g together of mental images
and ideas with deductions therefrom, and with a corresponding power
of detaching them from one another. Hobbes, the Professor tells us,
maintained this long ago, when he said that all our thinking
consists of addition and subtraction--that is to say, in bringing
ideas together, and in detaching them from one another.

Turning from thought to language, we observe that the word is
derived from the French langue, or tongue. Strictly, therefore, it
means tonguage. This, however, takes account of but a very small
part of the ideas that underlie the word. It does, indeed, seize a
familiar and important detail of everyday speech, though it may be
doubted whether the tongue has more to do with speaking than lips,
teeth and throat have, but it makes no attempt at grasping and
expressing the essential characteristic of speech. Anything done
with the tongue, even though it involve no speaking at all, is
tonguage; eating oranges is as much tonguage as speech is. The
word, therefore, though it tells us in part how speech is effected,
reveals nothing of that ulterior meaning which is nevertheless
inseparable from any right use of the words either "speech" or
"language." It presents us with what is indeed a very frequent
adjunct of conversation, but the use of written characters, or the
finger-speech of deaf mutes, is enough to show that the word
"language" omits all reference to the most essential characteristics
of the idea, which in practice it nevertheless very sufficiently
presents to us. I hope presently to make it clear to you how and
why it should do so. The word is incomplete in the first place,
because it omits all reference to the ideas which words, speech or
language are intended to convey, and there can be no true word
without its actually or potentially conveying an idea. Secondly, it
makes no allusion to the person or persons to whom the ideas are to
be conveyed. Language is not language unless it not only expresses
fairly definite and coherent ideas, but unless it also conveys these
ideas to some other living intelligent being, either man or brute,
that can understand them. We may speak to a dog or horse, but not
to a stone. If we make pretence of doing so we are in reality only
talking to ourselves. The person or animal spoken to is half the
battle--a half, moreover, which is essential to there being any
battle at all. It takes two people to say a thing--a sayee as well
as