He acknowledges that the "poor creature" imitation is supplemented by another "poor creature" convention. But he does not see that "habit and repute "and their relation to other words are always exercising an influence over them. Words appear to be isolated, but they are really parts of an organism which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilization, harmonized by poetry, emphasized by literature, technically applied in philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of human knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius, and come with new force and association to every lively-minded person. They are fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions, and yet are always imperceptibly changing. They carry with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of a word in a striking and familiar passage gives a complexion to its use everywhere else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has also a peculiar power over us. But these and other subtilties of language escaped the observation of Plato. He was not aware that the languages of the world are organic structures and that every word in them is related to every other; nor does he conceive of language as the joint work of speaker and hearer, requiring in man a faculty not only of expressing his thoughts but of understanding those of others.
Language is one of the links that carry us back, if not to the origin of the human race, at least to the first articulate-speaking man. Words are the faded images, or the battered and bruised and worn coins, that have been handed down from the remotest ages. When they have received a form in literature they become in a measure fixed so that we can see how they looked to the eye, if we do not know precisely how they sounded to the ear, millenniums ago. We usually have a mere fragment of primitive words and are almost wholly in the dark as to their phonetic value.
The connection between thought and speech has long been recognized; sometimes the priority of the one, sometimes of the other has been maintained. One fact is indisputable: language greatly influences our modes of thinking; in our early years conditions it entirely. We learn to use words with the meaning attached to them by our environment. Our first ideas are exactly those of our parents, of older brothers and sisters, of schoolmates, and so on. When we begin to learn words from books our intellectual outlook gradually enlarges. The circle of our thoughts becomes wider, but only in rare cases does it extend beyond that of our generation. To the average man his mothertongue is a current that carries him gently, imperceptibly and slowly along; he rarely stops to consider whither he is drifting. We pass on to our successors the inheritance of words into which we have come, generally unchanged and unaugmented. Only once in a while does the deeper insight of some thinker enlarge the boundary of our intellectual horizon. He may not use a single new term, at least none of his own coinage, but he puts into those he employs a sense different from what they had before. Such terms as "evolution" and "development," and such phrases as "survival of the fittest," have now a totally different
