ation
increase, the widely contrasted classes at first distinguished, come to
be each divided into sub-classes, differing from each other less than
the classes differ; and these sub-classes are again divided after the
same manner. By the continuance of which process, things are gradually
arranged into groups, the members of which are less and less _unlike_;
ending, finally, in groups whose members differ only as individuals, and
not specifically. And thus there tends ultimately to arise the notion of
_complete likeness_. For, manifestly, it is impossible that groups
should continue to be subdivided in virtue of smaller and smaller
differences, without there being a simultaneous approximation to the
notion of _no difference_.

Let us next notice that the recognition of likeness and unlikeness,
which underlies classification, and out of which continued
classification evolves the idea of complete likeness--let us next notice
that it also underlies the process of _naming_, and by consequence
_language_. For all language consists, at the beginning, of symbols
which are as _like_ to the things symbolised as it is practicable to
make them. The language of signs is a means of conveying ideas by
mimicking the actions or peculiarities of the things referred to. Verbal
language is also, at the beginning, a mode of suggesting objects or acts
by imitating the sounds which the objects make, or with which the acts
are accompanied. Originally these two languages were used
simultaneously. It needs but to watch the gesticulations with which the
savage accompanies his speech--to see a Bushman or a Kaffir dramatising
before an audience his mode of catching game--or to note the extreme
paucity of words in all primitive vocabularies; to infer that at first,
attitudes, gestures, and sounds, were all combined to produce as good a
_likeness_ as possible, of the things, animals, persons, or events
described; and that as the sounds came to be understood by themselves
the gestures fell into disuse: leaving traces, however, in the manners
of the more excitable civilised races. But be this as it may, it
suffices simply to observe, how many of the words current among
barbarous peoples are like the sounds appertaining to the things
signified; how many of our own oldest and simplest words have the same
peculiarity; how children tend to invent imitative words; and how the
sign-language spontaneously formed by deaf mutes is invariably based
upon imitati