our digestion.  Definitions, again, are like steps cut in a steep slope of ice, or shells thrown on to a greasy pavement; they give us foothold, and enable us to advance, but when we are at our journey’s end we want them no longer.  Again, they are useful as mental fluxes, and as helping us to fuse new ideas with our older ones.  They present us with some tags and ends of ideas that we have already mastered, on to which we can hitch our new ones; but to multiply them in respect of such a matter as thought, is like scratching the bite of a gnat; the more we scratch the more we want to scratch; the more we define the more we shall have to go on defining the words we have used in our definitions, and shall end by setting up a serious mental raw in the place of a small uneasiness that was after all quite endurable.  We know too well what thought is, to be able to know that we know it, and I am persuaded there is no one in this room but understands what is meant by thought and thinking well enough for all the purposes of this discussion.  Whoever does not know this without words will not learn it for all the words and definitions that are laid before him.  The more, indeed, he hears, the more confused he will become.  I shall, therefore, merely premise that I use the word “thought” in the same sense as that in which it is generally used by people who say that they think this or that.  At any rate, it will be enough if I take Professor Max Muller’s own definition, and say that its essence consists in a bringing together of mental images and ideas with deductions therefrom, and with a corresponding power of detaching them from one another.  Hobbes, the Professor tells us, maintained this long ago, when he said that all our thinking consists of addition and subtraction—­that is to say, in bringing ideas together, and in detaching them from one another.

Turning from thought to language, we observe that the word is derived from the French langue, or tongue.  Strictly, therefore, it means tonguage.  This, however, takes account of but a very small part of the ideas that underlie the word.  It does, indeed, seize a familiar and important detail of everyday speech, though it may be doubted whether the tongue has more to do with speaking than lips, teeth and throat have, but it makes no attempt at grasping and expressing the essential characteristic of speech.  Anything done with the tongue, even though it involve no speaking at all, is tonguage; eating oranges is as much tonguage as speech is.  The word, therefore, though it tells us in part how speech is effected, reveals nothing of that ulterior meaning which is nevertheless inseparable from any right use of the words either “speech” or “language.”  It presents us with what is indeed a very frequent adjunct of conversation, but the use of written characters, or the finger-speech of deaf mutes, is enough to show that the word “language” omits all reference to the most essential characteristics of the idea,