en abstract ideas and sounds, the mere signs of thought, that
strike the ear, than there is between the same ideas and signs
addressed only to the eye.

The point most debated for centuries has been, not whether there
was any primitive oral language, but what that language was. Some
literalists have indeed argued from the Mosaic narrative that because
the Creator, by one supernatural act, with the express purpose to
form separate peoples, had divided all tongues into their present
varieties, and could, by another similar exercise of power, obliterate
all but one which should be universal, the fact that he had not
exercised that power showed it not to be his will that any man to
whom a particular speech had been given should hold intercourse with
another miraculously set apart from him by a different speech. By this
reasoning, if the study of a foreign tongue was not impious, it was
at least clear that the primitive language had been taken away as a
disciplinary punishment, as the Paradisiac Eden had been earlier lost,
and that, therefore, the search for it was as fruitless as to attempt
the passage of the flaming sword. More liberal Christians have been
disposed to regard the Babel story as allegorical, if not mythical,
and have considered it to represent the disintegration of tongues
out of one which was primitive. In accordance with the advance of
linguistic science they have successively shifted back the postulated
primitive tongue from Hebrew to Sanscrit, then to Aryan, and now seek
to evoke from the vasty deeps of antiquity the ghosts of other rival
claimants for precedence in dissolution. As, however, the languages of
man are now recognized as extremely numerous, and as the very sounds
of which these several languages are composed are so different that
the speakers of some are unable to distinguish with the ear certain
sounds in others, still less able to reproduce them, the search for
one common parent language is more difficult than was supposed by
mediaeval ignorance.

The discussion is now, however, varied by the suggested possibility
that man at some time may have existed without any oral language. It
is conceded by some writers that mental images or representations can
be formed without any connection with sound, and may at least serve
for thought, though not for expression. It is certain that concepts,
however formed, can be expressed by other means than sound. One mode
of this expression is by gesture, a