250 



NA TURE 



{Jtdy 14, 1887 



festations than an orang or chimpanzee, if they were 

 confined to the society of dumb associates. 



But, though holding this opinion, I do not venture to say 

 that deaf-mutes, if left to themselves, may not act 

 rationally, as little as I should take upon myself to assert 

 that animals may not act rationally. I prefer indeed, as 

 I have often said, to remain a perfect agnostic with 

 regard to the inner life of animals, and, for that, of deaf- 

 mutes also. But I should not contradict anybody who 

 imagines that he has discovered traces of the highest 

 intellectual and moral activity in deaf-mutes or animals. 

 I read with the deepest interest the letter which Mr. 

 Arthur Nicols addressed to you. I accept all he says 

 about the sagacity of animals, and if I differ from him at 

 all, I do so because I have even greater faith in animals 

 than he has. I do not think, for instance, that animals, 

 as he says, are much longer in arriving at a conclusion 

 than we are. Their conclusions, so far as I have been 

 able to watch them, seem to me far more rapid than our 

 own, and almost instantaneous. Nor should I quarrel 

 with Mr. Nicols if he likes to call the vocal expressions of 

 pain, pleasure, anger, or warning, uttered by animals, 

 language. It is a perfectly legitimate metaphor to call 

 every kind of communication language. We may speak 

 of the language of the eyes, and even of the eloquence of 

 silence. But Mr. Nicols would probably be equally ready 

 to admit that there is a difference between shouting " Oh ! " 

 and saying " I am surprised." An animal may say " Oh ! " 

 but it cannot say " I am surprised ; " and it seems to me 

 necessary, for the purpose of accurate reasoning, to be 

 able to distinguish in our terminology between these two 

 kinds of communication. On this point, too, I have so 

 fully dwelt in my book that I ought not to encumber 

 your pages by mere extracts. 



I now come to the letters of Mr. Ebbels and Mr. 

 Mellard Reade. They both seem to imagine that, because 

 I deny the possibility of conceptual thought without 

 language, I deny the possibility of every kind of thought 

 without words. This objection, too, they will find so 

 fully answered in my book, that I need not add anything 

 here. I warned my readers again and again against the 

 promiscuous use of the word " thought." I pointed out 

 (p. 29; how, according to Descartes, any kind of inward 

 activity, whether sensation, pain, pleasure, dreaming, or 

 willing, may be called thought ; but I stated on the very 

 first page that, like Hobbes, I use thinking in the restricted 

 sense of adding and subtracting. We do many things, 

 perhaps our best things, without addition or subtraction. 

 We have, as I pointed out on p. 20, sensations and per- 

 cepts, as well as concepts and names. For ordinary pur- 

 poses we should be perfectly correct in saying that we 

 can "think in pictures." This, however, is more accu- 

 rately called imagination, because we are then dealing 

 with images, presentations ( Vorstellnttgen), or, as I 

 prefer to call them, percepts, and not yet with concepts 

 and names. Whether in man, and particularly in 

 the present stage of his intellectual life, imagination 

 is possible without a slight admixture of conceptual 

 thought and language, is a moot point ; that it is 

 possible in animals, more particularly in Sally, the black 

 chimpanzee at the Zoological Gardens, I should be reluc- 

 tant either to deny or to affirm. All I stand up for is that, 

 if we use such words as thought, we ought to define them. 

 Definition is the only panacea for all our philosophical 

 misery, and I am utterly unable to enter into Mr. Ebbels's 

 state of mind when he says : " This is a mere question of 

 definition, not of actual fact." 



When Mr. Ebbels adds that we cannot conceive the 

 sudden appearance of the faculty of abstraction together 

 with its ready-made signs or words, except by a miracle, 

 he betrays at once that he has not read my last book, the 

 very object of which is to show that we require no miracle 

 at all, but that all which seemed miraculous in language 

 is perfectly natural and intelligible. And if he adds that 



he has not been able to discover in my earlier works any 

 account of the first beginnings of language, he has 

 evidently overlooked the fact that in my lectures on the 

 science of language I distinctly declined to commit 

 myself to any theory on the origin of language, while the 

 whole of my last book is devoted to the solution of that 

 problem. My solution may be right or wrong, but it 

 certainly does not appeal to any miraculous interference 

 for the explanation of language and thought. 



There now remain two letters only that have really to 

 be answered, because they touch on some very important 

 points, points which it is manifest I ought to have placed 

 in a clearer light in my book. One is by Mr. Murphy, 

 the other by Mr. Romanes. Both have evidently read my 

 book, and read it carefully ; and if they have not quite 

 clearly seen the drift of my argument, I am afraid the fault 

 is mine, and not theirs. I am quite aware that my " Science 

 of Thought" is not an easy book to read and to under- 

 stand. I warned my readers in the preface that they must 

 not expect a popular book, nor a work systematically built 

 up and complete in all its parts. My book was written, 

 as I said, for myself and for a few friends, who knew 

 beforehand the points which I wished to establish, and 

 who would not expect me, for the mere sake of complete- 

 ness, to repeat what was familiar to them, and could easily 

 be found elsewhere. I felt certain that I should be under- 

 stood by them, if I only indicated what I meant ; nor did 

 it ever enter into my mind to attempt to teach them, or to 

 convince them against their will., I wrote as if in harmony 

 with my readers, and moving on with them on a road 

 which we had long recognized as the only safe one, and 

 which I hoped that others also would follow, if they could 

 once be made to see whence it started and whither it 

 tended. 



Mr. Murphy is one of those who agree with me that 

 language is necessary to thought, and that, though it may 

 be possible to think without words when the subjects of 

 thought are visible things and their combinations, as in 

 inventing machinery, the intellectual power that invents 

 machinery has been matured by the use of language. 

 Here Mr. Murphy comes very near to the remark made 

 by the Duke of Argyll, that language seems necessary to 

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

 mere act of thinking, whatever that may mean. But Mr. 

 Murphy, while accepting my two positions— that thought 

 is impossible without words, and that all words were in 

 their origin abstract — blames me for not having explained 

 more fully on what the power of abstraction really de- 

 pends. So much has lately been written on abstraction, 

 that I did not think it necessary to do more than indicate 

 to which side I inclined. I quoted the opinions of 

 Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, and Mill, and as for 

 myself I stated in one short sentence that I should ascribe 

 the power of abstraction, not so much to an effort of our 

 will, or to our intellectual strength, but rather to our intel- 

 lectual weakness. In forming abstractions our weak- 

 ness seems to me our strength. Even in our first 

 sensations it is impossible for for us to take in the 

 whole of every impression, and in our first perceptions we 

 cannot but drop a great deal of what is contained in 

 our sensations. In this sense we learn to abstract, 

 whether we like it or not ; and though afterwards 

 abstraction may proceed from an effort of the will, I 

 still hold, as I said on p. 4, that though attctttion can be 

 said to be at the root of all our knowledge, the power of 

 abstraction may in the beginning not be very far removed 

 from the weakness of distraction. If I had wished to 

 write a practical text-book of the science of thought, I 

 ought no doubt to have given more prominence to this 

 view of the origin of abstraction, but as often in my book, 

 so here too, I thought sapienti sat. 



I now come to Mr. Romanes, to whom I feel truly 

 grateful for the intrepid spirit with which he has waded 

 through my book. One has no right in these days to 



