the embrace, peculiar inflections and guttural sounds acquired more or less definite significance, and their traces have persisted through all the many modifications that crystallized at last into social conventions. Thus language came to have functions besides those of thought and expression.

In time, man seized directly upon separate objects and he communicated to his kind such impressions of them as were most needful to be known, most readily understood, and most easily conveyed. From an idea of the things most obvious of themselves, to ideas of their simplest acts and qualities, was a long but inevitable way.

Thus the wondrous tools of the mind helped it to conceive from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract. By means of these tools the mind developed and multiplied the ideas it already had; and its greatest idea perhaps, measured by its utility,—