The disorders of speech.

  • Wyllie, John, 1914-
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disorders of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    196/520 (page 180)
    mitting of no explanation. Whatever may have been the primi- tive origin of words, they are, in their essential nature, symbols. They are suggestive of percepts, in virtue of the law of associa- tion; and they are so subtly suggestive that a long train of thought expounded by a speaker can be called up to the minds of his hearers in instantaneous response, while he is in the act of speaking. These word-symbols are so superior to all others in their power of calling up percepts, that, in the development of written characters, the final triumph was attained only when the sounds of speech were at last analysed into their component letter-elements, and a written character was given to each of these. The visible writing then for the first time accurately suggested to the mind the audible sound, in virtue of the wonderful law of association. Written words are thus the visible symbols of sound symbols. In this respect they are so efficient that, when we read the words upon a written or printed page, they almost seem, to the imagina- tion, to sound audibly in our ears. So efficiently has language linked itself to thought, that many have difficulty in conceiving of thought as capable of existing at all without at least a mental embodiment of it in language. Prof. Max Miiller even goes so far as to say, There is no thought without words, as little as there are words without thought.1 Wfoat a strange definition, says Darwin, must here be given of the word thought. It seems pretty clear that if the disputants upon this question agreed to attach the same meanings to the terms employed in their argu- ments, they would soon come near to a general agreement. Many eminent authorities, as we have seen, hold that speech itself was invented by thought; and truly a man must be a master of words before his best thoughts can be expressed in language that is worthy of them. Some hold that thought can never be adequately expressed, but can only be suggested. Thus, according to Du Ponceau,2 Thought is vast as the air; it embraces far more than languages can express, or rather languages express nothing; — they only make our thoughts leap out in electric sparks from the speaker to the listener. A single word suggests a crowd of ideas which the 1 Quoted by Darwin, Descent of Man, note to p. 89. Quoted by Farrar, op. eft., p. 263.