Speech is, in a practical sense, more than the mere instrument of thought. It is so far an essential part of the faculty or function of “thinking,” that little beyond a simple recognition of the impressions received through the sensations can be accomplished without the aid of language—at least in one of its elementary forms. Thought and speech are so connected, that it is impossible to separate them. It is not a necessity that speech should be articulate and audible. It may be set in any key, from the loudest voice-utterance to the mere self-conscious conception of certain sounds, as when a person thinks the pronunciation of a word, clearly marking its peculiarities in his own mind, but in a manner imperceptible to any one else. If the performance of this act—pronouncing a word in thought—be closely examined, it will be found that there is an impulse, as it were, to move the lips and tongue, but so restrained, that commonly no obvious muscular action takes place. There are exceptions to this limitation which not only prove the rule, but show how intimately thoughts and actions are connected.
In sleep, during dreams, and in the case of some persons, especially the aged and feeble-minded, when awake, the lips move with nearly every thought, though no audible sound is emitted. When the restraint, normally exercised, is less forcible, or the impulse stronger, the thinker involuntarily speaks his thoughts; and comical stories are told of persons who have betrayed their real sentiments inopportunely by this process of thought-speaking. Faults in speech are, therefore, likely to be due to defects in thought, the two faculties being mutually dependent; or the reverse may be the case, and impediments and errors of speech react mischievously on the mind. Much interest and importance attach to the conclusion arrived at with respect to the real cause of the hesitation or error which marks the utterance of any particular sufferer.
First, make quite sure that it is not ordinary confusion of thought, consequent upon a slovenly habit of thinking or the miserable practice of allowing thoughts to drift, which has produced the faltering or mistake that occasions anxiety. Many persons permit their minds to become overrun with tangled scrub, so that nothing short of the most acute or agile powers of way-finding can carry a thought safely through the domain, and then they complain of the difficulty of thought-driving! Clear away the jungle that renders the mind impassable, and thought will no longer be found to wander by circuitous paths, and too often be irrecoverably lost. The only measure by which this self-improvement can be accomplished is one of culture; the degree of labor required will vary from that of a settler in the backwoods, who finds it necessary to clear and dig every square yard of the land he would convert to useful purposes, to the ordinary weeding and breaking the clods which may suffice to repair the results of a single season of neglect. In any event, however great or small the task may be, the cultivation must be accomplished, or this, the most troublesome and inconvenient cause of speech-blundering, a weedy, tangled, and lumpy state of mind can not be remedied. We are not now concerned with faults of the motor apparatus or mechanism of the voice; and, excluding these, it maybe asserted that, of all causes of hesitation or error in speech which lie, so to say, deeper than the surface, the neglect of self-control in thought is the most common and, in many senses, the most mischievous.
If a person who has previously been an easy and fluent speaker begins to hesitate in his utterance, there is generally reason for anxiety. Supposing the general health to be good, and nothing specially notable to have happened in the life of the individual which might have produced what is commonly called a “shock” to the mind or the nervous system, there is probably some physical or mental disorder in the background, to which attention should be directed. If the cause be physical, the attempt to speak will generally be accompanied by trembling or twitching in the muscles of the mouth, the lips, the nose, or the jaw. Should any such symptom be perceptible to friends, or self-detected, it will be wise to seek medical advice without delay, because it may be produced by conditions the most important, or comparatively trivial, and no one except a skilled practitioner can determine from which of several sources the agitation springs; whether it indicates mere weakness or serious disease.
Commonly, when there is none of this trembling or twitching, and sometimes even when these are present, the hesitation is mental. Either the mind is too busy with a crowd of thoughts to maintain proper command of the word-finding function, or that faculty is so enfeebled that it seems incapable of any reasonable activity in the service of the will. It is quick enough in the response to influences which have no right to usurp control, but when the master-spirit of thought, the judgment ruling by the will, issues a mandate, the faculty is powerless to obey. This comes of a riotous or vicious habit of thinking. The mind-weakness which results from the terrible error of mental dissipation, whatever the direction in which the thoughts are permitted to disport themselves, is one of the most perilous conditions of exhaustion into which the faculties of a still sound brain can be allowed to sink. It is a state of which the mind in danger is itself conscious long before any indication becomes recognizable by others. Hesitation in speech is one of the earliest external symptoms which indicate this malady, but when that occurs, the weakening power has generally been in secret operation for a length of time sufficient to accomplish serious mischief. It is not, as a matter of fact, too late to mend matters; but the individual who has permitted his mind to pass into this condition has incurred a great peril.
