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ject of them. But we may first object that, if even that 

 privileged " every one but the subject" were limited to 

 a knowledge of contractions, he would not know much. 

 It is only because he knows, first of all, a thinker and 

 wilier of contractions that these themselves cease to be 

 but passing externalities, and transitory contingencies. 

 Neither is it reasonable to assert an identity of nature 

 for contractions, and for that which they only represent. 

 It would hardly be fair to confound either the receiver 

 or the sender of a telegraphic message, with the move- 

 ments which alone bore it, and without which it would 

 have been impossible. The sign is not the thing signi- 

 fied, it is but the servant of the signifier his own arbi- 

 trary mark and intelligible, in the first place, only to 

 him. It is the meaning, in all cases, that is alone vital ; 

 the sign is but an accident. To convert the internality 

 into the arbitrary externality that simply expresses it, is 

 for Mr, Huxley only an oversight. Your ideas are 

 made known to your neighbors by contractions, there- 

 fore your ideas are of the same nature as contractions ! 

 Or, even to take it from the other side, your neighbor 

 perceives in you contractions only, and therefore your 

 ideas are contractions ! Are not the vital elements 

 here present the two correspondent internalities, be- 

 tween which the contractions constitute but an arbitrary 

 chain of external communication, that is so now, but 

 may be otherwise again ? The ringing of the bell at 

 the window is not precisely the dwarf within. Nor are 

 Engineer Chappe's "wooden arms and elbow-joints 

 jerking and fugling in the air," to be identified with 

 Engineer Chappe himself. For the higher faculties, 

 even for speech, etc., assuredly Mr. Huxley might have 

 well spared himself this superfluous and inapplicable 

 reference to contraction. 



