98 The Influence of Language and Environment upon the 



sphere. These diverse ideas, so numerous and necessary in 

 reasoning, are acquired and preserved by means of the word. 

 The highest and noblest example of this is to be found in the 

 narrative of Holy Scripture, where we find all the attributes of 

 the supreme Deity concentrated into one form, and rendered 

 intelligible to humanity in the person of the Logos, or Word of 

 God. Though of immense importance, we simply content our- 

 selves with recalling this, in expressing and emphasising this 

 physiological law ; That in the complex phenomena of the 

 moral and intellectual life of man, the concurrence of the 

 organism is the result of the materialisation of articulated and 

 figured signs of language in the brain. 



We have now to consider the influence of education, by 

 means of the signs of language, on the functions and develop- 

 ment of the nervous system. This will enable us to account 

 more easily for the various influences on the general phenomena 

 of impressionability and innervation, which so powerfully affect 

 the character of the man. In considering the signs of language 

 in their relation to the phenomena of life generally, we have to 

 observe (i) the acts of sensibility called animal ; (2) the acts of 

 the understanding ; (3) the acts of volition ; (4) the acts of animal 

 contractility ; (5) the acts of circulation, secretion, and nutri- 

 tion ; (6) the acts of the development of the nervous organism ; 

 (7) the acts of sympathy, impressionability, and organic con- 

 tractility. I. The acts of sensibility are various, but, assuming 

 that under the term sensibility may be included (i) sensorial 

 impressionability, (2) affective impressionability, (3) conscious- 

 ness, we may ask whether the sensations experienced by man 

 would be possible apart from the notions acquired by language. 

 This important question, we believe, can only be answered in 

 the negative. Hence, man's sensation consists in the faculty of 

 discerning and naming groups of confused impressions, in the 

 faculty of applying acquired notions of time, space, genus, 

 species, qualities of forms and colours, in determining different 

 impressions. This sensation is active, and generates an opera- 

 tion like that in logic called a primitive judgment. To be con- 



