The Origin of Human Reason

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. REASON AND LANGUAGE. Mr. Romanes having in the first section of his work (first five chapters) assumed that animals have perceptions (not merely sensitive affections) similar to our own, tries in his next section (chapters v.-ix.) to show that there is no essential difference between the language of man and that of animals. He tries to show this by representing not only that words, but that special modes of expressing them, were necessary antecedents for self-conscious expression on the one hand, and on the other, that the brute creation by sounds and gestures can express ideas, and truly communicate a knowledge of the facts to which their ideas relate. In his fifth chapter, on Language, Mr. Romanes does us the honour to adopt our own classification of its various categories, adding a seventh category for allkinds of written signs which we willingly adopt for greater clearness, and to avoid all divergence which does not seem to us absolutely necessary. Taken from our Lessons from Nature, p. 83. It may be convenient to our readers to present here the same classification as more recently expressed by us ( On Truth, p. 235), which is as follows: ? Language consists of two kinds?the language of feeling, and the language of the intellect. Of the mere language of the emotions and of feeling we may have? (1) Sounds which are neither articulate nor rational, such as cries of pain, or the murmur of a mother to her infant. (2) Sounds which are articulate but not rational, such as manyoaths and exclamations, and the words of certain idiots, who will repeat, without comprehending, every phrase they hear. Of these seven categories we regard the first three as being common to us and to animals, and hold that the last four?as external manifestations of...