A Limit to Evolution 309 



newly devised processes give rise to new conceptions, new 

 terms are invented to give expression to such conceptions. 

 Thus new words arise as a consequence and not as an ante- 

 cedent of such intellectual action. Nevertheless, these intel- 

 lectual actions show themselves by bodily signs of sound or 

 gesture., and even our silent thoughts are carried on by the 

 aid of such imagined bodily signs, without which we could 

 not continue to think. Human intelligence seems quite 

 unable to grow or even to endure without some embodiment — 

 without corporeal expressions of some kind. Thus language 

 is the means as well as the consequence of thought. The 

 mental and bodily sides of language are so intimately united 

 that, though the mental is anterior, it at once seeks, as it 

 were, to incarnate itself (and under normal conditions does 

 incarnate itself) in corporeal expression. But thought is 

 deeper, wider reaching, and more perfect than are its bodily 

 signs, and it is owing to this, and to the fact that thought is 

 anterior, that we owe the growth and development of language. 



By saying, then, that men speak while brutes are dumb, 

 we mean that men are distinguished by the fact that they 

 signify, either by words or gestures, universal, objective, 

 abstract ideas, which are poles asunder from all powers and 

 forms of feeling. Sense-perceptions, whether of men or 

 animals, are groups of associated feelings ; but ideas are 

 apprehensions of objective qualities grouped round an ob- 

 jective unity about which various judgments may be affirmed. 

 The former are but reinstatements of sense. The latter are 

 unities abstracted from sense. They thus belong to utterly 

 different categories, and a nature which has this power of 

 abstraction is separated from any nature which has not that >^ > 

 power, by a gulf which is an impassable limit to evolution, 

 because feeling and intellect are both thus different in nature, 

 and progress and develop along different and more or less 

 diverging roads. \ 



