DEAF-MUTES.
In studying intellectual development prior to speech, the group of deaf-mutes is sufficiently distinct from those which we have been considering. Animals do not communicate all their secrets, and leave much to be conjectured. Children reveal only a transitory state, a moment in the total evolution. Deaf-mutes (those at least with whom we are dealing) are adults, comparable as such to other men, like them, save in the absence of speech and of what results from it. They have reached a stable mental state. Moreover, those who are instructed at a late period, who learn a language of analytical signs, i. e., who speak with their fingers, or emit the sounds which they read upon the lips of others, are able to disclose their anterior mental state. It is possible to compare the same man with himself, before and after the acquisition of an instrument of analysis. Subjective and objective psychology combine to enlighten us.
The intellectual level of such persons is very low (we shall return to this): still their inferiority has been exaggerated, especially in the last century, by virtue of the axiom, it is impossible to think without words. Discussion of this antique aphorism is unnecessary; in its rigorous form it finds hardly any advocates of note.[29] Since thought is synonymous with comparing, abstracting, generalising, judging, reasoning, i. e., with transcending in any way the purely sensorial and affective life, the true question is not, Do we think without words? but, To what extent can we think without words? Otherwise expressed, we have to fix the upper limit of the logic of images, which evidently reaches its apogee in adult deaf-mutes. Further, even in this last case, thought without language does not attain its full development. The deaf-mute who is left without special education, and who lives with men who have the use of speech, is in a less favorable situation than if he forms a society with his equals. Gérando, and others after him, remarked that deaf-mutes in their native state communicate easily with one another. He enumerates a long series of ideas, which they express in their mimicry, and gestures, and many of these expressions are identical in all countries.
“Children of about seven years old who have not yet been educated, make use of an astonishing number of gestures and very rapid signs in communicating with each other. They understand each other naturally with great facility.... No one teaches them the initial signs, which are, in great part, unaltered imitative movements.”
The study of this spontaneous, natural language is the sole process by which we can penetrate to their psychology, and determine their mode of thought. Like all other languages, it comprises a vocabulary and a syntax. The vocabulary consists in gestures which designate objects, qualities, acts; these correspond to our substantives and verbs. The syntax consists in the successive order of these gestures and their regular arrangement; it translates the movement of thought and the effort towards analysis.
I. Vocabulary—Gérando collected about a hundred and fifty signs, created by deaf-mutes living in isolation or with their fellows.[30] A few of these may be cited as examples:
Child—Infantile gesture, of taking the breast, or being carried, or rocking in the cradle.
Ox—Imitation of the horns, or the heavy tread, or the jaws chewing the cud.
Dog—Movement of the head in barking.
Horse—Movements of the ears, or two figures riding horseback on another, etc.
Bird—Imitation of the beak with two fingers of the left hand, while the other feeds it; or simulation of flight.
Bread—Signs of being hungry, of cutting, and of carrying to the mouth.
Water—Exhibition of saliva, imitation of a rower, or of a man pumping; accompanied always by the sign of drinking.
Letter (missive)—Gestures of writing and of sealing, or of unsealing and reading.
Monkeys, cocks, various trades (carpenter, shoemaker, etc.) all designated by imitative gestures. For sleep, sickness, health, etc., they employ an appropriate gesture.
For interrogation: expression of two contradictory propositions, and undecided glance towards the person addressed. This is rather a case of syntax than of vocabulary; but a few signs may be further indicated for some notions more abstract than the preceding.
Large—Raise the hand and look up.
Small—Contrary gestures.
Bad—Simulate tasting, and make grimace.
Number—Indicate with the help of the fingers; high numbers, rapid opening of the hand several times in succession.
Buy—gesture of counting money, of giving with one hand, and taking with the other.
Lose—Pretend to drop an object, and hunt for it in vain.
Forget—Pass the hand quickly across the forehead with a shrug of the shoulders.
Love—Hold the hand on the heart (universal gesture).
Hate—Same gesture with sign of negation.
Past—Throw the hand over the shoulder several times in succession.
Future—Indicate a distant object with the hand, repeated imitation of lying down in bed and getting up again.
It does not need much reflexion to see that all these signs are abstractions as well as imitations. Among the different characters of an object, the deaf-mute chooses one that he imitates by a gesture, and which represents the total object. Herein he proceeds exactly like the man who speaks. The difference is that he fixes the abstract by an attitude of the body instead of by a word. The primitive Aryan who denominated the horse, the sun, the moon, etc., the rapid one, the shining one, the measurer (of months), did not act otherwise; for him also, a chosen characteristic represents the total object. There is a fundamental identity in the two cases; thus justifying what was said above: abstraction is a necessary operation of the mind, at least in man; he must abstract, because he must simplify.
The inferiority of these imitative signs consists in their being often vague, with a tendency to the opposite sense; moreover, since they are never detached completely from the object or the act which they figure, and cannot attain to the independence of the word, they are but very imperfect instruments of substitution.
