He who would penetrate into the essence of language should begin by putting aside all the philologist’s apparatus and observe how a hunter speaks to his dog. The dog follows the outstretched finger. He listens, tense, to the sound of the word, but shakes his head--this kind of man-speech he does not understand. Then he makes one or two sentences to indicate _his_ idea; he stands still and barks, which in his language is a sentence containing the question: “Is that what Master means?” Then, still in dog language, he expresses his pleasure at finding that he was right. In just the same way two men who do not really possess a single word in common seek to understand one another. When a country parson explains something to a peasant-woman, he looks at her keenly, and, unconsciously, he puts into his look the essence that she would certainly never be able to understand from a parsonic mode of expression. The locutions of to-day, without exception, are capable of comprehension only in association with other modes of speech--adequate by themselves they are not, and never have been.

If the dog, now, wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master’s stupidity in not understanding this perfectly distinct and expressive speech, he adds a vocal expression--he barks--and finally an expression of attitude--he mimes or makes signs. Here the man is the obtuse one who has not yet learned to talk.

Finally something very remarkable happens. When the dog has exhausted every other device to comprehend the various speeches of his master, he suddenly plants himself squarely, and his eye bores into the eye of the human. Something deeply mysterious is happening here--the immediate contact of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of waking-consciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the dog has become a “judge” of men, looking his opposite straight in the eye and grasping, behind the speech, the speaker.

Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of the fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word, and the grown-up talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary meanings of the words he or she is using--that is, the sound-forms in this case subserve a language that is quite other than that of words. Such languages also have their groups and dialects; they, too, can be learned, mastered, and misunderstood, and they are so indispensable to us that verbal language would mutiny if we were to attempt to make it do all the work without assistance from tone- and gesture-language. Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would be almost incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture-language in the form of punctuation.

It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses language in general with human word-language--and that not merely theoretically, but habitually in the practical conduct of all its investigations. As a result, it has remained immensely ignorant of the vast profusion of speech-modes of different kinds that are in common use amongst beasts and men. The domain of speech, taken as a whole, is far wider, and verbal speech, with its incapacity to stand alone (an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really a much more modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the “origin of human speech,” the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation of the problem. Verbal speech--for that is what is meant--never had origins at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain stage in man’s history, must not deceive us as to its position in the history of free-moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly ought not to begin with man.

But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless. For that microcosmic existences are _in plurality_ is a matter of simple self-evidence. To speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that Darwinian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of ancestors belong with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there, still the fact remains that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly and livingly sensible, of a “we,” and reaching out to one another for linkages of waking-consciousness.

Waking-being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed activity. This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm and the mechanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the plant-state--i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition, procreation, defence, attack--one side of it regularly consists in getting into touch with the macrocosm by means of the senses, whether it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of the unicellular creature or the vision of a highly developed eye that is in question. Here there is a definite _will to receive impression_; this we call orientation. But, besides, there exists from the beginning a _will to produce impression in the other_--what we call expression--and with that, at once, we have _speaking as an activity of the animal waking-consciousness_. Since then nothing fundamentally new has supervened. The world-languages of high Civilizations are nothing but exceedingly refined expositions of potentialities that were all implicitly contained in the fact of willed impressions of unicellular creatures upon one another.

But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear. The waking-consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space between particulars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is one’s first impression in the daily awakening, and hence the primitive impulse to crowd together in the midst of this alien world, to assure oneself sensibly of the proximity of the other, to seek a conscious connexion with him. The “thou” is deliverance from the fear of the being-alone. _The discovery of the Thou_, the sense of another self resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien, is the grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon animals _are_. One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny world of a water-droplet under the microscope to be convinced that the discovery of the Thou, and _with it that of the I_ has been taking place here in its simplest imaginable form. These tiny creatures know not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not merely waking-consciousness but also relations of waking-consciousness, and therewith not only expression, but the elements of an expression-_speech_.

It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great speech-groups. Expression-speech treats the Other as witness, and aims purely at effects upon him, while communication-speech regards him as a collocutor and expects him to answer. To understand means to receive impressions with one’s own feeling of their significance, and it is on this that the effect of the highest form of human expression-speech, art, depends.[179] To come to an understanding, to hold a conversation, postulates that the Other’s feeling of significances is the same as one’s own. The elementary unit of an expression-speech before witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of all expression-technique. On the other hand, the impression produced for the purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the elementary unit of all communication-technique--including, therefore, at the highest level, human speech.

