14 



CHAPTER II. 



THE GESTUEE-LANGUAaE. 



The power whicli man possesses of uttering his thoughts is 

 one of the most essential elements of his civilization. Whether 

 he can even think at all without some means of outward expres- 

 sion is a metaphysical question which need not be discussed 

 here. Thus much will hardly be denied by any one, that man^s 

 power of utterance, so far exceeding any that the lower animals 

 possess, is one of the principal causes of his immense pre-emi- 

 nence over them. 



Of the means which man has of uttering or expressing that 

 which is in his mind, speech is by far the most important, so 

 much so that when we speak of uttering our thoughts, the 

 phrase is understood to mean expressing them in words. But 

 when we say that man's power of utterance is one of the great 

 differences between him and the lower animals, we must attach 

 to the word utterance a sense more fully conformable to its 

 etymology. As Steinthal admits, the deaf-and-dumb man is 

 the living refutation of the proposition, that man cannot think 

 without speech, unless we allow the understood notion of speech 

 as the utterance of thought by articulate sounds to be too nar- 

 row.^ To utter a thought is literally to put it outside us, as to 

 express it is to squeeze it out. Grossly material as these meta- 

 phors are, they are the best terms we have for that wonderful 



* Steinthal, ' Ueber die Sprache der Taubstummen' (in Prutz's ' Deutsches Mu- 

 eeum,' Jan. to June, 1851, p. 904, etc.). 



