Children, they urge, are often evidently thinking and reasoning, though they can neither think nor speak in words.  If you ask me to define reason, I answer as before that this can no more be done than thought, truth or motion can be defined.  Who has answered the question, “What is truth?” Man cannot see God and live.  We cannot go so far back upon ourselves as to undermine our own foundations; if we try to do so we topple over, and lose that very reason about which we vainly try to reason.  If we let the foundations be, we know well enough that they are there, and we can build upon them in all security.  We cannot, then, define reason nor crib, cabin and confine it within a thus-far-shalt-thou-go-and-no-further.  Who can define heat or cold, or night or day?  Yet, so long as we hold fast by current consent, our chances of error for want of better definition are so small that no sensible person will consider them.  In like manner, if we hold by current consent or common sense, which is the same thing, about reason, we shall not find the want of an academic definition hinder us from a reasonable conclusion.  What nurse or mother will doubt that her infant child can reason within the limits of its own experience, long before it can formulate its reason in articulately worded thought?  If the development of any given animal is, as our opponents themselves admit, an epitome of the history of its whole anterior development, surely the fact that speech is an accomplishment acquired after birth so artificially that children who have gone wild in the woods lose it if they have ever learned it, points to the conclusion that man’s ancestors only learned to express themselves in articulate language at a comparatively recent period.  Granted that they learn to think and reason continually the more and more fully for having done so, will common sense permit us to suppose that they could neither think nor reason at all till they could convey their ideas in words?

I will return later to the reason of the lower animals, but will now deal with the question what it is that constitutes language in the most comprehensive sense that can be properly attached to it.  I have said already that language to be language at all must not only convey fairly definite coherent ideas, but must also convey them to another living being.  Whenever two living beings have conveyed and received ideas, there has been language, whether looks or gestures or words spoken or written have been the vehicle by means of which the ideas have travelled.  Some ideas crawl, some run, some fly; and in this case words are the wings they fly with, but they are only the wings of thought or of ideas, they are not the thought or ideas themselves, nor yet, as Professor Max Muller would have it, inseparably connected with them.  Last summer I was at an inn in Sicily, where there was a deaf and dumb waiter; he had been born so, and could neither write nor read.  What had he to do with words or words with him?  Are