Of the extensiveness of both these speech-worlds in the waking-consciousness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea. Expression-speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and strict ornament--which in the beginning coincides completely with the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle of the expression--but also the solemn ceremonial--whose web of formulæ spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that of the family[180]--and the language of costume, which is contained in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a _uniform_ significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed to a grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of to-day. We need only think of the dominant part played by the “mode” in our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the wedding-dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest’s robes, orders and decorations, mitre and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder, rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator, the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin and Montezuma--not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this _is_ religion.

The communication-languages, in which every kind of sense-impression that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have gradually evolved (so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are concerned) three outstanding signs--picture, sound, and gesture, which in the script-speech of the Western Civilization have crystallized into a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.

In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the _detachment of speaking from speech_. Of all processes in the history of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant only for a single individual act of the active waking-consciousness. Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the same. But this is no longer so when a _definite stock of signs offers itself_ for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are differentiated _from their significance_. The unity of the two not only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and, like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure extended; it is _not an organism, but a system_, which possesses its own _causal_ logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connexions of two beings.

This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes to belong to the community of waking-consciousness with which it is associated. _The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from speaking is the notion of the school._ This is fully developed in the higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the artist, the “well-brought-up” human being. And from this point each community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must know its language--i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules. In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined intensification of the depth and strictness of the form-language in every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists--as his _personal_ Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic--in a lifelong process of education and training _for_ this life. And consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of its own exigences--whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a “return to nature.” This _maestria_ extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours, with the fugues of Bach and the vase-paintings of Exekias,[181] we have the art of Attic oratory and that of French conversation, both presupposing, like any other art, a strict and carefully matured convention and a long and exacting training of the individual.

Metaphysically the significance of this separating-off of a set language can hardly be over-estimated. The daily practice of intercourse in settled forms, and the command of the entire waking-consciousness through such forms--of which there is no longer a sensed process of formation _ad hoc_, but which are just simply there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the word--lead to an ever-sharper distinction between understanding and feeling within the waking-consciousness. An incipient language is felt understandingly; the practice of speaking requires one, first, to feel the _known_ speech-medium and, secondly, to understand the intention put into it on _this_ occasion. Consequently the kernel of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of knowledge. Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but knowledge leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the sure knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to learn. “Understanding” is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that which is completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition of rigid speech to coursing blood and developing history come the _negative_ ideals of the absolute, the eternal, the universally valid--the ideals of Church and School.

But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and leads to the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and what was willed or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that lies came into the world with the separation of speech from speaking. The signs are fixed, but not so their meaning--from the outset we feel that this is so, then we know it, and finally we turn our knowledge to account. It is an old, old, experience that when one wills to say something, the words “fail” one (_versagen_, mis-say); that one does not “express oneself aright” and in fact says something other than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art--which is widespread even amongst animals (e.g., cats)--of “using words to conceal thoughts.” One says not everything, one says something quite different, one speaks formally about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact that one has said something. Or one imitates the speech of another. The red-backed shrike (_Lanius collurio_) imitates the strophes of small song-birds in order to lure them. This is a well-known hunter’s dodge, but here again established motives and signs are precedent for it, just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or the forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and mien as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language of every religion, every art, every society--we need only refer to the ideas expressed by the words “hypocrite,” “orthodox,” “heretic,” the English “cant,” the secondary senses of “diplomat,” “Jesuit,” “actor,” the masks and warinesses of polite society, and the painting of to-day, in which nothing is honest more and which in every gallery offers the eye untruth in every imaginable form.

In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in the real command of a language there is the danger that the relation between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There arises an intellectual art of _playing_ with expression, practised by the Alexandrines and the Romantics--by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in music, by Kierkegaard in religion.

_Finally, speech and truth exclude one another._[182] And in fact this is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical “judge of men,” who is all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate levels of social importance--and that instantaneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything cosmic--that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom _one_ language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the Kant stamp is never a “judge of men.”

The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without observing it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.