in the very existence of mind. Whatever may have been the nature of the first articulate sounds, they belong to the same organic and unconscious stages of expression with the still earlier language of gesture and feature. Vowels and consonants are not mere products of analysis. They must have been instinctively uttered in the infancy of man, long before they were combined into positive words. The "click languages" of Southern Africa represent a still more primitive expression. Through all such stages runs the one law that every bodily motion is the reverse side of a mental act. The inscrutable cosmic law of mind is essential to the growth of every germ of speech.
The capability of such primitive atoms of expression for development into conscious methods of communicating ideas Gesture and feature language. is seen in the great ingenuity of deaf-mutes in holding intercourse by means of gestures before being taught to converse by strict system; and in the preponderance of sign language in the eloquence of savage tribes. Such germs of speech, whether in gesture, facial change, emphasis, or tone, are retained through the whole course of human progress, and form important elements in the highest kinds of art.
Language, however, in its technical sense, begins in the use of sounds for the more or less conscious purpose Mystery of a beginning. of being understood. It is an ideal attraction. It involves social relations; it is a form of that profound desire of communion which animates all human growth. Here again we are thrown back on a remoteness so far beyond recall, that Rousseau might well confess himself unable to decide whether a social order already formed was more necessary for the construction of language, than was a language already discovered for the construction of society. Such the eternal irony that defeats our science in every search into the mystery of origin. But while we should gain nothing by resorting
