the common way, the high road, the current coin of thought.

With speech humanity begins. With the dawn of speech the child ceases
to be an animal we cherish, and crosses the boundary into distinctly
human intercourse. There begins in its mind the development of the most
wonderful of all conceivable apparatus, a subtle and intricate
keyboard, that will end at last with thirty or forty or fifty thousand
keys. This queer, staring, soft little being in its mother's arms is
organizing something within itself, beside which the most wonderful
orchestra one can imagine is a lump of rude clumsiness. There will come
a time when, at the merest touch upon those keys, image will follow
image and emotion develop into emotion, when the whole creation, the
deeps of space, the minutest beauties of the microscope, cities,
armies, passions, splendours, sorrows, will leap out of darkness into
the conscious being of thought, when this interwoven net of brief,
small sounds will form the centre of a web that will hold together in
its threads the universe, the All, visible and invisible, material and
immaterial, real and imagined, of a human mind. And if we are to make
the best of a child, it is in no way secondary to its physical health
and growth that it should acquire a great and thorough command over
speech, not merely that it should speak, but, what is far more vital,
that it should understand swiftly and subtly things written and said.
Indeed, this is more than any physical need. The body is the substance
and the implement; the mind, built and compact of language, is the man.
All that has gone before, all that we have discussed of sound birth and
physical growth and care, is no more than the making ready of the soil
for the mind that is to grow therein. As we come to this matter of
language, we come a step nearer to the intimate realities of our
subject--we come to the mental plant that is to bear the flower and the
ripe fruit of the individual life. The next phase of our inquiry,