REASON AND LANGUAGE. 143 



independent of the syntax which may happen to belong 

 to the language of their speaking friends." They do 

 not say, "'black horse,' but 'horse black ;' not 'Bring a 

 black hat,' but ' Hat black bring ; ' not ' I am hungry, 

 give me bread,' but ' Hungry me, bread give.' " We 

 need hardly observe that these modes of construction 

 answer every practical purpose, while, as we recently 

 remarked, they could never by any possibility have been 

 inherited from speaking ancestors. Thus we have here 

 absolute proof positive of the independent and spon- 

 taneous activity of the human intellect in forming and 

 expressing its own concepts or abstract ideas — entities 

 at the opposite pole of psychical, cognitive life, to sense- 

 perceptions and sensuous universals. 



This innate intellectuality, this spontaneous, pur- 

 posive, voluntary expression of concepts in manual 

 language, is made specially clear in the following pas- 

 sage,* which shows how the deaf and dumb first give 

 expression to that part of their communication which 

 they are most anxious to impress on their hearer : " If 

 a boy had struck another boy, and the injured party 

 came to tell us, if he was desirous to acquaint us with 

 the idea that a particular boy did it, he would point to 

 the boy first. But if he was anxious to draw attention 

 to his own suffering, rather than to the person by whom 

 it was caused, he would point to himself and make 

 the act of striking, and then point to the boy." Mr. 

 Romanes quotes f an answer given by a deaf and dumb 

 pupil to the Abbe Sicard. But the answer is far more 

 remarkable for the highly abstract conception it ex- 

 * p. 115. t p. 116. 



