of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of waking-consciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the dog has become a "judge" of men, looking his opposite straight in the eye and grasping, behind the speech, the speaker.
Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of the fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word, and the grown-up talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary meanings of the words he or she is using — that is, the sound-forms in this case subserve a language that is quite other than that of words. Such languages also have their groups and dialects; they, too, can be learned, mastered, and misunderstood, and they are so indispensable to us that verbal language would mutiny if we were to attempt to make it do all the work without assistance from tone- and gesture-language. Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would be almost incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture-language in the form of punctuation.
It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses language in general with human word-language — and that not merely theoretically, but habitually in the practical conduct of all its investigations. As a result, it has remained immensely ignorant of the vast profusion of speech-modes of different kinds that are in common use amongst beasts and men. The domain of speech, taken as a whole, is far wider, and verbal speech, with its incapacity to stand alone (an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really a much more modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the "origin of human speech," the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation of the problem. Verbal speech — for that is what is meant — never had origins at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain stage in man's history, must not deceive us as to its position in the history of free-moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly ought not to begin with man.
But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless. For that microcosmic existences are in plurality is a matter of simple self-evidence. To speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that Darwinian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of ancestors belong with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there, still the fact remains that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly and livingly sensible, of a "we," and reaching out to one another for linkages of waking-consciousness.
