there by a paltry association or two, while it is left for after-development to fill them out to more nearly their true value. The child is ludicrously unable at first to know what is meant by God, or good, or duty, or conscience, or the world, even as sun and moon, weight and color, involve infinitely more than he has an inkling of; but the word, in each case, gives him a definite nucleus, about which more and ever more knowledge may be grouped; he makes a constant approach toward the right conception, even if it be one to which no human wisdom has yet attained. For the condition of the child, after all, differs only in degree from that of the man, and in no very great degree. Our words are too often signs for crude and hasty, for indefinite and indefinable, generalizations. We use them accurately enough for the ordinary practical purposes of life; and most of mankind go through life content with that, letting instruction and experience bring what improvement they may; few have the independence, even if they had the time and ability, to test every name to the bottom, drawing precise limits about each. For the most part, we are loose thinkers and loose talkers, misled into error in an infinity of cases by our ignorance of the terms we glibly use. But even the wisest and most thorough of us is met by the impossibility of giving to speech a preciseness of definition which should exclude misunderstanding and unsound reasoning-especially as to matters of subjective import, where it is hard to bring conceptions to a sharp test. And so the differences of view, even of philosophers, take on the form of verbal questions, controversies hinge on the interpretation of a term, and every writer who aims at exactness has to begin with definitions-to which, then, he finds it impossible to be faithful; some antagonist

or successor, perhaps, shows him to have failed of exactness at a critical point, and tumbles into ruins the whole magnificent structure of fancied truth which he had erected.

We see from all this, it may be observed, how far language is from being identical with thought. It is so just as much as the mathematician's figures and symbols are identical with his conceptions of mathematical quantities and relations; and not one whit more. It is, as we noticed at the outset, the means of expression of thought, an instrumentality auxiliary to the processes of thought. An acquired language is something imposed from without upon the methods and results of mental action. It does, indeed, as a frame-work imposed upon a growing and developing body, give shape to that which underlies it, determining the "inner form;" and yet it is everywhere loose and adjustable. While working by it, the mind also works under it, shifting and adapting, changing and improving its classifications, working in new knowledge and better insight. Thus far we have emphasized the passive receptive work of the mind in dealing with language, because that is, especially at the outset, the bulk of its work; in the following chapters we have to take account of its more independent and creative activity.

But nothing that has been said is to be misconstrued into meaning that the mind is not, in all its work, essentially an active and creative force, or that it gets by instruction a faculty which it did not before possess. All that is implied in the power to speak belongs indefeasibly to man, as a part of his natural endowment; but this power is guided in its development, and determined in the result it attains, by the example and in

struction of other minds, already developed. It does nothing which it might not have done alone, under favoring circumstances, and with sufficient time-the life-time, namely, of a few score or hundred generations; but for what it actually does, both as regards the how much and the how, it has to thank those about it. Its acquisition of language is a part of its education, in just the same manner and degree as the other parts of education.

CHAPTER III.

THE CONSERVATIVE AND ALTERATIVE FORCES IN LAN

GUAGE.

Other side of life of language; growth and change; question of its mode and cause. Illustrative passage from oldest English, or AngloSaxon; exposition of its differences from modern English: differences of pronunciation; abbreviations and extensions; changes of meaning; of phraseology and construction. Classification of lin. guistic changes.

We have seen in the foregoing chapter that the individual learns his language, obtaining the spoken signs of which it is made up by imitation from the lips of others, and shaping his conceptions in accordance with them. It is thus that every existing language is maintained in life; if this process of tradition, by teaching and learning, were to cease in any tongue upon earth, that tongue would at once become extinct.

But this is only one side of the life of language. If it were all, then each spoken dialect would remain the same from age to age. In virtue of it, each does, in fact, remain nearly the same; this is what maintains the prevailing identity of speech so long as the identity of the speaking community is maintained—aside from those great revolutions in their circumstances which now and then lead whole communities to adopt the speech of another people. This, then, is the grand

conservative force in the history of language; if there were no disturbing and counteracting forces to interfere with its workings, every generation to the end of time would speak as its predecessors had done.

Such, however, as every one knows, is very far from being the case. All living language is in a condition of constant growth and change. It matters not to what part of the world we may go: if we can find for any existing speech a record of its predecessor at some time distant from it in the past, we shall perceive that the two are different—and more or less different, mainly in proportion to the distance of time that separates them. It is so with the Romanic tongues of southern Europe, as compared with their common progenitor the Latin; so with the modern dialects of India, as compared with the recorded forms of speech intermediate between them and the Sanskrit, or with the Sanskrit itself; and not less with the English of our day, as compared with that of other days. An English speaker even of only a century ago would find not a little in our every-day speech which he would understand with difficulty, or not at all; if we were to hear Shakespeare read aloud a scene from one of his own works, it would be in no small part unintelligible (by reason, especially, of the great difference between his pronunciation and ours); Chaucer's English (500 years ago) we master by dint of good solid application, and with considerable help from a glossary; and King Alfred's English (1000 years ago), which we call Anglo-Saxon, is not easier to us than German. All this, in spite of the fact that no one has gone about of set purpose to alter English speech, in any generation among the thirty or forty that have lived between us and Alfred, any more than in our own. Here, then, is another side of the life of