pprehend. By the help
of this device, and in proportion as they have perfected it, living
beings feel ever with great definiteness, and hence formulate their
feelings in thought with more and more precision. The higher
evolution of thought has reacted on the nervous system, and the
consequent higher evolution of the nervous system has again reacted
upon thought. These things are as power and desire, or supply and
demand, each one of which is continually outstripping, and being in
turn outstripped by the other; but, in spite of their close
connection and interaction, power is not desire, nor demand supply.
Language is a device evolved sometimes by leaps and bounds, and
sometimes exceedingly slowly, whereby we help ourselves alike to
greater ease, precision, and complexity of thought, and also to more
convenient interchange of thought among ourselves. Thought found
rude expression, which gradually among other forms assumed that of
words. These reacted upon thought, and thought again on them, but
thought is no more identical with words than words are with the
separate letters of which they are composed.

To sum up, then, and to conclude. I would ask you to see the
connection between words and ideas as in the first instance
arbitrary. No doubt in some cases an imitation of the cry of some
bird or wild beast would suggest the name that should be attached to
it; occasionally the sound of an operation such as grinding may have
influenced the choice of the letters g, r, as the root of many words
that denote a grinding, grating, grasping, crushing action; but I
understand that the number of words due to direct imitation is
comparatively few in number, and that they have been mainly coined
as the result of connections so far-fetched and fanciful as to
amount practically to no connection at all. Once chosen, however,
they were adhered to for a considerable time among the dwellers in
any given place, so as to become acknowledged as the vulgar tongue,
and raise readily in the mind of the inhabitants of that place the
ideas with which they had been artificially associated.

As regards our being able to think and reason without words, the
Duke of Argyll has put the matter as soundly as I have yet seen it
stated. "It seems to me," he wrote, "quite certain that we can and
do constantly think of things without thinking of any sound or word
as designating them. Language seems to me to be necessary for the
progress of thought,