RELATIONS OF SPEECH TO HUMAN PROGRESS 525 



other way were the brain capacities, already existing, made 

 available to determine which tribe or individual should survive. 

 The first man able to persuade others to act with him would at 

 once be victor over a more brutish rival who lacked the vocal 

 wherewithal ; while a tribe which could take counsel together 

 and form well-understood plans of action would easily overcome 

 and exterminate its competitors whose powers of speech did not 

 suffice for such an end. 



There can be no doubt that throughout the whole course of 

 the development of human speech the brain processes continually 

 outran all powers of organic expression. Even to-day, however 

 great be our knowledge of the contents of our dictionaries, and 

 however cunning we may have become in arranging such 

 material to the very best advantage, we are aware whenever we 

 speak or write that we are translating our thoughts into a very 

 imperfect medium. Although in our minds the conception may 

 stand out with the utmost clearness we are often able to do no 

 more than the artist who with a few suggestive lines leads the 

 imagination to see the thing which he wishes to bring before us 

 and does not attempt the task of representing it in all its photo- 

 graphic detail. 



How the brain reached this wonderful power of clear internal 

 expression long before there could have arisen any verbal traffic 

 in ideas is at present a mystery wholly beyond us. It would 

 seem as if there is spoken within each one of us an unknown 

 tongue (yet for self-communings known far better than any 

 spoken language) which defies full translation into any artificial 

 assemblage of words. The same thing seems true of mathe- 

 matical processes which man has laboriously endeavoured to 

 translate into arbitrary symbols based originally, it would seem, 

 upon the number of his fingers. It is a curious thought that if 

 the first pen-dactylic thing of the carboniferous epoch had been 

 differently constructed, if, for instance, his limbs terminated in 

 a few more, or less, developments of the fin rays of his fishy 

 forefathers, our whole world of mathematics would have been 

 an utterly different one. 



A little thought will show that in every movement of an 

 animal, such for instance as a goat leaping from rock to rock, 

 certain mathematical and physical problems are continually 

 presenting themselves and being solved by the nervous and 

 muscular mechanism. The exact force required by the muscles, 



