spheres of ratiocination, where our minds could hardly work at all without the direct aid of language; as there are also those where they could not surely hold and follow the chain of reason and deduction without the still further assistance afforded by writing down the argument. It may be freely conceded that such mental processes as we are in the constant habit of performing would be too difficult for us to cempass without words—as they certainly also lie far beyond what would have been our mental reach had we not been trained through the use of language to orderly thought, and enriched with the wealth of mental acquisitions accumulated by our predecessors and stored up in words. But this is a very different thing from acknowledging that thought is impossible without language. So, also, to build steam-engines and tubular-bridges, to weave satins and Brussels carpets, to tunnel mountains, to fill up valleys, is impossible without the aid of complicated and powerful machinery; yet we do not on that account deny all power and efficiency to the bare human hands. On the contrary, we see clearly that machinery is, in every part and parcel, ultimately the work of human hands, which can do wondrous things without it, if still more wondrous with it. Language, like manner, is the instrument of thought, the machinery with which the mind works; an instrument by which its capacity to achieve valuable results is indefinitely increased, but which, far from being identical with it, is one of its own products; with and by which it works with freedom, depending upon it now more, now less, according to circumstances—as the matter in hand, the style of elaboration, the deliberation required or permitted; and fully able to carry on the same operations with instrumentalities greatly differing in completeness and inherent adaptation to their purpose.
Our conclusion stands fast, then, that thought is anterior to language, and independent of it; it is not compelled to find expression in order to be thought. The immense and incalculable advantage which it gains from its command of speech is something incidental: something intended, indeed, and a necessary implication in the gift of speech to the human race; yet coming as a consequence of something else,
