lOO 



NA TURE 



Xjune 2, 1887 



dependent upon the preservation of the " feathered race," 

 and in support of this opinion he has brought together 

 much solid evidence. Two of the best chapters in the 

 book are on the sparrow, which he admits to be, during 

 harvest, an unmitigated nuisance. He thinks, however, 

 that even at such times " the farmer best consults his 

 own interests by merely scaring the bird away in place of 

 destroying it, and that sooner or later he will reap his 

 reward for his wise forbearance." 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



\The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions 

 expressed by his correspondents. Neither can he under- 

 take to retttm, or to correspond with the writers of, 

 refected manuscripts. JVo notice is taken of anonymous 

 communications. 



[The Editor urgently requests correspondents to keep their 

 letters as short as possible. The pressure on his space 

 is so great that it is impossible otheriuise to insure the 

 appearance even of comtnunications containing interesting 

 and novel facts.'] 



Thought without Words. 



The following correspondence has passed between Prof. Max 

 Miiller and Mr. F. Gallon with reference to Mr. Gallon's letter 

 on "Thought without Word";," printed in Nature on May 12 

 (p. 28) :- 



All Souls' College, Oxford, May 15, 1887. 



Dear Mr. Galton,— I have to thank you for sending me 

 the letter which you published in Nature, and in whicli you 

 discuss the fundamental principle of my recent book on the 

 "Science of Thought," the identity of language and reason. 

 Yours is the kind of criticism I like — honest, straightforward, 

 to the point. I shall try to answer your criticism in the same 

 spirit. 



You say, and you say rightly, that if a single instance could be 

 produced of a man reasoning without words, my whole system 

 of philosophy would collapse, and you go on to say that you 

 yourself are such an instance, that you can reason without 

 words. 



So can I, and I have said so in several passages of my book. 

 But what I call reasoning without words is no more than 

 reasoning without pronouncing words. With you it seems to 

 mean, reasoning without possessing words. What I call with 

 Leibniz, symbolic, abbreviated, or hushed language, what savages 

 call "speaking in the stomach," presupposes the former existence 

 of words. What you call thinking without words seems to be 

 intended for the thinking of beings, whether men or animals, 

 that possess as yet no words for what they are thinking. 



Now let us try to understand one another ; that is to say, let us 

 define the words we are using. We both use thinking in the 

 sense of reasoning. But thinking has been used by Descartes 

 and other philosophers in a much wider sense also, so as to 

 include sensation, passions, and intuitive judgments, which 

 clearly require no words for their realization. It is necessary 

 therefore to define what we mean by thinking, before we try to 

 find out whether we can think without words. In my book on 

 the "Science of Thought" I define thinking as addition and 

 subtraction. That definition may be right or wrong, but every 

 writer has the right, nay the duty, I should say, to explain in 

 what sense he intends to use certaia technical terms. Though 

 nowadays this is considered rather pedantic, I performed that 

 duty on the very first page of my book, and it seems somewhat 

 strange tliat a reviewer in the Academy should accuse me of not 

 having defined what I mean by thinking, for most reviewers 

 look at least at the first page of a work which is given them to 

 review. 



Now, the cases which you mention of wordless thought are 

 not thought at all in my sense of the word. I grant that animals 

 do a great deal of work by intuition, and that we do the same, nay 

 that we often do that kind of work far more quickly and far 

 more perfectly than by reasoning. You say, for instance, that 

 you take pleasuie in mechanical contrivances, and if something 

 does not fit, you examine it, go to your tools, pick out the right 

 one, set to work and repair the defect, often without a single 

 word crossing your mind. No doubt you can do that. So can 



the beaver and the bee. But neither the beaver nor the bee 

 would say what you say, namely that in doing this ^^ you inhibit 

 any 7}iental zvord f-om presenting itself ." What does that mean, 

 if not that the [mental words are there, the most complicated 

 thought-words, such as tool, defect, fit, are there ? only you do not 

 pronounce them, as little as you pronounce "two shillings and 

 sixpence," when you pay a cabman half-a-crown. 



