There may even be, as recent psychological tests seem to indicate, a certain proportion of individuals who are not competent to take an intelligent part in democratic government, who, having too little intellectual ability to follow the simplest problem needing coöperative and collective decision, must eternally be governed by others. If these facts come to be authenticated by further data, it merely emphasizes the fact that in a country professedly democratic it is essential to devise an education that will, in the case of each individual, educate up to the highest point of native ability.
Where a country is ostensibly democratic, a few informed citizens will govern the many uninformed, unless the latter are educated to an intelligent knowledge and appreciation of their political duties and obligations. Furthermore, the citizens of a community who are prevented from using their native gifts will be both useless and unhappy. Certainly this is an undesirable condition in a society where all individuals are expected, so far as possible, to be ends in themselves and not merely means for the ends of others.
CHAPTER X
LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION[1]
[Footnote 1: Much of the technical material for this chapter is drawn from Leonard Bloomfield's The Study of Language, and W. D. Whitney's The Life and Growth of Language.]
It was earlier pointed out that human beings alone possess language. They alone can make written symbols and heard sounds stand for other things, for objects, actions, qualities, and ideas. In this chapter the consideration of language may best be approached from the spoken tongue, under the influence of which, except in the simplest type of pictorial writing, the written form develops.[2]
[Footnote 2: Bloomfield: loc. cit., pp. 7-8.]
From the point of view of the student of behavior, language, spoken language especially, is a habit, acquired like walking or swimming. It is made possible primarily by the fact that human beings possess a variety and flexibility of vocal reflexes possessed by no other animal. All the higher animals have a number of vocal reflexes, which are called out primarily in the expression of emotion or desire. Cries of pain, hunger, rage, sex desire or desire for companionship, are common to a great number of the animal species. But these cries and vocal utterances are limited, and comparatively unmodifiable. They are moreover expressed, so far as experimental observation can reveal, with no consciousness of the specific significance of particular sounds and are used as the involuntary expression of emotion rather than as a specific means of communication.
... The primates have a much larger number of such vocal instincts than the other mammals, and a much larger number of stimuli can call them out, e.g., injury to bodily tissue calls out one group; hunger calls out a certain group; sex stimuli (mate, etc.) another; and similarly cold, swiftly moving objects, tones, strange animals call out others. When attachments are formed between the female and her offspring another large group is called into action. There is no evidence to show in the case of mammals that these vocal instincts are modified by the sounds of other animals.... These throat habits may be cultivated to such an extent in birds that we may get an approximation, more or less complete, to a few such habits possessed by the human being. Such throat habits, however, are not language habits.[1]
[Footnote 1: Watson: Behavior, p. 323.]