_speech_, and it is difficult to say which it means more properly. It
means both at once: why? because really they cannot be divided.... When
we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and
the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread
speech under foot and to hope to do without it--then will it be
conceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce its
own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its
speculations and emotions.

'As if,' he exclaims finely, 'language were the hired servant, the mere
mistress of reason, and not the lawful wife in her own house!'

If you need further argument (but what serves it to slay the slain?) let
me remind you that you cannot use the briefest, the humblest process of
thought, cannot so much as resolve to take your bath hot or cold, or
decide what to order for breakfast, without forecasting it to yourself in
some form of words. Words are, in fine, the only currency in which we can
exchange thought even with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that the
more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our
thoughts? Does it not follow that by drilling ourselves to write
perspicuously we train our minds to clarify their thought? Does it not
follow that some practice in the deft use of words, with its
correspondent defining of thought, may well be ancillary even to the
study of Natural Science in a University?

But I have another word for our men of science. It was inevitable,
perhaps, that Latin--so long the Universal Language--should cease in time
to be that in which scientific works were written. It was impossible,
perhaps, to substitute, by consent, some equally neat and austere modern
language, such as French. But when it became an accepted custom for each