tent to which we do so, and the necessity of the accompaniment, are both apt to be considerably exaggerated. When we think most elaborately and most reflectively, then we formulate our thoughts as if we were speaking or writing them; but we need not always think in that style. If I hold up two sticks together, to see which is the longer, my comparison and conclusion are assuredly, both of them, independent of any use of language, spoken or conceived of. When I taste a bit of strong sea-duck, which has been put upon my plate for mallard, my perception of its flavour and my judgment that "the bird is fishy" are wholly instantaneous, and simple mental acts: I may then proceed to state my judgment, either to myself or to others, in whatever style of elaboration I may choose. This, if I mistake not, is the normal order of procedure: the mental act is momentary, its formulation in words occupies time; we have our thought to start with, and then go on to give it deliberate expression. The operation of thinking in words is a double one; it consists of thinking and of putting the thought into words; we conceive the thought and conceive also its expression. That, when we turn our attention full upon our own minds, we read there the act and its expression together, does not necessarily prove more than the intimacy of the association we have established between our conceptions and their signs, and the power over us of the habit of expression. Every deliberate thought, doubtless, goes through the mind of the deaf-mute accompanied by an image of the dactylic writhings which would be his natural mode of expressing it;[1] but his mental action is not slavishly dependent upon such an external auxiliary.
The only way, in fact, to prove the necessary connection and mutual limitation of thought and speech is to lay down such a definition of the former as excludes everything which
- ↑ Indeed, I know that the children of a late principal of the Hartford deaf-and-dumb asylum, who had grown up in the asylum, and knew the peculiar language of the inmates as familiarly as their English, could always tell what their father was thinking of, as he walked up and down in meditation, by watching his hands: his fingers involuntarily formed the signs which were associated in his mind with his subjects of thought; while at the same time, doubtless, he imagined also their spoken signs.
