expression, in comparison with ordinary language, as going on one's hands
and knees is in comparison with walking, or as walking compared with
going by train; but it is as great an abuse of words to limit the word
"language" to mere words written or spoken, as it would be to limit the
idea of a locomotive to a railway engine. This may indeed pass in
ordinary conversation, where so much must be suppressed if talk is to be
got through at all, but it is intolerable when we are inquiring about the
relations between thought and words. To do so is to let words become as
it were the masters of thought, on the ground that the fact of their
being only its servants and appendages is so obvious that it is generally
allowed to go without saying.
If all that Professor Max Muller means to say is, that no animal but man
commands an articulate language, with verbs and nouns, or is ever likely
to command one (and I question whether in reality he means much more than
this), no one will differ from him. No dog or elephant has one word for
bread, another for meat, and another for water. Yet, when we watch a cat
or dog dreaming, as they often evidently do, can we doubt that the dream
is accompanied by a mental image of the thing that is dreamed of, much
like what we experience in dreams ourselves, and much doubtless like the
mental images which must have passed through the mind of my deaf and dumb
waiter? If they have mental images in sleep, can we doubt that waking,
also, they picture things before their mind's eyes, and see them much as
we do--too vaguely indeed to admit of our thinking that we actually see
the objects themselves, but definitely enough for us to be able to
recognise the idea or object of which we are thinking, and to connect it
with any other idea, object, or sign that we may think appropriate?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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