REASON AND LANGUAGE. 163 



greatly question whether, even under circumstances of 

 the strongest necessity (such as would have arisen if 

 man, or his progenitors, had been unable to articulate), 

 the language of gesture could have been developed into 

 anything approaching a substitute for the language of 

 words." So also do we. But we are certain, neverthe- 

 less, that such a dumb community of essentially rational 

 animals would have evolved a natural and instinctive 

 language of gesture, capable of making known the 

 concepts they had formed, and of aiding them by the 

 " recognitions " of their thus expressed concepts to 

 evolve ever more and more abstract concepts, though 

 probably never attaining to nearly the height that 

 man has attained to by the aid of speech. We are 

 certain they would have done this both on the a priori 

 ground of the necessary consequence of the presence 

 of animality and rationality in one absolute unity of 

 existence, and also on ct posteriori grounds, frorn the 

 evidence afforded by such extraordinary examples of 

 defective existence, as the blind, deaf, and dumb Laura 

 Bridgman,* and the still more striking case of Martha 

 Obrecht, which we will describe a little later. 



* With how little reason has Professor Huxley said (" Man's 

 Place in Nature," p 52, quoted by Mr. Romanes, p; 134), "A race 

 of dumb men, deprived of all communication with those who could 

 speak, would be little indeed removed from the brutes. The moral 

 and intellectual differences between them and ourselves would be 

 practically infinite, though the naturalist should not be able to 

 find a single shadow even of specific structural difference." Mr. 

 Romanes, in a note (pp. 134, 135), refers to recent discoveries in 

 cerebral physiology as to a "material organ of speech." Such 

 discoveries in no way effect our position, or can do so, as they 

 relate merely to the instrument whereby the verbum mentale is 

 able to manifest itself externally, and everybody knows that various 



