[29] Max Müller, however, is an exception. He has not made the smallest concession on this point in any of his works, including the last (Three Lectures, etc., cited above). He even maintains that a society of deaf-mutes would hardly rise above the intellectual level of a chimpanzee. “A man born dumb, notwithstanding his great cerebral mass and his inheritance of strong intellectual instincts, would be capable of few higher intellectual manifestations than an orang or a chimpanzee, if he were confined to the society of dumb associates” (p. 92). This thesis was attacked by thirteen critics, including Romanes, Galton, the Duke of Argyle, etc., but Max Müller meets them all and replies to them without flinching. It must be confessed that the arguments invoked by his correspondents are very unequal in merit. Some are convincing, others not. The Duke of Argyle says happily that “words are necessary to the progress of thought, but not at all to the act of thinking.” Ebbels (p. 13, appendix) shows that Max Müller has unduly limited the question by excluding all processes anterior to the formation of concepts; we think in images; the transition from one form to another is imperceptible, and the faculty of abstraction does not appear suddenly along with the signs. On the other hand, we cannot admit as evidence the facts invoked by other correspondents, e. g., chess-players who combine and calculate solely by the aid of visual images; answers to letters, conceived in the first place as a general plan before they are developed in words, etc. It is forgotten that the persons capable of these operations have had long practice in verbal analysis, thereby attaining a high intellectual level. So, in the physical order, the practical gymnast, even when not executing any particular feat, possesses a suppleness and agility of body, due to exercise, which translates itself into all his movements.
[30] De l’Education des sourds-muets, 2 vol., 1827. Notwithstanding its somewhat remote date, the book has lost none of its interest in this particular. It must also be remembered that institutions for deaf-mutes are far more numerous now than at the beginning of the century, and that the children are placed in them much earlier. Formerly they were abandoned to themselves or instructed very late; in proportion to their age, they presented better material for the study of their development.
[31] Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 80. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, Chapter VI.
[32] Kussmaul, Die Störungen der Sprache, Chapter xxx.
[33] Cf. as proof, the story related by Kussmaul (op. cit., VII.): A young deaf-mute was arrested by the police of Prague as a vagabond. He was placed in an institution and questioned by suitable methods, when he made known that his father had a mill with a house and surroundings which he described exactly; that his mother and sister were dead, and his father had re-married; that his step-mother had ill-treated him, and that he had planned an escape which had succeeded. He indicated the direction of the mill to the east of Prague. Inquiries were made, and all these statements were verified.
[34] Romanes, Mental Evolution, etc., p. 150.
[35] W. James, Psychology, I., 266, for the second observation; Philosophical Review, I., No. 6, p. 613 et seq. for the first.
[36] Sign-Language Among the North American Indians, 1881. Published in Report of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington. Cf. also: Tylor, op. cit.; Romanes, op. cit., VI.; Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, Chapter VI.; Kleinpaul, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsych., VI., 353.
[37] Lubbock. The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, p. 417.
[38] Gérando, op. cit., II., note K, p. 203. Among the gestures that are identical under their double form may be noted stone, water, large, tall, to see, finished, man, house, good, pretty, now, etc.