We think with Steinthal, with Jacob Grimm,[79] and with M. Renan,[80] that language is not innate in man, that is to say, it is not, as the Buddhist philosophy has already declared, a _necessary_ consequence of active intelligence.[81] Further, it has not been revealed--this theory does not even deserve the honour of having been opposed by Jacob Grimm.[82] But we may admit that language is, if not a necessity, a least a direct consequence of an intellect such as existed amongst mankind at the time, whether long or short we know not, which preceded the appearance of language. “The moment,” says M. Renan, stating the theories of Steinthal,[83] “that language arises from the human soul and appears in the light of day and constitutes an epoch in the development of the life of the mind, is the moment when intuition is changed into idea. Things appear first to the mind in the complexity of the real, abstraction is unknown to the primitive man.” Here, then, are two well-characterised modes, two ways of being, entirely different from the intellect of man. The one, where this intellect only possesses intuition, the other where analysis sees the light, where the mind is abstracted, and where, by a mechanism more or less complicated, but at the same time by a real work,[84] it ends by calling every abstraction of mind by a name; then he speaks. But before the time when this revolution is accomplished, the state of man is completely comparable to that in which animals are placed. They have caught at certain relations by means of their intelligence, without usually feeling any necessity for explaining them, a relation of a much more elevated order of beings, for it has been truly remarked,[85] and it must not be forgotten, that the capital act of language is to “wish to speak.” We have seen that certain abstract ideas, by reason of their nature, were so entirely foreign to certain races of men, that their intellects had never _wished_ for a word in order to express them. Well, if other ideas, expressing much more simple relations, have escaped animals, there is only, in fact, a gradation corresponding to what we have just said concerning intellectual phenomena among the human race. As for the specific difference which some have tried to establish under this head between man and animals, if it were correct it must be shown that language is completely unattainable by any mammalia, even within the most restricted limits. And is it so? Will it be mooted that certain animals have not even a rudiment of language, whether articulated or not it does not much signify, in their state of nature? Will it be mooted that they never make any sort of sign in order to communicate anything to one another, to call them, or give an alarm, or express some peculiar sensation?[86]