n think at all unless we do so
in words; that is to say, in sentences with verbs and nouns. Indeed he
goes so far as to say upon his title-page that there can be no
reason--which I imagine comes to much the same thing as thought--without
language, and no language without reason.

Against the assertion that there can be no true language without reason I
have nothing to say. But when the Professor says that there can be no
reason, or thought, without language, his opponents contend, as it seems
to me, with greater force, that thought, though infinitely aided,
extended and rendered definite through the invention of words,
nevertheless existed so fully as to deserve no other name thousands, if
not millions of years before words had entered into it at all. Words,
they say, are a comparatively recent invention, for the fuller expression
of something that was already in existence.

Children, they urge, are often evidently thinking and reasoning, though
they can neither think nor speak in words. If you ask me to define
reason, I answer as before that this can no more be done than thought,
truth or motion can be defined. Who has answered the question, "What is
truth?" Man cannot see God and live. We cannot go so far back upon
ourselves as to undermine our own foundations; if we try to do we topple
over, and lose that very reason about which we vainly try to reason. If
we let the foundations be, we know well enough that they are there, and
we can build upon them in all security. We cannot, then, define reason
nor crib, cabin and confine it within a thus-far-shalt-thou-go-and-no-
further. Who can define heat or cold, or night or day? Yet, so long as
we hold fast by current consent, our chances of error for want of better
definition are so small that no sensible person will consider them. In
like manner, if we hold by current consent or common sense, which is the
same thing, about reason, we shall not find the want of an academic
definition hinder us from a reasonable conclusion. What nurse or mother
will doubt that her infant child can reason within the limits of its own
experience, long before it can formulate its reason in articulately
worded thought? If the development of any given animal is, as our
opponents themselves admit, an epitome of the history of its whole
anterior development, surely the fact that speech is an accomplishment
acquired after birth so artificially that children who have gone wild in
the wo