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subdued, bis exclamations merge into a purely animal cry — 
the natural, involuntary, instinctive expression of suffering. The 
vulgar babit of swearing (erroneously so called) offers another 
instance of tbe instinctive tendency to express feeling vocally. 
When a man swears be does not represent to himself the 
awful ideas which are generally attached to the words he 
makes use of. He obeys a natural inclination to vent his 
anger orally ; up to a certain point he employs articulate 
words drawn from a limited vocabulary which habit has ren- 
dered familiar; but it is known that human beings are 
capable of being enraged to such an extent that even this 
quasi language fails them. In these and other similar in- 
stances the expressions of thought and feeling stand in an 
inverse ratio to each other. 
We see, therefore, that, as regards the human psychology, 
the language of thought and the “ language 33 of feeling differ 
in their origin, in their nature, and in their objects. And, 
considering the strong resemblance which exists between the 
oral expressions of feeling in man and the cries of brutes, we 
might infer from analogy that these cries are never used for 
the purpose of conveying information, which is the proper 
function of language. It is said, however, that t( a house-dog 
barks for the purpose of acquainting his master with the 
presence of an unseasonable intruder/'’ It might be argued 
with equal propriety that the geese in the Roman citadel cackled 
in order to let its occupants know of the unexpected advent 
of the Gauls. The fact is that the dog barks because he is 
alarmed ; he barks whether his master is at home or not, and 
for one instance in which he barks from an ostensible motive, 
he barks in two without any apparent reason whatever. And 
whenever we can trace his barking to its cause with anything 
like certainty, we invariably discover that cause — and the 
same applies to the cries of other animals — in the action of 
some object upon his feelings. 
The argument from the analogy of human cries and the 
results of observation are further corroborated by a superficial 
examination of the mutual relation of thought and language. 
There are two mental operations involved in language, 
namely, the acceptation of a word, or other conventional sign, 
as the representative of an idea, and the complete thought or 
junction of the ideas of substance and activity, expressed by 
the noun and verb — generally in the indicative mood. How 
if we assume the cry of an animal to be uttered with the view 
of conveying information, we must translate the cry by an entire 
sentence, passing over the simpler elements of which every sen- 
tence is composed, for it has never been shown that animals 
