and logic has always existed, or that their distinctions were familiar to
Socrates and Plato. (5) There is the fallacy of exaggerating, and also of
diminishing the interval which separates articulate from inarticulate
language--the cries of animals from the speech of man--the instincts of
animals from the reason of man. (6) There is the danger which besets all
enquiries into the early history of man--of interpreting the past by the
present, and of substituting the definite and intelligible for the true but
dim outline which is the horizon of human knowledge.

The greatest light is thrown upon the nature of language by analogy. We
have the analogy of the cries of animals, of the songs of birds ('man, like
the nightingale, is a singing bird, but is ever binding up thoughts with
musical notes'), of music, of children learning to speak, of barbarous
nations in which the linguistic instinct is still undecayed, of ourselves
learning to think and speak a new language, of the deaf and dumb who have
words without sounds, of the various disorders of speech; and we have the
after-growth of mythology, which, like language, is an unconscious creation
of the human mind. We can observe the social and collective instincts of
animals, and may remark how, when domesticated, they have the power of
understanding but not of speaking, while on the other hand, some birds
which are comparatively devoid of intelligence, make a nearer approach to
articulate speech. We may note how in the animals there is a want of that
sympathy with one another which appears to be the soul of language. We can
compare the use of speech with other mental and bodily operations; for
speech too is a kind of gesture, and in the child or savage accompanied
with gesture. We may observe that the child learns to speak, as he learns
to walk or to eat, by a natural impulse; yet in either case not without a
power of imitation which is also natural to him--he is taught to read, but
he breaks forth spontaneously in speech. We can trace the impulse to bind
together the world in ideas beginning in the first efforts to speak and