right shoulder, at the same time extend and raise the right arm high, extending the index finger upward, perpendicularly.” I have entered thus at some length into the syntax of gesture-language because this language is, as I have before remarked, the most natural or immediate mode of giving expression to the logic of recepts; it is the least symbolic or conventional phase of the sign-making faculty, and therefore a study of its method is of importance in such a general survey of this faculty as we are endeavouring to take. The points in the above analysis to which I would draw attention as the most important are, the absence of the copula and of many other “parts of speech,” the order in which ideas are expressed, the pictorial devices by which the ideas are presented in as concrete a form as possible, and the fact that no ideas of any high abstraction are ever expressed at all.[76] CHAPTER VII. ARTICULATION. It will be my aim in this chapter to take a broad view of Articulation as a special development of the general faculty of sign-making, reserving for subsequent chapters a consideration of the philosophy of Speech. On the threshold of articulate language, then, we have four several cases to distinguish: first, articulation by way of meaningless imitation; second, meaningless articulation by way of a spontaneous or instinctive exercise of the organs of speech; third, understanding of the signification of articulate sounds, or words; and fourth, articulation with an intentional attribution of the meaning understood as attaching to the words. I shall consider each of these cases separately. * * * * * The meaningless imitation of articulate sounds occurs in talking birds, young children, not unfrequently in savages, in idiots, and in the mentally deranged. The faculty of such meaningless imitation, however, need not detain us; for it is evident that the mere re-echoing of a verbal sound is of no further psychological significance than is the mimicking of any other sound. * * * * *