could supply these verbal uniforms, and secondly, because we never meet with naked concepts; or, to put it more strongly still, because we never meet with a rabbit without a skin, or an oyster without a shell.

The reason why real thought is impossible without language is very simple. What we call language is not, as is commonly supposed, thought plus sound, but what we call thought is really language minus sound. That is to say, when we are once in possession of language, we may hum our words, or remember them in perfect silence, as we remember a piece of music without a single vibration of our vocal chords. We may also abbreviate our words, so that such expressions as, If Plato is right,' may stand for a whole library. We may in fact eliminate the meaning of the word so that the word only remains as a symbol1; we may even substitute algebraic signs for real words, and thus carry on processes of reckoning or reasoning which in their final results are perfectly astonishing. But as little as we can reckon without actual or disguised numerals, can we reason without actual or disguised words. This is the last result to which the Science of Language has led us, and which has changed the Science of Language into the Science of Thought. We think in words' must become the charter of all exact philosophy in future, and it will form, I believe, at the same time the reconciliation of all systems of philosophy in the past.

Communication, not language.

But surely, it is said, men communicate, and animals too communicate, without language. Yes,

1 Science of Thought, p. 35.

they certainly do, we all do, some more, others less successfully. The Polynesians, as Chamisso1 tells us in his charming Voyage round the world (1815-1818), are sparing of words, and a wink often takes the place of a long speech. Perhaps it does so even among less savage races. They do not even say Yes, when they can help it, but only move their brow. It is only to a stranger that they will say Inga, yes. But such communication is not thought, if we use our words properly.

I go even a step further, and maintain that we are so made that, whether we like it or not, we must show by outward signs what passes within us. There are few people who can so repress their emotions as not to let others see when they are angry or happy. We blush, we tremble, we frown, we pout, we grin, we laugh, we smile, and what can be more tell-tale, and sometimes more eloquent, than these involuntary signs? I have no doubt that animals betray their feelings by similar signs, and that these signs are understood by their fellow-creatures. You have only to disturb an ant-hill, and see what happens. A number of ants will run away on their beaten tracks, they will stop every ant they meet, and every ant, after having been touched and communicated with, will run to the ant-hill to render help with the same alacrity with which a member of the fire-brigade runs towards the place of conflagration after hearing the bugle in the street. We cannot understand how it is done, but that little head of an ant, not larger than the head of a pin, must have been able to express terror and implore help, even as a dog will run up to

1 Chamisso's Werke, vol. i. p. 357.

you and express in his face terror, and by his motions implore your help. But when will people learn that emotions are not thoughts, and that if we call anger or joy thought, we simply muddle our own thoughts and confound our own language?

I believe that some of these involuntary manifestations of our feelings may in time lead to intentional gestures; and we know from pantomimes, also from communications that are said to take place in America and Australia between tribes speaking different languages, that this gesture-language may be brought to a very high degree of perfection. But we must not forget that in all cases where this communication by means of gestures has been observed, the parties concerned are each in possession of a real language, that in fact they think first in their own conceptual language and then translate their thoughts back into pantomime 1.

The subject, however, is curious, and deserves more study than it has hitherto received. We imagine we can understand why a person kneeling down is supposed to implore mercy, why another shaking his fist is supposed to say, Stand off! But these gestures, as used in different countries, have not always the same meaning, and even the expressive

In the island of Gomera, one of the islands of the Canary Archipelago, people communicate by means of a whistling language. The island is traversed by many deep ravines and gullies which run out in all directions from the central plateau. They are not bridged, and can often only be crossed with great difficulty, so that people who really live very near to each other in a straight line have to make a circuit of hours when they wish to meet. Whistling has therefore become an excellent means of communication, and has gradually assumed the proportions of a true substitute for speech. But what they whistle is their own language.

signs used by deaf and dumb people are by no means identical all over the globe 1.

Children again, long before they are able to speak, can imitate the acts of eating, drinking, riding on their father's knees, and thus express their little wishes; but a wish is not a thought, as little as fear and horror. If some philosophers like to call these states of feeling thought, they may do so at their own peril, but they ought at all events to let us know, in order that others may be able to discount such license.

Images.

Some more serious philosophers put in a claim for images. Images, they say, such as our senses leave in our memory, may surely be called thought. They may, no doubt, if only we let others know that in our own philosophical dialect we use thinking in that extended sense. But it is surely better to distinguish and to keep the term imagination for signifying the play of our images. I myself hold it impossible that human beings should have real images without first having framed them in names; and among physiologists, Helmholtz denies the possibility of our having perceptions without names. But, of course, if careful observers, such as Mr. Galton, assure us that they have images without knowing what they are images of, and without remembering what they are called, we are bound to believe them, even though we cannot follow them. What they are anxious for is evidently to show that animals, though they have no language, have images, that they combine these images, and that their acts, their sensible, or, as they like to call

1 1 Mallery, Sign Language among the North-American Indians,

them, their rational acts, are determined by them. Let that be so, at least for argument's sake. But even then, is not this imagination or even this reasoning without language utterly different from imagination and reasoning with language? Suppose a dog, instead of coming to me, as one of my dogs did, expressing his uneasiness and then dragging me on to his rug which was red, and showing me that it was occupied by my other dog, who ought to have been on his own rug which was blue, looking at me reproachfully till I had ordered the other dog away, and then taking possession with all the pride of an injured innocent of his own red rug-suppose that dog, instead of wheedling and barking were suddenly to stand up on his hind legs and say to me, 'The other dog has taken my rug; please, Sir, order him away,' should we not almost go out of our mind?

Or let us place an infant and a grown-up man side by side, the one struggling and crying for a cup of milk, the other saying plainly, 'I should like that cup of milk.' Is not the distance between these two acts immeasurable, the one being merely the result of the direct or reflex action of our senses, the other the result of a growth that has gone on for thousands of years? The grown-up man also, if he were dying of thirst, might no doubt rush towards the cup and swallow it without saying a word, and we might call the expression of his impetuous features language, and his rushing movements reason. But we should gain nothing by the use of this metaphorical language. There are philosophers who tell us that an infant could not stretch out its arms without going through a silent syllogism: By stretching out our arms we