Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 122.djvu/68

62 strokes of imagination in Gulliver's Travels.

Gulliver, in the account of his third voyage, tells of a scheme concocted by certain professors of the Grand Academy of Lagado for abolishing all words whatsoever, on the ground that, since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them (in bundles on their backs) such things as might be necessary to express their particular business. 'I have often beheld two of those sages,' says Gulliver, 'almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave.'

Now, however otherwise he may have intended them, these silent philosophers of Swift's are plainly modern scientists: for a scientist may be defined as a man who thinks with things instead of words. True, the scientist employs a curious language of his own; but the precise mark that sets the genuine scientist off from the charlatan is the fact that his terms—kept outlandish, I fancy, for that very reason—are merely tags of identification substituted temporarily for the things they represent, as a mathematician lets a single letter stand for a complicated expression which it would be tedious to keep on recopying. And just as the mathematician makes a resubstitution before he is done with his figuring, so the scientist in the end replaces his tags with things, which thereupon bring him up with a sharp jerk if in the interval he has let his terminology take liberties with his intellect. The scientist, to be sure, unlike Swift's philosophers, does not ordinarily carry his apparatus on his back. But that is but a detail. Indeed, Gulliver himself goes on to tell how the primitive packs of these sages were supplemented by rooms fitted out with all the necessary objects of conversation. But what is this if not the evolution of the laboratory?

And so science with its things, like religion with its ritual, and like art with its music and pictures, must be counted on the side against mere words. With such foes in the field against it, the outlook for language appears dark indeed—until all at once an immense sphere is remembered about which we have said nothing. The language of ordinary life,—of the street, of the club, of the home,—that surely (you protest) is not disappearing.

Ah! but you forget. Such language is not language at all, as I have chosen to define it. (This is no quibble; it is the heart of the whole matter.) Every hour of the day is testimony to the fact that, in proportion as we really know one another, we leave the level of mere language when we would converse, and rise to higher and subtler modes of communication: we talk, not by words, but by the light in the eye, the expression of the face, the tone of the voice, the gestures of the hand, yes, the movements of the whole body. Gropingly we all reach after the ideal caught in those future-piercing lines of Donne:

We understood Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought That one might almost say, her body thought.

Even dull and sluggish men make use in their way of these finer instruments of meaning; while truly expressive and receptive souls put more, and find more, in a shrug of the shoulder or a toss of the head, in a wink or a nudge, in an 'ah!' or an 'oh!' than dumb ones do in hours of talk or pages of printed matter. In fact, among sensitive and congenial spirits, words, in the sense in