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.