PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. 115 



generated by any otlier- agency tlian that wliicli is active in their after combi- 

 nation and development ; namely, by the conscious exertion of man's natural 

 powers, by his use of the faculties conferred upon him for the satisfaction of the 

 necessities implanted in him. In this way, and in no other, is language a di- 

 vine gift. It is divine in the sense that man's nature, with all its capacities and 

 acquirements, is a divine creation. It is human, in that it is a product of that 

 nature, in its normal workings. 



It is highly important that we make clear to ourselves what is the directly 

 mpelling force to the production of language. It is not any internal and 

 necessary impulse to expression on the part of thought itself, although this is 

 very often maintained ; it is the desire of communication. One man alone would 

 never form a language. Two children could not grow up together without ac- 

 quiring some means of exchange of thought. Language is not thought, nor 

 thought language ; noris there a mysterious and indissoluble connexion between 

 the two, so that we cannot conceive of the existence of the one apart from the 

 other. But thought would be awkward, feeble, and indistinct, without the 

 working apparatus afforded it in language. The mind, deprived of such an in- 

 strument, would be, as it were, lamed and palsied. The possession of ideas, 

 cognitions, reasonings, deductions, imaginings, hopes, cannot be denied to the 

 deaf and dumb, even when untaught any substitute for spoken language ; nor, 

 indeed, even to the lower animals, in greatly inferior and greatly varying degree. 

 Thought is anterior to language and independent of it. It does not require ex- 

 pression in order to be thought. The incalculable advantage Avhich it derives 

 from its command of speech, though a necessary implication in the gift of 

 speech to man, comes incidentally, growing out of that communication which 

 man must and will have with his fellow. A word, then, is not a thought ; it 

 is the sign of thought, arbitrarily selected and conventionally agreed upon. 

 It is the fashion to cry down the use of the word conventional as applied to 

 language ; but, rightly understood, it precisely expresses the fact. It does not 

 imply the holding of a convention and formal discussion, but the acceptance and 

 adoption into use, on the part of a community, of something proposed by an in- 

 dividual ; and in no other way, as has been shown above, does anything in 

 language originate; nor did it, back to the very beginning. Every root-syllable 

 was first used in its peculiar sense by some one, and became language by the 

 assent of others. 



These considerations relieve the remaining part of our problem of much of its 

 difficulty. Under the outward impulse to communication, thought tends irre- 

 sistibly toward expression: it will have expression, and, were it destitute of 

 articulate speech, it would have sought and found other means — gestures, atti- 

 tudes, looks, written signs, any or all of these. But the voice was the appointed 

 and provided means of supplying this great want, and no race of men, accord- 

 ingly, is found unprovided with articulate speech. It remains to inquire how 

 men should have discovered what the voice was meant for, and have applied it 

 to its proper use. Several theories have been proposed in explanation of this. 

 One, the onomatopoetic, supposes that the first names of objects and acts were 

 generated by imitation of the cries of animals and the noises of dead nature ; 

 another, the interjectional, regards the natural sounds which we utter when in 

 . a state of excited feeling, our exclamations, as the beginnings of speech ; another 

 compares man's utterance with the ringing of natural substances when struck, 

 and holds that man has an instinctive faculty for giving expression to the 

 rational conceptions of his mind. The last of these is believed to be destitute 

 of all value, as grounded in unsound theory, and supported by nothing in our 

 experience or observation. The other tAvo are so far true that it must be granted 

 that exclamations and imitated sounds helped men to realize that they had in 

 their voices that which was capable of being applied to express the movements 

 of their spirits. But the study of language brings to light no interjectional 



