needs of the moment, by ever yielding to an impulse and grasping a
possibility, which the already acquired treasure of words and forms, and
the habit of their use, suggest and put within reach."[243] "Every
single item of alteration, of whatever kind, and of whatever degree of
importance, goes back to some individual or individuals who set it in
circulation, from whose example it gained a wider and wider currency,
until it finally won that general assent, which is alone required in
order to make anything in language proper and authoritative."[244] These
statements might be applied to any of the folkways. The statements on
page 46 of Whitney's book would serve to describe and define the mores.
This shows to what an extent language is a case of the operation by
which mores are produced. They are always devices to meet a need, which
are imperceptibly modified and unconsciously handed down through the
generations. The ways, like the language, are incorporeal things. They
are borne by everybody and nobody, and are developed by everybody and
nobody. Everybody has his little peculiarities of language. Each one has
his peculiarities of accent or pronunciation and his pet words or
phrases. Each one is suggesting all the time the use of the tricks of
language which he has adopted. "Nothing less than the combined effort of
a whole community, with all its classes and orders, in all its variety
of characters, circumstances, and necessities, is capable of keeping in
life a whole language."[245] "Every vocable was to us [children] an
arbitrary and conventional sign; arbitrary, because any one of a
thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us and
associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired
had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting use of the community
of which we formed a part."[246] "We do not, as children, make our
language for ourselves. We get it by tradition, all complete. We think
in sentences. As our language forms sentences, that is, as our
mother-tongue thinks, so we learn to think. Our brain, our entire
thought-status, forms itself by the mother-tongue, and we transmit the
same to our children."[247] Nature men have only petty coins of speech.
They can express nothing great. They cannot compare, analyze, and
combine. They are overwhelmed by a flood of details, in which they
cannot discern the ruling idea. The material and sensual constitute
their limits. If they mov