35o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



He acknowledges that the " poor creature " imitation is supplemented by 

 another " poor creature " convention. But he does not see that " habit and 

 repute " and their relation to other words are always exercising an influence 

 over them. Words appear to be isolated, but they are really parts of an 

 organism which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilization, 

 harmonized by poetry, emphasized by literature, technically applied in philos- 

 ophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of human 

 knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius, and come with 

 new force and association to every lively-minded person. They are fixed by the 

 simultaneous utterance of millions, and yet are always imperceptibly changing. 

 They carry with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the 

 use of a word in a striking and familiar passage gives a complexion to its 

 use everywhere else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has also 

 a peculiar power over us. But these and other subtilties of language escaped 

 the observation of Plato. He was not aware that the languages of the world 

 are organic structures and that every Avord in them is related to every other; 

 nor does he conceive of language as the joint work of speaker and hearer, re- 

 quiring in man a faculty not only of expressing his thoughts but of understand- 

 ing those of others. 



Language is one of the links that carry us back, if not to the origin 

 of the human race, at least to the first articulate-speaking man. Words 

 are the faded images, or the battered and bruised and worn coins, that 

 have been handed down from the remotest ages. When they have 

 received a form in literature they become in a measure fixed so that we 

 can see how they looked to the eye, if we do not know precisely how 

 they sounded to the ear, millenniums ago. We usually have a mere 

 fragment of primitive words and are almost wholly in the dark as to 

 their phonetic value. 



The connection between thought and speech has long been recog- 

 nized; sometimes the priority of the one, sometimes of the other has 

 been maintained. One fact is indisputable : language greatly influences 

 our modes of thinking; in our early years conditions it entirely. We 

 learn to use words with the meaning attached to them by our environ- 

 ment. Our first ideas are exactly those of our parents, of older 

 brothers and sisters, of schoolmates, and so on. When we begin to learn 

 words from books our intellectual outlook gradually enlarges. The 

 circle of our thoughts becomes wider, but only in rare cases does it 

 extend beyond that of our generation. To the average man his mother- 

 tongue is a current that carries him gently, imperceptibly and slowly 

 along; he rarely stops to consider whither he is drifting. We pass on 

 to our successors the inheritance of words into which we have come, 

 generally unchanged and unaugmented. Only once in a while does 

 the deeper insight of some thinker enlarge the boundary of our intel- 

 lectual horizon. He may not use a single new term, at least none of 

 his own coinage, but he puts into those he employs a sense different from 

 what they had before. Such terms as " evolution " and " development," 

 and such phrases as " survival of the fittest," have now a totally different 



