WORDS VIEWED AS DEEDS One of the most stupendous elements in civilization has hitherto been only casually mentioned—words. Without language civiliza tion could hardly even have begun and certainly could never have attained its higher forms. Speech underlies thinking and con scious planning and research. It does more. It creates a world of ideas which interpenetrates and seems to transcend that of the facts of human experience. What pass for facts are indeed so moulded by our notions of them that recent philosophers are less and less confident in their efforts to separate the functioning of ideas from that of facts. Much has been discovered of late which serves to revolutionize the older theories of language and thinking, and to eliminate some of the age-long quandaries in which philoso phers have found themselves involved. These new views can be only briefly suggested here.
The Fourth Gospel opens, "In the beginning was the Word; • • • All things were made by it ; . . . In it was life ; and the life was the light of men." Goethe declared that in the beginning was the deed. The most recent writers who deal with speech would seek to shed new light on civilization by recognizing that words have always been deeds. They have always been regarded as wonder-working acts; they create things which without them could never exist ; they are the chief light of man—and his darkness as well.
Making noises is a conspicuous animal trait. Katydids, frogs, whippoorwills, dogs, and many other creatures exhibit a tireless patience in this matter. Man, too, is a great chatterer. His fel low men may be bored by his talk, but they are likely to be scared by his silence. It is portentous and bodes no good. To keep still is an unfriendly act. So, as Malinowski has pointed out, one of the many functions of utterances has been reassurance and the expression of companionability. The cries of animals as related to their needs and behaviour are only just beginning to be carefully studied. Whitman and Craig have discovered a marvel lous correlation between the ejaculations of pigeons and their ways of life. Kohler, Yerkes and others are attending to our nearer relatives. But all that needs be noted here is that human language must have emerged from the spontaneous sounds made by pre-man.
Only when men began to make pictures of events and gestures, and painfully developed writing from the pictures, have we the least actual evidence of language. The Egyptian inscriptions illus trate picture writing and its later and most ingenious meta morphosis into sound symbols—an alphabet. This happened five or six thousand years ago. But it is clear from the Egyptian lan guage that its surprising complexity and sophistication imply an antecedent development of incalculable length, to judge from the slowness of man's material inventions.
While the beginnings of language are hidden from us by the lapse of hundreds of thousands of unrecorded years, there are several new ways of coming to a far better understanding of them than hitherto. There are historical and contemporaneous sources of information which have been exploited of late and serve to revolutionize the older views. For example, the so-called primitive languages (until recently, never reduced to writing), afford a suffi cient proof that words are fundamentally acts, closely related to man's other conduct. Then, watching the way that babies—the Latins aptly called them infantes, or speechless creatures—learn to talk, greatly re-enforces and corroborates the evidence derived from the study of "illiterate" tribes. Lastly, anyone who has learned the trick, can substantiate the same thing if he tests the babble always going on around him.
We have already noted one way in which speech is a mode of action, a friendly gesture, not an expression of thought or con veyance of ideas as philosophers have taught us. "How do you do?" is not a question to be answered under usual circumstances. One concurs in the obvious statement, which conveys no fresh information, "Fine day, sir." These are just tail-waggings, like taking off one's hat, bowing, smiling and hand-shaking. We can, however, do far more with language ; we at times can strike with a word more safely and more effectively than with our fist ; by words we can cower, and dodge, and elude danger. Those in high est standing in all communities make a living by words, unwritten and written. Whole professions confine their activities to words, —clergymen, teachers (of the older type), lawyers, politicians; brokers deal in alternately saying "buy" or "sell." Doubtless other things lie behind this trafficking, but words are effective acts, or so intimately intertwined with them, that it is impossible to say where one sets in and the other ends. Pure talk and written words seem of ten to do the business without the intervention of so-called things. The magic operations and achievements of words can be observed everywhere and in all ages. Jacob and Esau struggled bitterly to win a blessing from their blind old father. His words were momentous. They might cause unborn generations to bow down before his son's offspring or doom him and his children to perpetual slavery.
As a clergyman of the i 8th century remarked, "Words have a certain bewitchery or fascination which makes them operate with a force beyond what we can naturally give account of." Joy and infinite woe follow in their train ; from which our wordless ancestors must have been spared. The main emotional structure of civilization—so poignant and so unique an element in human life—is largely reared on words. They serve to establish new orders of sensitiveness and excitability. Words increase the clarity of our memory to a tremendous degree and at the same time they vivify imagination, which could exist on no considerable scale without them. With these word-created adjuncts we can elaborate our hopes, fears, scruples, self-congratulations, jealousies, re morses and aspirations far beyond anything that seems justified to the onlooker; we can project them backward into the past and forward into the future. Words can rear more glorious palaces and dig deeper, darker dungeons than any made with hands.