356 PSYCHOLOOT. 



guage is assuredly a capital distinction between man and 

 brute. But it may readily be shown how this distinction 

 merely flows from those we have pointed out, easy disso- 

 ciation of a representation into its ingredients, and associa- 

 tion by similarity. 



Language is a system of signs, different from the things 

 signified, but able to suggest them. 



No doubt brutes have a number of such signs. When 

 a dog yelps in front of a door, and his master, understand- 

 ing his desire, opens it, the dog may, after a certain number 

 of repetitions, get to repeat in cold blood a yelp which was 

 at first the involuntary interjectional expression of strong 

 emotion. The same dog may be taught to ' beg ' for food, 

 and afterwards come to do so deliberately when hungry. 

 The dog also learns to understand the signs of men, and 

 the word ' rat ' uttered to a terrier suggests exciting 

 thoughts of the rat-hunt. If the dog had the varied im- 

 pulse to vocal utterance which some other animals have, 

 he would probably repeat the word ' rat ' whenever he 

 spontaneously happened to think of a rat-hunt — he no 

 doubt does have it as an auditory image, just as a parrot 

 calls out different words spontaneously from its repertory, 

 and having learned the name of a given dog will utter it on 

 the sight of a different dog. In each of these separate cases 

 the particular sign may be consciously noticed by the ani- 

 mal, as distinct from the particular thing signified, and will 

 thus, so far as it goes, be a true manifestation of language. 

 But when we come to man we find a great difference. He 

 has a deliberate intention to apply a sign to everything. The 

 linguistic impulse is with him generalized and systematic. 

 For things hitherto unnoticed or unfelt, he desires a sign 

 before he has one. Even though the dog should possess 

 his ' yelp ' for this thing, his ' beg ' for that, and his audi- 

 tory image 'rat' for a third thing, the matter with him rests 

 there. If a fourth thing interests him for which no sign 

 happens already to have been learned, he remains tran- 

 quilly without it and goes no further. But the man postu- 

 lates it, its absence irritates him, and he ends by inventing 

 it This GENEEAL PUEPOSE Constitutes, I take it, the peculiarity 

 of human speech, and explains its prodigious development. 