II. Syntax—The mere fact of the existence of a syntax in the language of the deaf-mutes proves that they possess a commencement of analysis, i. e., that thought does not remain in the rudimentary state. This point has been carefully studied by different authors: Scott, Tylor, Romanes,[31] who assign to it the following characteristics:
1. It is a syntax of position. There are no “parts of speech,” i. e., terms having a fixed linguistic function: substantive, adjective, verb, etc. The terms (gestures) borrow their grammatical value from the place which they occupy in the series, and the relations between the terms are not expressed.
2. It is a fundamental principle that the signs are disposed in the order of their relative importance, everything superfluous being omitted.
3. The subject is placed before the attribute, the object (complement) before the action, and, most frequently, the modified part before the modifying.
Some examples will serve for the better comprehension of the ordinary procedure of this syntax. To explain the proposition: After running, I went to sleep, the order of gesture would be: to run, me, finished, to sleep.—My father gave me an apple: apple, father, me, give.—The active state is distinguished from the passive by its position: I struck Thomas with a stick; me, Thomas, strike, stick. The Abbé Sicard, on asking a deaf-mute, Who created God? obtained the answer: God created nothing. Though he had no doubt as to the meaning of this inversion, he asked the control question, Who makes shoes? Answer, shoes makes cobbler.
The dry, bare character of this syntax is evident: the terms are juxtaposed without relation; it expresses the strictest necessity only; it is the replica of a sterile, indistinct mode of thought.
Since we are endeavoring by its aid to fix an intellectual level, it is not without interest to compare it with a syntax that is frequent among the weak in intellect. “These do not decline or conjugate; they employ a vague substantive, the infinitive alone, or the past participle. They leave out articles, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, reject prepositions, employ nouns instead of pronouns. They call themselves “father,” “mother,” “Charles,” and refer to other people by indeterminate substantives, such as man, woman, sister, doctor, etc. They invert the regular order of substantives and adjectives.”[32] Although this is a case of mental regression, hence not rigorously comparable with a mind that is sane but little developed, the mental resemblance between the two syntaxes, and especially the absence of all expression of relations deserves to be signalised, because it cannot be the result of a fortuitous coincidence. It is the work of intellectual inferiority and of relative discontinuity of thought.
There is little to say about numeration in deaf-mutes. When untrained, they can count up to ten with the help of their fingers, like many primitive people. Moreover (according to Sicard and Gérando), they make use of notches upon a piece of wood or some other visible mark.
To conclude, their mental feebleness, known since the days of antiquity by Aristotle, by the Roman law which dispossessed them of part of their civil rights, later on by many philosophers who refused even to concede them memory, arises from their inaptitude to transcend the inferior forms of abstraction and kindred operations. In regard to the events of ordinary life, in the domain of the concrete (admitting, as is not always done, that there are individual varieties, some being intelligent, and others stupid), deaf-mutes are sufficiently apt to seize and to comprehend the practical connexion between complex things.[33] But the world of higher concepts, moral, religious, cosmological, is closed to them. Observations to this effect are abundant, though here again—as must be insisted on—they reveal great individual differences.
Thus, a deaf-mute whose friends had tried to inculcate in him a few religious notions, believed before he came under instruction that the Bible was a book that had been printed in heaven by workmen of Herculean strength. This was the sole interpretation he gave to the gestures of his parents, who endeavored to make him understand that the Bible contains a revelation, coming from an all-powerful God who is in heaven.[34] Another who was taken regularly to church on Sunday, and exhibited exemplary piety, only recognised in this ceremony an act of obedience to the clergy. There are many similar cases on record. Others on the contrary, seek to inquire into, and to penetrate, the nature of things. W. James[35] has published the autobiography of two deaf-mutes who became professors, one at the asylum of Washington, the other in California.
The principal interest attaching to the first is the spontaneous appearance of the moral sense. After stealing small sums of money from the till of a merchant, he accidentally took a gold coin. Although ignorant of its value, he was seized with scruples, feeling “that it was not for a poor man like him, and that he had stolen too much.” He got rid of it as best he could, and never began again.
The other biography—from which we make a few brief extracts—may be taken as the type of an intelligent and curious deaf-mute. He was not placed in an institution until he was eleven years old. During his childhood he accompanied his father on long expeditions, and his curiosity was aroused as to the origin of things: of animals and vegetables, of the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars (at eight or nine years). He began to understand (from five years) how children were descended from parents, and how animals were propagated. This may have been the origin of the question he put to himself: whence came the first man, first animal, first plant, etc. He supposed at first that primæval man was born from the trunk of a tree, then rejected this hypothesis as absurd, then sought in various directions without finding. He respected the sun and moon, believed that they went under the earth in the West, and traversed a long tunnel to reappear in the East, etc. One day, on hearing violent peals of thunder, he interrogated his brother, who pointed to the sky, and simulated the zigzag of the lightning with his finger; whence he concluded for the existence of a celestial giant whose voice was thunder. Puerile as they may be, are these cosmogonic, theological conceptions inferior to those of the aborigines of Oceanica and of the savage regions of South America, who, nevertheless, have a vocal idiom, a rudimentary language?
To sum up. That which dominates among the better gifted, is the creative imagination: it is the culminating point of their intellectual development. Their primitive curiosity does not seem inferior to that of average humanity; but since they cannot get beyond representation by images they lack an instrument of intellectual progress.