368 P8TCHOL007. 



The exceedingly interesting account which Dr. Howe 

 gives of the education of his various blind-deaf mutes illus- 

 trates this point admirably. He began to teach Laura 

 Bridgman by gumming raised letters on various familiar 

 articles. The child was taught by mere contiguity to pick 

 out a certain number of particular articles when made to 

 feel the letters. But this was merely a collection of par- 

 ticular signs, out of the mass of which the general purpose 

 of signification had not yet been extracted by the child's 

 mind. Dr. Howe compares his situation at this moment to 

 that of one lowering a line to the bottom of the deep sea in 

 which Laura's soul lay, and waiting until she should spon- 

 taneously take hold of it and be raised into the light. The 

 moment came, ' accompanied by a radiant flash of intelli- 

 gence and glow of joy '; she seemed suddenly to become 

 aware of the general purpose imbedded in the difi'erent de- 

 tails of all these signs, and from that moment her education 

 went on with extreme rapidity. 



Another of the great capacities in which man has been 

 said to differ fundamentally from the animal is that of pos- 



great imitativeness of man. The first produces the original reflex inter- 

 jectional sign; the second (as Bleek has well shown) fixes it, stamps it, and 

 ends by multiplying the number of determinate specific signs which are a 

 requisite preliminary to the general conscious purpose of sign-making, 

 which I have called the characteristic human element in language. The 

 way in which imitativeness fixes the meaning of signs is this: When a pri- 

 meval man has a given emotion, he utters his natural interjection; or when 

 (to avoid supposing that the reflex sounds are exceedingly determinate by 

 nature) a group of such men experience a common emotion, and one takes 

 the lead in the cry, the others cry like him from sympathy or imitative- 

 ness. Now, let one of the group hear another, who is in presence of the 

 experience, utter the cry; he, even without the experience, will repeat the 

 cry from pure imitativeness. But, as he repeats the sign, he will be re- 

 minded by it of his own former experience. Thus, first, he has the sign 

 with the emotion; then, without it; then, with it again. It is " dissociated 

 by change of concomitants "; he feels it as a separate entity and yet as hav- 

 ing a connection with the emotion. Immediately it becomes possible for 

 him to couple it deliberately with the emotion, in cases where the latter 

 would either have provoked no interjectional cry or not the same one. In 

 a word, his mental procedure tends to ^.c this cry on that emotion; and 

 when this occurs, in many instances, he is provided with a stock of signs, 

 like the yelp, beg, rat of the dog, each of which suggests a determinate 

 image. On this stock, then, similarity works in the way above explained. 



