Chapter 29

Origin and Organic Apparatus of Language.

Man reveals his life through more than four millions of inflections ere he can speak or gesticulate. When he begins to reason, to make abstractions, the vocal apparatus and gesture are insufficient; he must speak, he must give his thought an outside form so that it may be appreciated and transmitted through the senses. There are things which can be expressed neither by sound nor gesture. For instance, how shall we say at the same time of a plant: "It is beautiful, but it has no smell." Thought must then be revealed by conventional signs, which are articulation. Therefore, God has endowed man with the rich gift of speech.

Speech is the sense of the intelligence; sound the sense of the life, and gesture that of the heart.

Soul communicates with soul only through the senses. The senses are the condition of man as a pilgrim on this earth. Man is obliged to materialize all: the sensations through the voice, the sentiments through gesture, the ideas through speech. The means of transmission are always material. This is why the church has sacraments, an exterior worship, chants, ceremonies. All its institutions arise from a principle eminently philosophical.

Speech is formed by three agents: the lips, the tongue and the soft-palate.

It is delightful to study the special rôle of these agents, the reason of their movements.

They have a series of gestures that may be perfectly understood. Thus language resembles the hand, having also its gesture.