“Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the monkey,” says Buffon, “the distance which separates them is immense, since internally it is filled by thought and outwardly by speech.”[75] We know how to consider the first of these appreciations. As to the second, let us see if we shall not there perceive a sort of gradation which would insensibly lead us from our own complicated languages to others of a much greater simplicity, so much so that they can scarcely be called by that name. Speech and language are two words often confounded, but in science we must give to each of them its own value. Speech is a language articulated by the respiratory channels. Language may be defined as “everything spoken by well known and understood means between two intellects.” It may be seen that we give the fullest acceptation possible to this word. It is a language that the Abbé de l’Epée invented for the deaf and dumb. The writing of this language is another. A phonetic telegram is, as regards a stranger, merely a succession of sounds, like the song of a nightingale; a naval telegram is only an assemblage and a combination of colours like an arabesque, united the moment when the necessary arrangement forms these sounds or these colours into language.[76]
Speech alone being the habitual and natural language of mankind, endowed otherwise with special organic specifications in order to produce it, we have been generally led to confound these two distinct things in speaking of mankind, viz., speech and language. This being allowed, the first question which we have to examine is this, “Has man always possessed the faculty of speech?”. A difficult question, but one which we have no right to proclaim as impossible to be solved, which is, perhaps, not the case, and of which the difficulty belongs principally to the very imperfect knowledge which we possess concerning the distant epoch which saw mankind in his cradle.[77] Let us first of all remember that man has, in common with animals, voice, cries, natural inflections (M. Flourens), that which we otherwise call natural language. “Like a simple animal,” says Herder,[78] “man possesses the faculty of speech. All the most violent and painful sensations of his body, as well as the strong passions of his mind, are manifested immediately by cries or inflections of the voice, by natural and inarticulate sounds. The animal which suffers—as well as the hero Philoctetes—when it feels sorrow will moan and sigh, even when abandoned in a desert island, far from the sight of any friendly creature, without any hope of succour.” This language is intelligible between all animals, between animals and ourselves, and between ourselves and animals. We may affirm that man possesses it always, from the first hour of his birth. As to articulated language, as artificial language has been called in opposition to the preceding, the question is much more confused and much less clearly defined.
We think with Steinthal, with Jacob Grimm,[79] and with M. Renan,[80] that language is not innate in man, that is to say, it is not, as the Buddhist philosophy has already declared, a necessary consequence of active intelligence.[81] Further, it has not been revealed—this theory does not even deserve the honour of having been opposed by Jacob Grimm.[82] But we may admit that language is, if not a necessity, a least a direct consequence of an intellect such as existed amongst mankind at the time, whether long or short we know not, which preceded the appearance of language. “The moment,” says M. Renan, stating the theories of Steinthal,[83] “that language arises from the human soul and appears in the light of day and constitutes an epoch in the development of the life of the mind, is the moment when intuition is changed into idea. Things appear first to the mind in the complexity of the real, abstraction is unknown to the primitive man.” Here, then, are two well-characterised modes, two ways of being, entirely different from the intellect of man. The one, where this intellect only possesses intuition, the other where analysis sees the light, where the mind is abstracted, and where, by a mechanism more or less complicated, but at the same time by a real work,[84] it ends by calling every abstraction of mind by a name; then he speaks. But before the time when this revolution is accomplished, the state of man is completely comparable to that in which animals are placed. They have caught at certain relations by means of their intelligence, without usually feeling any necessity for explaining them, a relation of a much more elevated order of beings, for it has been truly remarked,[85] and it must not be forgotten, that the capital act of language is to “wish to speak.”
We have seen that certain abstract ideas, by reason of their nature, were so entirely foreign to certain races of men, that their intellects had never wished for a word in order to express them. Well, if other ideas, expressing much more simple relations, have escaped animals, there is only, in fact, a gradation corresponding to what we have just said concerning intellectual phenomena among the human race. As for the specific difference which some have tried to establish under this head between man and animals, if it were correct it must be shown that language is completely unattainable by any mammalia, even within the most restricted limits.
And is it so? Will it be mooted that certain animals have not even a rudiment of language, whether articulated or not it does not much signify, in their state of nature? Will it be mooted that they never make any sort of sign in order to communicate anything to one another, to call them, or give an alarm, or express some peculiar sensation?[86]
Experience would entirely deny any such assertion. And this not only with reference to the superior animals, for this faculty appears to be extended even to the invertebrata. The well-known experiments of P. Huber seem to have proved in the most decisive manner that ants,[87] like bees, are able to transmit certain signs or indications from one to the other; even if the mere act of living in a republic, of joining together in one common work, did not offer the strongest presumption of a language peculiar to these creatures. If anyone dares to deny to animals the spontaneous exercise of a restricted language, limited in whatever way that may be desired, at least it cannot be denied that many of the vertebrate animals are not capable of receiving from it an equal education, of understanding the signification of certain sounds, of certain signs, and of producing in their turn such as may be understood by us, of communicating to us any of their thoughts, or any of their appreciations.
We are not speaking here of animals who can reproduce certain sounds belonging to the vocal organs of man; that is a fact of an entirely material character, and which has no reference to the question of language. It is evident that the animal which articulates any word whatsoever does not understand it a whit more than the man who imitates the cry of an animal, and, in a general way, neither comprehends its sense nor its signification.
Maupertuis alleges[88] that if animals were capable of understanding we could teach them to make themselves understood by other signs in default of a voice. A strange aberration of intellect for such a studious and learned man. This is the man who makes an impossibility out of an everyday occurrence; for, first of all, most animals have some sort of voice, and if they had it not, there are few persons who are ignorant of the way in which certain mute dogs make themselves understood when they particularly desire it. What would really be absurd would be the hope of imparting ideas to animals, matters relating, indeed, to a higher order, since we see that even all men are not capable of grasping them. Man has been able to train animals, and to train implies precisely the idea of communicating a thought from man to an animal, and from the animal to man. “Jump,” says the shepherd to his dog, and the dog knows that this vocal articulation orders him to make a given muscular effort. The man has spoken to the dog. During the night some one opens the gate of the farm-yard, and the watch-dog barks; he thus tells his master that something unusual is happening.[89]
That which proves besides that the barking of the dog is merely a conventional sign, an artificial language, so to say, is the fact, that in certain countries the dogs do not bark; jackals and wolves learn how to bark when in company with the dogs who can talk in this manner, and that the same dogs lose the power, or rather the habit of barking, if they return to a savage state.[90]
We have already spoken of those inferior races which seem to have borrowed from their better endowed neighbours a rudiment of civilisation, which, for a long time they did not know how to develope in any way. Does it not seem that there is here some comparison with what has just been stated? that under a civilising influence, in contact with a superior being, the dog has learnt a language; but that not understanding its general application (a more complex, and more highly elevated idea), he has not known how to transmit the use of it to his own race, or has himself forgotten it, from not having any occasion to exercise this power?[91]