July 14, 1887] 



NATURE 



249 





stations. Another feature of the weather was the sudden 

 changes which occurred in the humidity of the air, which 

 were perhaps most striking on June 18, on which day at 

 many places a higher temperature was observed than has 

 been noted for many years. On that day thunderstorms 

 occurred over the greater part of the eastern districts of 

 Scotland, accompanied with dense clouds and a close 

 atmosphere. At a very large number of places not a drop 

 of rain fell. At a few places a heavy, short- continued 

 shower fell, but the air cleared and dried so suddenly 

 that in three minutes all effects of the rain were 

 gone ; and everything looked as parched and dried up as 

 before the rain. On the morning of this day the isobars 

 for 9 a.m. revealed the existence of a local shallow 

 depression extending from Ochtertyre, north-eastwards 

 towards Aberdeen, where atmospheric pressure was 

 lower than on either side of it. Here the thunder- 

 storm was severest, and rain fell most generally. At 

 Lednathie, Forfarshire, the storm and rainfall were all 

 but unprecedented. The rain commenced at 12.50 p.m., 

 and ceased at 1.30 p.m., and during these forty minutes 

 there fell 2 '24 inches. Mr. Morison, the observer, 

 remarks that " the appearance of the rain while falling 

 was like bright small streams falling straight down" — 

 a description which will recall to some of our readers 

 what they have often noticed during the torrential 

 downpours of the tropics. 



The state of many of our rivers attests only too strongly 

 to the persistence and severity of the drought. On 

 Sunday last the level of the Tay was fully half an inch 

 beneath the deep cut made in the red sandstone rock at 

 Perth on June 30, 1826, to mark the unprecedented low- 

 ness of the river at that time. The Thames in its upper 

 reaches is covered with high grown rushes and great 

 floating masses of weeds, and nearer London it is 

 reported to be lower than it has been in the memory of 

 the oldest boatman. 



NO LANGUAGE WITHOUT REASON- 

 REASON WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 



-NO 



A S I found that you had already admitted no less than 

 ■**■ thirteen letters on my recent work " The Science 

 of Thought," I hesitated for some time whether I ought to 

 ask you to admit another communication on a subject 

 which can be of interest to a very limited number of the 

 readers of Nature only. I have, indeed, from the very 

 beginning of my philological labours, claimed for the 

 science of language a place among the physical sciences, 

 and, in one sense, I do the same for the science of 

 thought. Nature that does not include human nature in 

 all its various manifestations would seem to me like St. 

 Peter's without its cupola. But this plea of mine has not 

 as yet been generally admitted. The visible material 

 frame of man, his sense-organs and their functions, his 

 nerves and his brain, all this has been recognized as the 

 rightful domain of physical science. But beyond this 

 physical science was not to go. There was the old line 

 of separation, a line drawn by mediaeval students between 

 man, on one side, and his works, on the other ; between 

 the sense-organs and their perceptions ; between the 

 brain and its outcome, or, as it has sometimes been 

 called, its secretion —namely, thought. To attempt to 

 obliterate that line between physical science, on one 

 side, and moral science, as it used to be called, on 

 the other, was represented as mere confusion of thought. 

 Still, here as elsewhere, a perception of higher unity 

 does not necessarily imply an ignoring of useful dis- 

 tinctions. To me it has always seemed that man's 

 nature can never be fully understood except as one 

 and indivisible. His highest and most abstract thoughts 

 appear to me inseparable from the lowest material im- 

 pacts made upon his bodily frame. And " if nothing was 



ever in the intellect except what was first in the senses," 

 barring, of course, the intellect itself, it follows that we 

 shall never understand the working of the intellect, unless 

 we first try to understand the senses, their organs, their 

 functions, and, in the end, their products. For practical 

 purposes, no doubt, we may, nay we ought, to separate 

 the two. Thus, in my own special subject, it is well to 

 separate the treatment of phonetics and acoustics from 

 higher linguistic researches. We may call phonetics and 

 acoustics the ground floor, linguistics the first story. But 

 as every building is one — the ground floor purposeless 

 without the first story, the first story a mere castle in the 

 air without the ground floor — the science of man also is 

 one, and would, according to my opinion, be imperfect 

 unless it included psychology, in the widest meaning of 

 that term, as well as physiology ; unless it claimed the 

 science of language and of thought, no less than the 

 science of the voice, the ear, the nerves, and the brain, as 

 its obedient vassals. It was, therefore, a real satisfaction to 

 me that it should have been Nature where the questions 

 raised in my " Science of Thought " excited the first in- 

 terest, provoking strong opposition, and eliciting distinct 

 approval, and I venture to crave your permission, on that 

 ground, if on no other, for replying once more to the 

 various arguments which some of your most eminent 

 contributors have brought forward against the funda- 

 mental tenet of my work, the inseparableness of language 

 and reason. 



I may divide the letters published hitherto in Nature 

 into three classes, unanswerable, answered, and to be 

 answered. 



I class as unanswerable such letters as that of the Duke 

 of Argyll. His Grace simply expresses his opinion, with- 

 out assigning any reasons. I do not deny that to myself 

 personally, and to many of your readers, it is of great 

 importance to know what position a man of the D uke's wide 

 experience and independence of thought takes with regard 

 to the fundamental principle of all philosophy, the identity 

 of language and thought, or even on a merely subsidiary 

 question, such as the geneaological descent of man from 

 any known or unknown kind of animal. But I must wait 

 till the Duke controverts either the linguistic facts, or the 

 philosophical lessons which I have read in them, before I 

 can meet fact by fact, and argument by argument. I only 

 note, as a very significant admission, one sentence of his 

 letter, in which the Duke says : " Language seems to me 

 to be necessary to the progress of thought, but not at all 

 necessary to the mere act of thinking." This sentence 

 may possibly concede all that I have been contending 

 for, as we shall see by and by. 



I class as letters that have been answered the very 

 instructive communications from Mr. F. Galton, to which 

 I replied in Nature of June 2 (p. loi), as well as several 

 notes contributed by correspondents who evidently had 

 read my book either very rapidly, or not at all. 



Thus, Mr. Hyde Clarke tells us that the mutes at 

 Constantinople, and the deaf-mutes in general, com- 

 municate by signs, and not by words — the very fact on 

 which I had laid great stress in several parts of my book. 

 In the sign-language of the American Indians, in the 

 hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt, and in Chinese and 

 other languages which were originally written ideo- 

 graphically, we have irrefragable evidence that other 

 signs, besides vocal signs or vocables, can be used for 

 embodying thought. This, as I tried to show, confirms, 

 and does not invalidate, my theory that we cannot think 

 without words, if only it is remembered that words are 

 the most usual and the most perfect, but by no means the 

 only possible signs. 



Another correspondent, " S. T. M. Q.", asks how I 

 account for the early processes of thought in a deaf-mute. 

 If he had looked at p. 63 of my book he would have found 

 my answer. Following Prof. Huxley, 1 hold that deaf- 

 mutes would be capable of few higher intellectual mani- 



