order to obtain such proficiency? The first answer which suggests itself is to the effect that such skill or proficiency is acquired by a process called study or learning. We learn to do it; we study the art; we follow a course and all that the course implies; we attend lectures, we take lessons, we read the text-book containing the principles (rudimentary or otherwise) which embody the precepts relating to that art, we perform exercises; in short, we become students. Very well; let us accept the answer for what it is worth and proceed to formulate a series of supplementary questions: What are the qualities which mark the successful student? What sort of people are likely to study with success? Of what people can we predict failure or incapacity for making progress? Most people will answer: The student must possess intelligence, assiduity, and perseverance; if at the same time he should be ‘gifted,’ his progress will be much greater than the progress of one who possesses no ‘natural talents’ for learning the art in question.

This answer, on the face of it, seems a reasonable one and a right one; it gives us the impression of being in accordance with the traditions and maxims of the pedagogic world, and with our experience, either as teachers or as learners. We think of our efforts (successful or unsuccessful) to learn shorthand, piano-playing, violin-playing, singing, chess, typewriting, dancing, drawing, painting, modelling, carpentering, and a host of similar subjects; we remember the intensive acts of analysis and synthesis, the efforts of attention, the strain of comprehending, the striving to retain; we remember the hours of solid labour, the exercises, the drills, the spade-work; we consider the period of time covered by these continuous efforts, and we realize the cost at which we have acquired our present proficiency.

And yet there exists an art, we are told, in which every one of us has become proficient, an art in which every man, woman, and child throughout the world is a skilful adept, an art which has been acquired without any process resembling study, without lectures or lessons or text-books or theory, without the exercise of our powers of conscious or critical reflection, or analysis, or synthesis, or generalization, without the giving of our conscious attention, without deliberate effort or striving.

This art, we are told, requires no intelligence on the part of the one who is learning it; on the contrary, the least intelligent often prove to be among the most successful adepts, notably very young children, idiots, or barbarians of the lowest scale.

This statement seems so strange on the face of it, so paradoxical and so contrary to our preconceived notions concerning the acquiring of knowledge, that we immediately suspect some ‘catch’; we are inclined to treat as a joker the one who has so gravely made the statement. The ‘art’ in question is probably something of an absurdly rudimentary character, something of such a simple nature that it neither admits of analysis or synthesis nor requires any form of logical or co-ordinated thought. But no, the art in question is one involving at least three distinct sciences, each of which is so complex and so vast that the learned world has not yet succeeded in unravelling it or in sounding its depths.

Convinced by now that we are the object of some form of ingenious witticism, we ask: What, then, is this strange art in which the dunce excels, this art which requires of its adepts neither brains, industry, nor patience?

The answer is: The art of using the spoken and everyday form of any given language. Show me the child of three years of age, the madman, or the savage, who is not an expert at it!

Let us make sure that we have understood this answer, in order that we may not misinterpret it, in order that we may not read into it a meaning which is not there. In the first place, there is no question here of reading or writing the language, but of understanding what is said, and of expressing what we wish to say by speaking; and the art in question has nothing to do with alphabets, with letters, with spelling, with calligraphy, which are artificial developments deliberately invented by man. Nor is there any question of literary composition in prose or poetry; we are not dealing with any æsthetic form, but merely with the ‘everyday’ form, the colloquial form, the sort of speech we use on ordinary occasions in order to express our usual thoughts. Let there be no mistake on this point: the higher forms of language, the artistic developments, eloquence or literature, may interest us, may interest us intensely, but the particular art of which we are now speaking is far removed from these heights; we are considering language as manifested by the normal colloquial form as used by the average speaker in ordinary circumstances.

Now there is no doubt whatever that proficiency in this particular sort of human activity is possessed by every human being who is not congenitally deaf or dumb; we are all able to say what we want to say, we are all able to understand what is said to us provided that the communication concerns things which are within the limits of our knowledge. We have acquired this proficiency not by a course of study as we understand the term in its ordinary use; we have not learnt it as a result of lectures or lessons; it has not come as a consequence of deliberate effort and concentration. Some of us, in exceptional circumstances, may have availed ourselves of our intelligence; but in general our intelligence, our reasoning powers, our capacities for deduction, for analysis and synthesis, have counted for nothing in the process.

Might we not then call it a ‘gift’? Did we not mention specifically that those who have a gift for a particular art can to a certain extent dispense with the qualities of intelligence, assiduity, perseverance? There is no objection against using the term ‘gift,’ provided that it is clear to our minds that everybody possesses the gift in question. Usually, however, we understand by ‘gift’ something ‘given’ to certain individuals only; consequently we are not in the habit of speaking about the gift of sight, of hearing, or of locomotion. It would be safer to avoid the term and to speak rather of our natural, spontaneous, and universal capacity for using spoken language.

But are we right as to our facts? Is it true that we acquire speech by some capacity other than our intelligence, our reasoning powers? Let our answer be based on objective and easily proven evidence. A child of two or three years of age can use the spoken language appropriate to his age, but what does that child know of reasoning? And what is its standard of intelligence? Not enough to cause it to realize or understand that two and two make four. And yet that child observes with a marvellous degree of accuracy most of the complicated laws governing his mother-tongue. And the savage. By definition he is unintelligent, he has never learnt to think logically, he has no power of abstraction, he is probably unaware that such a thing as language exists; but he will faithfully observe to the finest details the complexities (phonetic, grammatical, and semantic) of his ‘savage’ language. He will use the right vowel or tone in the right place; he will not confuse any of the dozen or so genders with which his language is endowed; a ‘savage’ language (with an accidence so rich that Latin is by comparison a language of simple structure) will to him be an instrument on which he plays in the manner of an artist, a master: and we are speaking of a savage, mark you, whose intelligence is of so low an order that for him that which is not concrete has no existence!