Essays on Life 



thus-far-shalt-thou-go-and-no-further. Who 

 can define heat or cold, or night or day ? 

 Yet, so long as >we hold fast by current 

 consent, our chances of error for want of 

 better definition are so small that no sensible 

 person will consider them. In like manner, 

 if we hold by current consent or common 

 sense, which is the same thing, about reason, 

 we shall not find the want of an academic 

 definition hinder us from a reasonable con- 

 clusion. What nurse or mother will doubt 

 that her infant child can reason within the 

 limits of its own experience, long before it 

 can formulate its reason in articulately worded 

 thought ? If the development of any given 

 animal is, as our opponents themselves admit, 

 an epitome of the history of its whole anterior 

 development, surely the fact that speech is 

 an accomplishment acquired after birth so 

 artificially that children who have gone wild 

 in the woods lose it if they have ever 

 learned it, points to the conclusion that 

 man's ancestors only learned to express them- 

 selves in articulate language at a compara- 

 tively recent period. Granted that they learn 



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