advantage which each one of us derives from it within his inmost self, in the training and equipment of his own powers of thought: but the advantage is one we should never have enjoyed, save as we were born members of a community: the ideas of speech and of community are inseparable.
By thus tracing back, as well as our knowledge and our limited time have allowed, the course of the history of human speech even to its very beginning, we have made such answer as was within our power to our introductory question, "Why we speak as we do, and not otherwise?" But, before bringing our discussions to a close, it will be well for us, varying a little the emphasis of our inquiry, to present and consider it in one or two new aspects.
And, in the first place, why do we speak—we human beings and we alone, and not also the other races of animals which have been endowed with faculties in many respects so like our own? The fact is a patent one: although some of the lower animals are not entirely destitute of the power of communicating together, their means of communication is altogether different from what we call language. The essential characteristic of our speech is that it is arbitrary and conventional; that of the animals, on the other hand, is natural and instinctive: the former is, therefore, capable of indefinite change, growth, and development; the latter is unvarying, and cannot transcend its original narrow limits: the one is handed down by tradition, and acquired by instruction; the other appears independently, in its integrity, in every individual of the race. Now, for the superiority of man in this particular, the general reason, that his endowments are vastly higher than those of the inferior races, though by no means so definite as could be desired, is perhaps the truest and most satisfactory of which the case at present admits. When philosophers shall have determined precisely wherein lies the superiority of man's mind, they will at the same time have explained in detail his exclusive possession of speech. We are accustomed to agree that man is distinguished from the brute by the gift of reason; but then we can only define reason as that whereby man is distinguished from the brute; for as to what reason is, how far it
