412 FROM BRUTE 



This passage, which formed the introduction to an 

 article on " The Physiology of Thinking," written some 

 years ago,* may be taken as the text of the present 

 chapter. 



Views very similar to these had previously been enforced 

 by Herbert Spencer, Huxley, and others, and they have 

 grown much in public recognition during the intervening 

 period, especially through the able advocacy of one whose 

 loss we have now to deplore. Though the doctrines ex- 

 pressed by G. H. Lewes were not perhaps so novel as his 

 language seems to imply, yet he lent them new force, and 

 developed them in a fuller and more precise manner than 

 had been done by other writers. 



The most obvious use of Language is of course as a 

 means of definite communication between man and man. 

 In his '^ Laws of Thought," Thomson says (pp. 37— 39 and 

 47): ''We might dispense with articulate speech for 

 certain purposes, and might make gestures and changes 

 of the countenance, which are the language of action, 

 supply its place. But actions and the play of features, 

 whilst they serve to express love or hatred for some 

 present object, need of food or rest, joy or sorrow, can 

 but express a very small and confined list of thoughts, if 

 we would indicate our feelings towards an absent person, 

 or our wish for something at a distance, or would direct 

 attention to some inward state or sentiment . . . Hence 

 it is necessary to appropriate to every object a signal, 

 always available, which all men by a tacit convention 

 accept as a substitute for the object, and which, there- 

 fore, recalls the object to the fancy whenever it is 

 employed ; and such a signal is a noun or name .... 

 Names, however, are representatives of things ; and the 

 difierent states of things must find an expression likewise ; 

 * " Fortnightly Review," January, 1809. 



