CHAPTER XXVI.

Language as the Distinguishing Characteristic of the Human Being.

§ 136. LANGUAGE fixes the knowledge of objects in universals. Each word represents an indefinite number of particular objects, actions, or relations. The word oak stands for all oaks-present, past, or future. No being can use language, much less create language, unless it has learned to conceive as well as perceive-learned to see all objects as individuals belonging to classes, and incidentally recognised its own individuality. All human beings possess language. Even deaf and dumb human beings invent and use gestures with as definite meaning as words, each gesture denoting a class with a possible infinite number of special applications.

Language is the means of distinguishing between the brute and the human-between the animal soul, which has continuity only in the species (which pervades its being in the form of instinct), and the human soul, which is immortal, and possessed of a capacity to be educated. There is no language until the mind can perceive general types of existence; mere proper names or mere exclamations or cries do not constitute language. All words that belong to language are significative-they express or 99 mean something; hence they are conventional symbols, and not mere individual designations. Language arises

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only through common consent, and is not an invention of one individual. It is a product of individuals acting together as a community, and hence its use implies the ascent of the individual into the species. By this expression is meant that the individual in his particularity becomes conscious of his ego as producing cause-as self-active-hence the individual recognises himself as a universal or species, in recognising himself as an independent, original cause of his acts and deeds, his thoughts, his feelings; for his feelings are his reactions against alien being. He is the common term to all his variety, and hence in this sense species as well as individual. Unless an individual could ascend into the species, he could not understand language. To know words and their meaning is an activity of divine significance; it denotes the formation of universals in the mind-the ascent above the here and now of the senses, and above the representation of mere images, to the activity which grasps together the general conception of objects, and thus reaches beyond what is transient and variable. Doubtless the nobler species of animals possess not only sense-perception, but a considerable degree of the power of representation. They are not only able to recollect, but to imagine or fancy to some extent, as is evidenced by their dreams. But that animals do not generalize sufficiently to form for themselves a new objective world of types and general concepts, we have a sufficient evidence in the fact that they do not use words, or invent conventional symbols. With the activity of the symbol-making form of representation, which we have named Memory, and whose evidence is the invention and use of language, the true form of individuality is attained, and each individual human being, as mind, may be said to be the entire species. Inasmuch as he can form universals in his mind, he can realize the most abstract thought, and he is conscious. Consciousness begins when one can seize the pure universal in the presence of immediate objects here and now. The sense-perception of the mere animal, therefore, differs from that of the human being in this: The human being knows himself as sub

ject that sees the object, while the animal sees the object, but does not separate himself, as universal, from the special act of seeing. To know that I am I is to know the ego, the most general of objects, and to carry out abstraction to its very last degree, for what is of a higher degree of generality than the ego as determiner of itself, as subject but not yet as object? It is the power to become any or all thoughts, feelings, and volitions, but as subject it is not any one of these as yet. And yet this is what all human beings know, young or old, savage or civilized. The savage invents and uses language-an act of the species, but which the species can not do, without the participation of the individual. It should be carefully noted that this activity of generalization which produces language, and distinguishes the human from the brute, is not the generalization of the activity of thought, so called. It is the preparation for thought. These general types of things are the things which thought deals with. Thought does not deal with mere immediate objects of the senses; it deals rather with the objects which are indicated by words-i. e., general objects. Some writers would have us suppose that we do not arrive at general notions except by the process of classification and abstraction, in the mechanical manner that they lay down for this purpose. The fact is, that the mind has arrived at these general ideas in the process of learning language. In infancy, most children have learned such words as is, existence, being, nothing, motion, cause, change, I, you, he, etc. They do not contain all the experience that they will contain late in life, but they are already used as general terms. At the very beginning the child uses the third figure of the syllogism in each discrimination of a difference, and makes a definition of the new type which will include an infinite number of examples if they can be furnished. The definition will also do equally well for the one specimen under observation, if there are no more.

§ 137. Language is therefore the sign by which we can recognise the arrival of the soul at this stage

of development on the way to complete self-activity. Hence language is the evidence of immortal individuality. In order to use language, it must be able not only to act for itself, but to act wholly upon itself. It must not only perceive things by the senses, but accompany its perceiving by an inner perception of the act of perceiving (and thus be its own environment). This perception of the act and process of perceiving is, as has been shown, the recognition of classes, species, and genera—the universal processes underlying the existence of the particular.

§ 138. Language in this sense involves conventional signs, and hence, as has been remarked above, is not an immediate expression of feeling, like the cries of animals. The immediate expression of feeling (which is only a reaction) does not become language, even when it accompanies recollection or free reproduction-nor until it accompanies memory and conception or the seeing of the particular in the general. When it can be shown that a species of animals use conventional signs in communication one with another, we shall be able to infer their immortality, because we shall have evidence of their freedom from sense-perception and environment sufficient to create for themselves their own occasion for activity. They would then be shown to react not merely against their

environment, but against their own action; hence they would involve both action and reaction, self and environment within each self. They would in that case have selves, and their selves exist for themselves, and hence they would have self-identity.

Take away self-identity, and still there may be persistence of self-activity; but it is only generic-that of the species and not of the individual. The species lives, the individual dies in such cases. If the same individual lived on in another life, it would only be unconscious transmigration. The animal soul could not remember its former life, because it did not know itself in the form of moral feeling. It did not reach a sense of moral responsibility, and hence did not feel itself as an independent cause, originating changes in the world.

§ 139. These distinctions of self-activity or of spontaneous energy which have been pointed out in the stages of nutrition, feeling, sense-perception, and recollection are often overlooked, or are accounted as the direct product of the environment, and not admitted as the reactions of individual energy. The science that ignores the manifestation of energy in the reaction of the individual assumes that all the energy is in the environment, although the obvious fact is that there is energy on each side-on that of the individual and on that of the environment.

140. In these lower stages of the activity of individual energy we have individuality that can not