140. With what feature of political life may the service of a general idea in mental life be compared?
§ [16]. Language
[1.] Word Imagery
There can be no doubt that animals are to some extent able to generalize. A dog or a cat is trained to distinguish between indoors and outdoors and to adjust its behavior accordingly. This would be impossible if the dog possessed no general notion of room or street.
But these generalizations remain rather insignificant so long as they are not connected with one definite image which stands as a symbol for the whole class of things. Nature scarcely presents to us any images which could be used as symbols of this kind. What are we invariably conscious of when thinking of books, or of trees, or of houses—something that is not only invariable, but also readily separable in our imagination? It is difficult to name anything which fulfills these conditions. But man created what he did not find in nature, symbols which can be used as meaning whole classes of objects and relations of objects. The totality of these symbols is human language.
These symbols are normally divided into four classes of imagery, four languages, so to speak, in such a manner that each class of objects has a symbol in each of the four languages. The first of these languages acquired by the child is the auditory language, made up of the sounds of the words spoken by others. Soon after having begun to understand spoken words, the child begins to speak himself. Thus he acquires a second language, made up of kinesthetic imagery of his vocal organs. These languages are the only ones possessed by illiterates. In school the child learns to read, that is, he acquires a third class of symbols, consisting of visual images of written and printed words. One might of course speak of these as two visual languages, since the sight of written words differs somewhat from the sight of printed words. Finally the child learns to write, and thus acquires a fourth language, made up of kinesthetic images of the writing hand.
These are, of course, not the only languages possible. The blind-born, unable to acquire visual imagery, substitute tactual word imagery by learning to read raised letters or the raised point script generally taught in institutions for the blind. But a seeing person, too, may acquire this tactual language in addition to the other four. The deaf-born acquire a visual language made up of the images of the hand and the fingers representing symbolically letters and words. But it is hardly worth while to enumerate all these minor languages. The most important ones practically are these four: the auditory, the visual (written and printed), the kinesthetic of the vocal organs, and the kinesthetic of the writing hand.
We saw that the origin of all these languages, that is, classes of word images, is to be found in speech. How speech itself originated in the human race is a problem which thus far is not solved, or at least, of which no proposed solution has thus far been universally accepted. Some light is shed upon it by the answer to the simpler question as to the origin of speech in childhood. Only during the last few decades has this question been given attention, obviously because this growth of speech, as an everyday occurrence, seemed to ask for no explanation. The child imitates!—what else should be said about it? But in order to imitate, the child must first be able to produce the elements of the things to be imitated. And by imitation speech only is acquired, but not the full significance of language.
[2.] The Acquisition of Speech
(1) Speech originates from instinctive activities of the vocal organs. As a child, when left to himself and feeling well, plays with his hands and kicks, he also, in response to all kinds of external and internal stimulations, moves instinctively (that is, because of his inherited nervous connections) lips and tongue, larynx and chest, and produces a great number of different sounds and sound combinations—not only those which are used in the language of his people, but also the strangest crowing and smacking and clucking sounds. He cannot produce speech sounds without immediately hearing them. Thus an association is formed between sound perception, kinesthetic perception, and motor activity; and soon the sound of his own voice stimulates the child to further production of these speech sounds. This explains why the same sounds are often so many times repeated in an infant’s babble, and why baby talk contains so many reduplications like papa, mama, byby, and so on.