DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD'S INTELLECT INDEPENDENTLY OF LANGUAGE. A wide-spread prejudice declares, "Without language, no understanding"! Subtile distinctions between understanding and reason have limited the statement to the latter term. But even in the restricted form, "Without verbal language, no reason," it is at least unproved. _Is there any thinking without words?_ The question takes this shape. Now, for the thinker, who has long since forgotten the time when he himself learned to speak, it is difficult, or even impossible, to give a decided answer. For the thinking person can not admit that he has been thinking without words; not even when he has caught himself arriving at a logical result without a continuity in his unexpressed thought. A break occurred in the train. There was, however, a train of thought. Breaks alone yield no thought; they arise only after words have been associated with thoughts, and so they can by no means serve as evidence of a thinking without words, although the ecstasy of the artist, the profundity of the meta-physician, may attain the last degree of unconsciousness, and a dash may interrupt the thought-text. But the child not yet acquainted with verbal language, who has not been prematurely artificialized by training and by suppression of his own attempts to express his states of mind, who learns _of himself_ to _think_, just as he learns of himself to see and hear--such a child shows plainly to the attentive observer that long before knowledge of the word as a means of understanding among men, and long before the first successful attempt to express himself in articulate words--nay, long before learning the pronunciation of even a single word, he combines ideas in a logical manner--i. e., he _thinks_. Thinking is, it is true, "internal speech," but there is a speech without words. Facts in proof of this have already been given in connection with other points (Vol. I, pp. 88, 327, 328); others are given further on. It will not be superfluous, however, to put together several observations relating to the development of the childish intellect without regard to the acquirement of speech; and to present them separately, as a sort of introduction to the investigation of the process of learning to speak. Memory; a causative combination of the earliest recollections, or memory-images; purposive, deliberate movements for the lessening of individual strain--all these come to the child in greater or less measure independently of verbal language. The, as it were, embryonic logic of the child does not need words. A brief explanation of the operation of these three factors will show this. Memory takes the first place in point of time.