276 ELEMENTS OF SCIENCE 



quite unable to grow, or even to endure, without some 

 embodiment, without corporeal expressions of some kind. 

 Thus language of word or gesture is the necessary means 

 of human thought as well as its necessary consequence. 



The mental and bodily sides of language are so in- 

 timately united that, though the mental side is anterior, 

 it at once seeks, as it were, to incarnate itself, and, 

 under normal circumstances, does incarnate itself, in 

 corporeal expression. Deaf mutes will spontaneously 

 evolve a gesture language through which they can 

 understand each other and communicate their ideas. 

 Rational conceptions, therefore, can evidently exist 

 without words, but rational words cannot exist without 

 conceptions or abstract ideas. But though a language 

 of gesture may be elaborated, and even carried to much 

 perfection, as we see in certain ballets, yet spoken lan- 

 guage is so enormously superior to that of gesture that 

 no comparison can be made between the two vehicles for 

 the expression of human thought. 



The intellect is the common root from which both 

 thought and language (whether of speech or gesture) 

 spring, and thenceforth continue and develop in 

 unseparable union. 



Language, then, is of two radically distinct kinds 

 (i) the language of feeling which we possess in 

 common with animals; and (2) the language of the 

 intellect which is absolutely peculiar to man. 



There are also various subdivisions of each of these 

 two kinds of language. 



Of the mere language of the emotions and of feeling 

 we may have : 



(i) Sounds which are neither articulate nor rational, 

 such as cries of pain or the murmur of a mother to her 

 infant. 



