Animals, like men, have reflex actions and sensations, though nature
enters the animal by force, takes it by assault, conquers and enslaves
it. With man is born language, because he is resistance to nature,
governance of his own body, and liberty. "Language is liberation; even
to-day we feel that our soul becomes lighter, and frees itself from a
weight, when we speak." Man, before he attains to speech, must be
conceived of as accompanying all his sensations with bodily movements,
mimetic attitudes, gestures, and particularly with articulate sounds.
What is still lacking to him, that he may attain to speech? The
connexion between the reflex movements of the body and the state of the
soul. If his sentient consciousness be already consciousness, then he
lacks the consciousness of consciousness; if it be already intuition,
then he lacks the intuition of intuition. In sum, he lacks the _internal
form of language_. With this comes speech, which forms the connexion.
Man does not choose the sound of his speech. This is given to him and he
adopts it instinctively.
When we have accorded to Steinthal the great merit of having rendered
coherent the ideas of Humboldt, and of having clearly separated
linguistic from logical thought, we must note that he too failed to
perceive the _identity_ of the internal form of language, or "intuition
of the intuition," as he called it, with the aesthetic _imagination_.
Pages:
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328