THE INBORN POTENTIALITY OF THE CHILD 315 



profiting by experience to do the right thing at the right 

 moment. With such a heritage these two human beings, with 

 the instincts for the preservation of the individual and the 

 species, would possess as inborn qualities tendencies which 

 would be productive of a virile stock endowed with superior 

 energy, sagacity, and racial temperament, thus enabling their 

 descendants to have a great advantage over primitive races 

 possessed of a language and a limited social heritage. There 

 might be an inborn tendency to artistic feeling and expression, 

 derived from progenitors, which under favourable conditions 

 would find expression. There might be an inborn tendency 

 to the instinct of curiosity which would lead them to observe 

 and reason on natural phenomena, and thereby learn to obtain 

 fire and to make rude weapons. If their parents were right- 

 handed, as in all probability they were, they would use the 

 right hand in preference ; that is to say, the left half of the brain 

 would be the active partner, and predominate in voluntary 

 movements of the hand as an instrument of the mind. 



It would be safe to assume that prior to the acquisition of 

 articulate speech and language this new race of beings would 

 at first only be able to communicate with one another by gesture 

 language ; then some creative mind would employ articulate 

 sounds to supplement the primitive gesture language as a 

 means of communicating ideas, and correspondingly would 

 arise the dawn of intellectual development and abstract thought 

 and reasoning, because thought in all the higher mental pro- 

 cesses cannot be carried on without the aid of language. Then, 

 as language by graphic signs and articulate speech progressed 

 together, simultaneously supporting each other in the develop- 

 ment of the higher mental faculties that differentiate the brute 

 from the savage and the savage from the civilised human being, 

 so the social heritage — the Universal Mind— would expand and 

 increase. Man, instead of thinking by associating concrete 

 images, would now carry on the processes of thought and 

 memory by means of words heard and seen (symbols), in the 

 form of spoken, written, and printed language. 



How great a part language has played in the development 

 of the mind can be gathered by a little consideration of the fact 

 that individual human experience would be almost entirely lost 

 by the cessation of every individual life, without language. 

 Moreover, completely developed languages, when studied from 



