CHAPTER II.
THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE.
The power which man possesses of uttering his thoughts is one of the most essential elements of his civilization. Whether he can even think at all without some means of outward expression is a metaphysical question which need not be discussed here. Thus much will hardly be denied by any one, that man's power of utterance, so far exceeding any that the lower animals possess, is one of the principal causes of his immense pre-eminence over them.
Of the means which man has of uttering or expressing that which is in his mind, speech is by far the most important, so much so, that when we speak of uttering our thoughts, the phrase is understood to mean expressing them in words. But when we say that man's power of utterance is one of the great differences between him and the lower animals, we must attach to the word utterance a sense more fully conformable to its etymology. As Steinthal admits, the deaf-and-dumb man is the living refutation of the proposition, that man cannot think without speech, unless we allow the understood notion of speech as the utterance of thought by articulate sounds to be too narrow.[1] To utter a thought is literally to put it outside us, as to express is to squeeze it out. Grossly material as these metaphors are, they are the best terms we have for that wonderful process by which a man, by some bodily action, can not only make other men's minds reproduce more or less exactly the workings of his own, but can even receive back from the outward sign an impression similar to theirs, as though not he himself but some one else had made it.