The same applies to what you say about billiards and fencing. 

 Neither cannoning nor fencing is thinking. The serpent coiling 

 itself and springing forward and shooting out its fangs does 

 neither think nor speak. It sees, it feels, it acts, and as I stated 

 on p. 8 of my book, that kind of instantaneous and thoughtless 

 action is often far more successful than the slow results of reason- 

 ing. Well do I remember when I was passing through my drill 

 as a Volunteer, and sometimes had to think what was right and 

 what was left, being told by our sergeant, "Them gentlemen as 

 thinks will never do any good." I am not sure that what we 

 call genius may not often be a manifestation of our purely animal 

 nature — a sudden tiger's spring, rather than une longue patience. 



It is different, however, with chess. A chess-player may be 

 very silent, but he deals all the time with thought -words or 

 word-thoughts. How could it be otherwise ? What would be 

 the use of all his foresight, of all his intuitive combination, if he 

 did not manipulate with king, queen, knights, and castles ? and 

 what are all these but names, most artificial names too, real 

 agglomerates of ever so many carefully embedded thoughts ? 



An animal may build like the beaver, shoot like the serpent, 

 fence like the cat, climb like the goat ; but no animal can play 

 chess, and why ? Because it has no words, and therefore no 

 thoughts for what we call king, queen, and knights, names and 

 concepts which we combine and separate according to their con- 

 tents ; that is, according to what we ourselves or our ancestors 

 have put into them. 



You say, again, that in algebra, the most complicated phase 

 of thought, we do not use words. Nay, you go on to say that 

 in algebra " the tendency to use mental words should be tvithstood." 

 No doubt it should. The player on the pianoforte should like- 

 wise withstand the tendency of saying, now comes C, now 

 comes D, now comes E, before touching the keys. But how 

 could there be a tendency to use words, or, as you say in another 

 place, "to disetnbarrass ourselves of words," if the words were 

 not there ? In algebra we are dealing, not only with words, but 

 with words of words, and it is the highest excellence of language 

 if it can thus abbreviate itself more and more. If we had to pro- 

 nounce every word we are thinking, our progress would be 

 extremely slow. As it is, we can go through a whole train of 

 thought without uttering a single word, because we have signs, 

 not only for single thoughts, but for whole chains of thoughts. 

 And yet, if we watch ourselves, it is very curious that we can 

 often feel the vocal chords and the muscles of the mouth moving, 

 as if we were speaking ; nay, we know that during efforts of 

 intense thought, a word will sometimes break out against our 

 will ; it may be, as you say, a nonsense word, yet a word 

 which, for some reason or other, could not be inhibited from 

 presenting itself. 



You say you have sometimes great difficulty in finding appro- 

 priate words for your thoughts. W' ho has not ? But does that 

 prove that thoughts can exist without words ? Quite the con- 

 trary. Thoughts for which we cannot find appropriate words 

 are thoughts expressed as yet by inappropriate, very often by 

 very general, words. You see a thing and you do not know what 

 it is, and therefore are at a loss how to call it. There are people 

 who call everything "that thing," in French "chose," because 

 they are lazy thinkers, and therefore clumsy speakers. But 

 even " thinj; " and "chose" are names. The more we distin- 

 guish, the better we can name. A good speaker and thinker 

 will not say "that thing," "that person," "that man," "that 

 soldier," "that officer," but he will say at once "that lieutenant- 

 general of Fusiliers." He can name appropriately because he 

 knows correctly, but he knows nothing correctly or vaguely 

 except in a string of names from officer down to thing. 

 Embryonic thought, which never comes to the birth, is not 

 thought at all, but only the material out of which thought may 

 spring. Nor can infant thought, which cannot speak as yet, be 

 called living thought, though the promise of thought is in 

 it. The true life of thought begins when it is named, and 

 has been received by baptism into the congregation of living 

 words. 



You say that "after you have made a mental step, the appro- 

 priate word frequently follows as an echo ; as a rule, it does not 