This is a point on which it is necessary to speak plainly. Habits of musing, brooding, or conjuring up mental pictures and scenes in which the thinker is himself an actor, and into which he gradually brings his faculties of imagination, and even his sensations, are the overlooked, the unconfessed, perhaps the unrecognized, causes of by far the larger number of attacks of “insanity.” And; though it seems cruel to say so, the great majority of poor creatures, especially the younger and middle-aged persons, who with wrecked minds drag out weary years in lunatic asylums have themselves to thank for the experience. Any one of a score of existing causes may overbalance the mind or occasion the outbreak and determine the particular form the mind-malady ultimately assumes; but the predisposing cause which renders the disaster possible and entails all the evil consequences is the morbid habit of allowing the thoughts to wander uncontrolled, at first innocently, then in forbidden paths, and finally wherever the haunting demon of the inner life, a man’s worse nature, his evil self, may lure or drive them!
The habit of preoccupation which sometimes shows itself by hesitation in speech is less dangerous than weakness, but it should not be neglected. Having “too much to think about” is not so bad as having exhausted the power of voluntary thought, but it is an evil. “Too much” does not always mean more than the mind ought to be able to receive and deal with. It is quite as often too much for the defective discipline of thought maintained, as really more than a due quantity for the mind engaged if the business of thinking were properly conducted. There is a marked tendency in modern education—and it increases each year—to neglect the training of minds. The subjects which were principally useful for purposes of mental development and exercise are being eliminated because they do not commend themselves to the commercial instinct of the day as producing marketable information. Greek, Latin, mathematics, and the like, are not possessed of a high value in the mart of commerce or on ’Change, and they are therefore lightly estimated.
We are beginning to reap the fruit of this time-serving policy in education, and it takes the form of a general break-down of young minds when set to any duty which involves dealing with a crowd of thoughts at once. The untrained and disorderly thinker can not choose his words, he has “no time” to arrange them, and can seldom find them when wanted. He is “thinking of something else.” It has come to be thought rather clever to be “abstracted,” and “so engrossed,” “with many things to think about!” These are the pitiful excuses offered by a generation of incompetent and confused thinkers when their speech betrays them. A clever talker will often bridge over the gap between two right words in place of interposing a wrong one. It is amusing and, in a certain sense, interesting to notice how admirably this is done by self-possessed though confused speakers; but the evil of disorderly thought lurks behind, and may be detected through the flimsy, though ingenious, artifice.
The remedy for a growing hesitancy in speech, when not the result of serious mind-weakness—and the person affected is generally secretly conscious of the cause—is a better method of thinking. The first effort must be to preserve greater calmness; the second, to be more orderly in thought. There is a process in thinking which is the counterpart of dotting the i’s and putting in the stops in writing, or of knotting the thread and “fastening off” securely in needlework. If this be neglected, as it commonly is by what are called rapid—another word for careless, reckless, or impetuous—thinkers, entanglement and confusion in thought, showing themselves in hesitation and errors of speech, are inevitable.
Verbal blunders are generally due to confusions of thought, but sometimes to disease. It is important to distinguish between the two varieties of this fault. The former is a matter for self-improvement, the latter will require medical aid. If the mistakes made seem to follow no particular line of error—if they are, so to say, general or capricious, the wrong words substituted for what it was wished to say being taken at random, perhaps from some other sentence at the moment darting across the mind—the “confusion” may be safely set down as one to be cured by mind-discipline. If, on the contrary, particular words, previously familiar and ready at hand, are forgotten, certain numbers dropped out of memory, and a sort of method seems to determine the occurrence of faults in speaking or writing, the matter may be more serious, and advice should be sought. It is a curious feature of the early forms of speech-disorder springing from physical sources—for example, incipient disease of the brain—that particular elements of knowledge seem to be effaced, and special processes of thought or reasoning can no longer be performed, although the great mass of mind-work goes on unimpaired.