THOUGHT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 19 thought and feeling. The very brutes feel and think. Mankind can not be inferior to them.* 4. Language necessary to thorough and comprehensive Thought. But without articulate language the thoughts of men would be scanty and imperfect, and their emotions would be undeveloped and untrained. This is clearly ascertained from facts. The deaf and dumb (speechless because they can * *Lord Bacon thus presents his view of the possibility of thought without language: "The notes of things, then, which carry a sig nification without the help or intervention of words, are of two kinds : one, ex congruo, where the note has some congruity with the motion, the other, ad placitum, where it is adopted and agreed upon at pleas ure. Of the former kind are hieroglyphics and gestures, of the latter, the real characters above mentioned. The use of hieroglyphics is very old. * * When Periander, being consulted how to preserve a tyranny, bade the messenger follow him, and went into his garden and topped the highest flowers, hinting at the cutting off of the nobility, he made use of a hieroglyphic just as much as if he had drawn it on paper. In the mean time it is plain that hieroglyphics and gestures have always some similitude to the thing signified, and are a kind of emblems-whence I have called them notes of things by congruity" (Advancement of Learning, book iv. chap. i.). Sir William Hamilton styles the assertion that man can not think without language a psychological hypothesis in regard to the absolute dependence of the mental faculties on language, cnce and again refuted" (Ed. Rev. vol. cxv. p. 208). The art of pantomime, or of expressing character, thought, and action by attitudes, gestures, and motions, was highly cultivated by the Romans in their theatres. Some of the thought thus conveyed was instructive and ennobling, but often it was degrading and indecent, and therefore public pantomimic performances were severely denounced by the early Christian preachers. Macrobius, who lived in the early part of the fifth century after Christ, relates that Cicero, the famous orator, and Roscius, a famous actor, would often try together to ascertain which could express a thought the more eloquently, the one by words, and the other by gestures and motions. not hear), however advanced in years, never have many thoughts till they learn language. They have no idea of life and death, of cause and effect, of reward and punishment. That beautiful system of instructing them, devised in modern times, and which itself is a great honor both to modern science and to Christianity, shows how indispensable words are, as the instruments of thought; for those mutes, who have never heard a sound, must learn words before they can possibly receive abstract ideas, such, for instance, as are expressed in the Lord's Prayer, or in the Constitution of the United States. These words they learn, as they learn to think, not imperceptibly, as hearing persons do, through articulate language, but slowly and laboriously. No instance has yet been known in the whole history of the world of a human being who was taught to equal the average of children of ten years of age, in thought and emotion, without a knowledge of words. There have been poets and orators, learned mathematicians, astronomers, land-surveyors, and machinists without sight, skillful artists without hands, but no men of thought who could not understand and use words. Well did Quintilian exclaim, "How little does man's divine mind avail him if speech is denied!"* Words are the signs of thought. We learn the thoughts of others by words. We store up thoughts by the memory of words, or by writing them, to be compared, analyzed, and classified at our leisure. The basis of Rhetoric is a knowledge of words. * De Institutione Oratoria, lib. ii. cap. xvi. THE ORIGIN AND USE OF LANGUAGE. 5. The Origin of Language.-THE origin of language can not certainly be ascertained by investigation. The Holy Scriptures represent man as having language from the beginning. The theory that human beings were once a mute and almost thoughtless herd, like the brutes, is a figment of the imagination not based on historic evidence. The various views of those who have endeavored to account for the origin of language may be reduced to these three theories: (1.) It was communicated to man by the Creator. (2.) It was the invention of man, previous to which the race may have lived without it, like dogs or cattle, hundreds and thousands of years. (3.) Man is so constituted that it is as instinctive for him to speak as it is for a beaver to construct a dam, or for a bee to store up honey. The first and third views do not conflict with each other, and may both be correct, but the second is wholly imaginary and unphilosophical, and all who demand a basis of fact for their opinions to rest upon should decline to receive it. It has even been conjectured by some that if a com pany of human beings could be left to grow up together from childhood without hearing a word uttered by any other person, they would naturally themselves construct a language. This, however, is only conjecture.* There is a wonderful uniformity in many of the languages spoken by men, and many philologists believe that all are variations from one original common speech. 6. A Variety of Words necessary.-Without wandering far into the field of conjecture, we can confidently assert that words are the necessary vehicles of mature and various thought. As the skillful painter must have on his easel materials for every color, and even every delicate shade, as the accomplished organist must have an instrument well-furnished with notes and stops, so must the speaker or writer have a copious supply of these airy yet permanent representatives of mental and moral action-words. Words are winged messengers, without which thoughts slumber in a silence that can not be distinguished from death. Without language, the body would be little better than a tomb for the soul. 7. Natural Language itself not diminished, but im * Rev. Horace Bushnell, D.D., in his work entitled "God in Christ, with a Preliminary Dissertation on Language," published in IIartford in 1849, relates an instance of two twin boys in Connecticut who constructed a language for each other in infancy, and would not use their mother-tongue. Unfortunately one of them died, "and with him died, never to be spoken again, what, beyond any reason for doubt, was the root of a new original diversity of human speech-a new tongue." The instance is not given with sufficient fullness and definiteness to produce conviction. WORD-PAINTING. 23 proved by Speech.-So essential is speech to the thorough culture of the mind that it may be doubted whether natural language itself is not rendered by it more efficient than it possibly could have been without the cultivation secured by the use of words. The paintings and hieroglyphics of savages are indeed superior to the best pictorial illustrations that could have been produced by human beings wholly destitute of language; but how far short do the pictures made by savages fall of the paintings of a Raphael, or the illustrations that accompany modern scientific works! 7. Word-painting.Word-painting, or the representation by language of what may be seen by the eye, often produces a more definite and complete picture of the object than can be presented by sculpture or on the canvas, because, in addition to describing the mere superficial appearance, some words are used which sug gest the feelings and thoughts both of the objects described, if they have any, and of the observer. Take, for instance, the following description of a dying gladiator, as described by Byron in Childe Harold, canto iv. stanza 140: "I see before me the gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand-his manly brow Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now The arena swims around him-he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won." |