holds property, wages war, indulges in amusements, gratifies social instincts; and that in all this, the savage is but one remove from the brute. Ascending the scale, we have examined the first stages of human progress and analyzed an incipient civilization. We will now pass the frontier which separates mankind from animal-kind, and enter the domain of the immaterial and supernatural; phenomena which philosophy purely positive cannot explain.

The primary indication of an absolute superiority in man over other animals is the faculty of speech; not those mute or vocal symbols, expressive of passion and emotion, displayed alike in brutes and men; but the power to separate ideas, to generate in the mind and embody in words, sequences of thought. True, upon the threshold of this inquiry, as in whatever relates to primitive man, we find the brute creation hotly pursuing, and disputing for a share in this progressional power. In common with man, animals possess all the organs of sensation. They see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. They have even the organs of speech; but they have not speech. The source of this wonderful faculty lies further back, obscured by the mists which ever settle round the immaterial. Whether brutes have souls, according to the Aristotelean theory of soul, or whether brute-soul is immortal, or of quality and destiny unlike and inferior to that of man-soul, we see in them unmistakable evidence of mental faculties. The higher order of animals possess the lower order of intellectual perceptions. Thus pride is manifested by the caparisoned horse, shame by the beaten dog, will by the stubborn mule. Brutes have memory; they manifest love and hate, joy and sorrow, gratitude and revenge. They are courageous or cowardly, subtle or simple, not merely up to the measure of what we commonly term instinct, but with evident exercise of judgment; and, to a certain point, we might even claim for them foresight, as in laying in a store of food for winter. But with all this there seems to be a lack of true or connected thought, and of the faculty of abstraction, whereby conceptions are analyzed and impressions defined.

THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION.

They have also a language, such as it is; indeed, all the varieties of language common to man. What gesture-language can be more expressive than that employed by the horse with its ears and by the dog with its tail, wherein are manifestations of every shade of joy, sorrow, courage, fear, shame, and anger? In their brutish physiognomy, also, one may read the language of the emotions, which, if not so delicately pictured as in the face of man, is none the less distinctive. Nor are they without their vocal language. Every fowl and every quadruped possesses the power of communicating intelligence by means of the voice. They have their noise of gladness, their signal cry of danger, their notes of anger and of woe. Thus we see in brutes not only intelligence but the power of communicating intelligence. But intelligence is not thought, neither is expression speech. The language of brutes, like themselves, is soulless.

The next indication of man's superiority over brutes, is the faculty of worship. The wild beast, to escape the storm, flies howling to its den; the savage, awe-stricken, turns and prays. The lowest man perceives a hand behind the lightning, hears a voice abroad upon the storm, for which the highest brute has neither eye nor ear. This essential of humanity we see primordially displayed in mythic phenomena; in the first struggle of spiritual manhood to find expression. Language is symbol significant of thought, mythology is symbol significant of soul. The one is the first distinctive sound that separates the ideal from the material, the other the first respiration of the soul which distinguishes the immortal from the animal. Language is thought incarnate; mythology, soul incarnate. The one is the instrument of thought, as the other is the essence of thought. Neither is thought; both are closely akin to thought; separated from either, in some form, perfect intellectual manhood cannot develop. I do not mean to say with some, that thought without speech cannot exist; unless by speech is meant any form of expression symbolical, emotional, or vocal, or unless by thought is meant something more than mere self-consciousness without sequence and without abstraction. There can be no doubt that speech is the living breath of thought, and that the exercise of speech reacts upon the mental and emotional faculties. In brutes is found neither speech nor myth; in the deaf and dumb, thought and belief are shadowy and undefined; in infants, thought is but as a fleeting cloud passing over the brain. Yet for all this, deaf mutes and children who have no adequate form of expression cannot be placed in the category of brutes. The invention of the finger-alphabet opened a way to the understanding of the deaf and dumb; but long before this is learned, in every instance, these unfortunates invent a gesture-language of their own, in which they think as well as speak. And could we but see the strangely contorted imagery which takes possession of a gesture-thinker's brain, we should better appreciate the value of words. So, into the mouth of children words are put, round which thoughts coalesce; but evidences of ideas are discovered some time before they can be fully expressed by signs or sounds. Kant held the opinion that the mind of a deaf mute is incapable of development, but the wonderful success of our modern institutions has dissipated forever that idea.

The soul of man is a half-conscious inspiration from which perception and expression are inseparable. Nature speaks to it in that subtle sympathy by which the immaterial within holds converse with the immaterial without, in the soft whisperings of the breeze, in the fearful bellowings of the tempest. Between the soul and body there is the closest sympathy, an interaction in every relation. Therefore these voices of nature speaking to nature's offspring, are answered back in various ways according to the various organisms addressed. The animal, the intellectual, the spiritual, whatsoever the entity consists of, responds, and responding expands and unfolds. Once give an animal the power to speak and mental development ensues; for speech cannot continue without ideas, and ideas cannot spring up without intellectual evolution. A dim, half-conscious, brutish thought there may be; but the faculty of abstraction, sequences of thought, without words either spoken or unspoken, cannot exist.

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

It is not at all probable that a system of gesture-language was ever employed by any primitive people, prior or in preference to vocal language. To communicate by signs requires no little skill and implies a degree of artifice and forethought far beyond that required in vocal or emotional language. Long before a child arrives at the point of intelligence necessary for conveying thought by signs, it is well advanced in a vocal language of its own.

In mythology, language assumes personality and independence. Often the significance of the word becomes the essential idea. Zeus, from meaning simply sky, becomes god of the sky; Eos, originally the dawn, is made the goddess of the opening day. Not the idea but the expression of the idea becomes the deity. And so, by these creations of fancy, the imagination expands; in the embodiment of the idea, the mind enlarges with its own creation. Then yet bolder metaphors are thrown off like soap-bubbles, which no sooner take form in words than they are also deified. Thus soul and thought and speech act and react on one another, all the evolutions of conception seeking vent in sound or speculation; and thus language, the expression of mind, and mythology, the expression of soul, become the exponents of divine humanity.

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