Essays on Life 



compared with going by train ; but it is as 

 great an abuse of words to limit the word 

 " language " to mere words written or spoken, 

 as it would be to limit the idea of a locomotive 

 to a railway engine. This may indeed pass 

 in ordinary conversation, where so much must 

 be suppressed if talk is to be got through at 

 all, but it is intolerable when we are inquir- 

 ing about the relations between thought and 

 words. To do so is to let words become as 

 it were the masters of thought, on the ground 

 that the fact of their being only its servants 

 and appendages is so obvious that it is gen- 

 erally allowed to go without saying. 



If all that Professor Max Miiller means to 

 say is, that no animal but man commands an 

 articulate language, with verbs and nouns, or 

 is ever likely to command one (and I question 

 whether in reality he means much more than 

 this), no one will differ from him. No dog or 

 elephant has one word for bread, another for 

 meat, and another for water. Yet, when we 

 watch a cat or dog dreaming, as they often 

 evidently do, can we doubt that the dream is 



accompanied by a mental image of the thing 



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