development begins with articulate speech, leaving music for
the expression of the emotions.

To symbolize the sounds used to express emotion, if I may so
put it, is to weaken that expression, and it would naturally
be the strongest emotion that would first feel the inadequacy
of the new-found speech. Now what is mankind's strongest
emotion? Even in the nineteenth century Goethe could say, "'Tis
fear that constitutes the god-like in man." Certainly before
the Christian era the soul of mankind had its roots in fear.
In our superstition we were like children beneath a great tree
of which the upper part was as a vague and fascinating mystery,
but the roots holding it firmly to the ground were tangible,
palpable facts. We feared--we knew not what. Love was human,
all the other emotions were human; fear alone was indefinable.

The primeval savage, looking at the world subjectively, was
merely part of it. He might love, hate, threaten, kill, if he
willed; every other creature could do the same. But the wind
was a great spirit to him; lightning and thunder threatened him
as they did the rest of the world; the flood would destroy him
as ruthlessly as it tore the trees asunder. The elements were
animate powers that had nothing in common with him; for what
the intellect cannot explain the imagination magnifies.

Fear, then, was the strongest emotion. Therefore auxiliary aids
to express and cause fear were necessary when the speech symbols
for fear, drifting further and further away from expressing the
actual thing, became words, and words were inadequate to express
and cause fear. In that vague groping for sound symbols which