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

It is delightful to study the special role 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.

Chapter II.

Elements of Articulate Language.

Every language is composed of consonants and vowels.  These consonants and vowels are gestures.  The value of the consonant is the gesture of the thing expressed.  But as gesture is always the expression of a moral fact, each consonant has the intrinsic character of a movement of the heart.  It is easy to prove that the consonant is a gesture.  For example, in articulating it, the tongue rises to the palate and makes the same movement as the arm when it would repel something.

The elements of all languages have the same meaning.  The vowels correspond directly to the moral state.

There is diversity of language because the things we wish to express vary from difference in usage and difference of manner and climate.  What we call a shoe, bears among northern people a name indicating that it protects the feet from the cold; among southern people it protects the feet from the heat.  Elsewhere the shoe protects the feet against the roughness of the soil; and in yet other places, it exists only as a defensive object—­a weapon.

These diverse interpretations require diverse signs.  This does not prove the diversity of language, but the diversity of the senses affected by the same object.

Things are perceived only after the fashion of the perceiver, and this is why the syllables vary among different peoples.

Nevertheless, there is but one language.  We find everywhere these words:  I an active personality, me a passive personality, and mine an awarding personality.  In every language we find the subject, the verb and the adjective.

Every articulate language is composed of substantive, adjective and copulative ideas.

All arts are found in articulation.  Sound is the articulation of the vocal apparatus; gesture the articulation of the dynamic apparatus; language the articulation of the buccal apparatus.  Therefore, music, the plastic arts and speech have their origin and their perfection in articulation.

It is, then, of the utmost importance to understand thoroughly the elements of speech, which is at the same time a vocalization and a dynamic.  Without this knowledge no oratorical art is possible.

Let us now hasten to take possession of the riches of speech.

Chapter III.

The Oratorical Value of Speech.

The privilege of speech may be considered under a double aspect, in itself and in its relations to the art of oratory.