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CHAPTER XXI.

THE FIRST LANGUAGE NECESSARILY TAUGHT.

SEE how speedily the deaf-mute learns to talk to himself in the finger alphabet with a kind of shorthand rapidity while actively thinking, and how he even dreams of things as it were on the fingers, as they move with their instructed association also in sleep. But by a still more laborious and patient skill the deaf-mute has been taught actually to speak with distinctness and correct accent as if capable of hearing. This striking triumph over natural defect is achieved by instructing the deaf-mute to observe and imitate the movements of the organs employed in speaking. Those organs and their actions are so carefully demonstrated by the example of the skilled teacher, that the pupil is by slow degrees at length able with quick eye so to catch the movements of the lips and chest of the speaker as to learn language by sight instead of hearing. The skill necessarily exercised in teaching such persons thus, so to say, to see words and correctly to express themselves is marvellous. The writer for several successive days. held long conversations of a very mixed character with a lady thus instructed, and she so perfectly caught his

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words by sight, and replied with such correctness of modulation and connectedness of utterance, as to strike him so powerfully with the evident force of her intelligence that he had not the slightest suspicion that she was deaf, though afterwards informed that she was not only deaf but born deaf, and had never heard a single sound.

This lady's intellect had actually been, so to say, developed with the use of words acquired only by sight. Until thus taught, her mind-power of course appeared as defective as her means of communication, for the reasoning faculties are fully exercised only in connection with language. Hence, in Hebrew idiom, to think is to speak to one's own heart. As William Humboldt says, 'Man is man by speech.' Therefore, it follows that He who gave the first man his rational faculties also provided means by which they were called into proper exercise, that is by imparting to him speech by actual instruction through the natural channel-the ear. Man could speak when he found there was speech. And where could man have found this fulfilment of his reason had not He whose thoughts are uttered in creation also by some means actually addressed man's ear in words, as signs of things, and of moods of thought in relation to things? He who has so lovingly arranged our relationships, that by an imitative sympathy the young child gradually catches the significance of syllables breathed from loving lips, and echoes back at length the utterance of thought and feeling in kindred accents, could not leave His first created human child-a child

indeed in knowledge of facts, though mature in faculty of mind-without a voice and presence to evince a love fully equal to the exigence He had Himself made. The organisation by which thought becomes articulate in words is naturally excited into action by the impression of language on the ear; and if the speech-organs are in a normal state, the power of speaking follows on hearing speech, as if by an involuntary reflex action, almost as readily as smiles awaken smiles: soul answers soul, as face answers face. Thus, as soon as a child is capable of fixing attention sufficiently to discover that. words are employed as signs of feeling, it begins to imitate them; and it is one of the most charming things in nature to listen to a young child reiterating with delight a new word which it has learned to utter as a matter of feeling, even though without any distinct ideas attached to it. To speak it and to play with it is a power and a joy. At length words with their meanings thus take possession of the memory in such a happy manner that we think in words. The importance of impressing and eliciting the mind of childhood in conversation, with an easy and pleasant familiarity which shall convey pure thoughts in pure language, cannot be too strongly insisted on, since the earliest impressions are those which form the basis of the future. character, as respects both the heart and the intellect.

We always speak to our own inner ear while we think, because we really acquire both thoughts and words together through the ear at first. Hence, what is clearly spoken reaches the understanding and the feel

ings more readily than what is read in silence, until we have attained such a facility in reading that the written or printed words find a kind of echo in the mind, and become as if audible to our understandings. In fixing words upon the memory, we repeat them to ourselves till we get them, as we say, by heart; and, in endeavouring rightly to clothe our thoughts with words, we inwardly speak as if listening to our own utterance. So completely are thinking and language associated, that in certain conditions of mind we think aloud; and were it not for the social necessity of keeping our current thoughts to ourselves, we should be apt to be always prattling to our own spirits, like children rejoicing to play as in the company of their own voices, when debarred for a time from fellowship with others.

'Man is man by speech,' and to condemn a man to silence is to extinguish his manhood. Even a monk of La Trappe, if he talk not in his dreams with angels and with saints, can only become mad by communion with his own mind; and that habitual criminals should become insane or idiotic in solitary dumb confinement, where even the jailor dare not speak, is but the natural result of leaving men to improve themselves by thinking, with nothing better than themselves to think of. Even brutes, roaming the wilds of nature for their food, cheer each other with voices, and would die without a sense of fellowship with creatures of some sort; how, then, should a man, endowed with reason on purpose for converse through eye and hand, and attitude and

utterance, with kindred beings, feel other than a blank existence in a world, to make him only conscious of his wants, without another to look into his face responsive to his soul and draw him from himself?

If all the conditions of human intellect were not met with their appropriate provision in the first man, he could have been nothing but an incongruity in creation. Without words, his intellect and reason would have remained dormant; and, therefore, as surely as there is a faculty in human nature that corresponds with the tones and modulations of speech, which would have remained utterly useless in a dumb life, so surely must words, with the Word in them, have addressed that first human soul to awaken the full feeling of its own humanity. To make man was to include speech as a gift, to be willingly received.

The acquisition of language in the child is as slow as its own mental development, and as language is necessary to a process of thought, the increase of thoughts as well as ideas is one with the increase of our vocabulary; therefore, that man should be taught language was necessary to his completion as man. In a man complete in all his faculties, the lessons in language must have been equally complete. A perfect man demanded a perfect language. Less than he needed could not have been given, and what he needed who could give but He who created him? But a perfect language must have been, in all points, expressly adapted both to convey all ideas which the human mind could possibly receive concerning the nature of