XIV.

LANGUAGE AS RELATED TO MENTAL OPERATIONS.

478. THE primary purpose of language as the means of communication-mind with mind-subserves a purpose scarcely less important in the development of the intellect when it is employed as the instrument of thought by the individual reason. Single words, and certain constant and conventional combinations of them, are the tools of thought, and without the aid of these its processes-must stop short at a rudimental stage.

479. In relation to different intellectual processes language is a more or a less indispensable instrument. It yields also an aid more or less necessary to different minds, according to their original structure, to their abstractive power, and to the extent of culture they may have received. But there are certain operations (as we shall see), in carrying forward which it can scarcely be imagined that even the strongest minds, advantaged by the most perfect discipline, could dispense with this assistance, or could think to any good purpose otherwise than as leaning, from step to step, upon words-phrases-propositions.

480. Language, to become fully available for these purposes, must be held at command under conditions which should be understood. The mind, while employing this, its instrument, must have set itself free, in

some degree, from the thraldom of words and phrases. This emancipation takes place, to some extent, in the course of the most ordinary education, but in the fullest manner only when culture has been carried forward into adult years, or otherwise in rare instances of native powers of mind of a high order.

481. Soon after its awakening in the midst of a world of objects, pressing upon it through the senses, the human infant, while listening to the voices that soothe or that startle the ear, is yielding itself to a process, in the course of which the world of words comes to adhere, point after point, to the world of objects; and these adhesions, multiplying every day, and becoming more and more firm or indissoluble, are at length so thoroughly riveted or welded that the union could scarcely be more intimate if, in fact, the mother tongue were born with the mind itself. If the human family had known only one language, it would scarcely have been possible for us to entertain the supposition that words are nothing more than arbitrary signs, and that they might therefore have been other than they are.

482. In fact, millions of men pass through their destined course of years with no other consciousness than this. Thought and language have never been sundered, in all their experience, from infancy to age. So much intellectual action as may consist with this fixity is possible to minds thus conditioned, but not It is the function of education to break up, in a greater or less degree, this rude congestion, and to give to the mind its proper supremacy in relation to its implements.

more.

483. The teacher makes a commencement in this process when he finds occasion to revise the child's glossary, substituting one term for another wherever a faulty fitting has taken place as to the meaning of words. The child, by an unconscious inductive process, carries forward this corrective operation for himself while he listens to the promiscuous conversation of adults. His alert curiosity not only brings him into possession of a stock of convertible terms-synonyms, equivalents, and metonymic phrases-but it leads him to loosen himself off a little from that intimate blending of words and ideas which had taken place at the first.

484. The acquisition and the actual use of one or more languages beside the vernacular greatly accelerates the process of liberation, as does also an initiation in those abstract sciences which demand a laying aside, for a time, the colloquial sense of language, and the taking up an artificial, or technical sense. By means such as these, that fixity of the connection between words and ideas is loosened, which is the impracticable condition of minds among the uneducated classes.

485. And yet culture may go very far, and still it may leave the mind under thraldom, if not to words taken singly, yet to a mass of conventional and customary combinations of them. It is so especially with those minds that may be designated as the logical or formulative. Persons of this class think only by sentences or by clusters of words. It is less, or scarcely at all so, with those that are at once analytic and synthetic, inventive and creative. If words are the tools of thought, the same may be said of them as of those

implements which are wielded by the hand. The unvaried use, year after year, of certain implements of the mechanic arts so becomes a second nature to the artisan that there is room for the question, Which of the two is really the master, the workman or his tool? the hand and arm obey the tool as much as this obeys the muscular force.

486. A very large proportion of all ordinary discourse, public and private, follows in the track of conventional forms, which are scarcely less determinative as to the movements of thought than are the rails to the course of the train which speeds itself upon them with more of the appearance of spontaneous force than of its reality, and yet this despotism of conventional speech is not to be complained of, for by the means of it the social system holds its onward course with a steady momentum, and it avoids the peril of a road which otherwise it might choose for itself. Certain utterances, as well of feeling as of opinion, are (to change the figure) stereotyped, and by means of these accredited forms a tacit censorship is brought to bear upon society, much to its advantage. The individual man, when he accepts the aid of certain modes of parlance, yields himself unconsciously to a process of revision which retrenches much and amends much that might offend all ears if uttered in its native form.

487. Thus far Mind and its implement, language, exercise a divided empire, or they rule the man in alternating moments. But the development of the human faculties upon higher ground can take place only when the rightful supremacy of the one and the due subserviency of the other of these two powers has

been firmly established, and has become the habit of the reason.

488. In listening-so far as it may indeed be possible to listen in such cases-to the extemporaneous discourse of public speakers, to whom exercises of this sort have become only too easy, one may follow the "law of thought" from the end of one sentence to the beginning of the next, and from the closing sentence of one paragraph to the initial sentence of another, and one may clearly discern what that principle of sequency is which gives law to the speaker's mind as he glides along upon the worn tram-road of accustomed utterances. Exercises of this sort might well enough be adduced in illustration of the doctrine that a "law of suggestion" of some kind rules supreme in the world of Mind.

489. But let it be supposed that a speaker's course of thought is suddenly influenced by some cross current, or by some incidental motive which comes to combine itself with, and to give a varied character to the discourse. In this case there is before us a much more complicated phenomenon. The mind, subject, as it is assumed to be, to its customary "law of association," is here seen to be serving two masters; it is pulled forward, now by the right-hand force, now by the left-hand, and yet it contrives to hold on its way between the two.

490. That it should be able to do so is perhaps conceivable, for such is the velocity of our mental operations that we may suppose even an ordinary mind to be capable of this rapid alternation between two distinct courses of thought, and yet that it should be

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