Most people, asked if they can think without speech, would probably answer, “Yes, but it is not easy for me to do so.  Still I know it can be done.”  Language is but a garment!  But what if language is not so much a garment as a prepared road or groove?  It is, indeed, in the highest degree likely that language is an instrument originally put to uses lower than the conceptual plane and that thought arises as a refined interpretation of its content.  The product grows, in other words, with the instrument, and thought may be no more conceivable, in its genesis and daily practice, without speech than is mathematical reasoning practicable without the lever of an appropriate mathematical symbolism.  No one believes that even the most difficult mathematical proposition is inherently dependent on an arbitrary set of symbols, but it is impossible to suppose that the human mind is capable of arriving at or holding such a proposition without the symbolism.  The writer, for one, is strongly of the opinion that the feeling entertained by so many that they can think, or even reason, without language is an illusion.  The illusion seems to be due to a number of factors.  The simplest of these is the failure to distinguish between imagery and thought.  As a matter of fact, no sooner do we try to put an image into conscious relation with another than we find ourselves slipping into a silent flow of words.  Thought may be a natural domain apart from the artificial one of speech, but speech would seem to be the only road we know of that leads to it.  A still more fruitful source of the illusive feeling that language may be dispensed with in thought is the common failure to realize that language is not identical with its auditory symbolism.  The auditory symbolism may be replaced, point for point, by a motor or by a visual symbolism (many people can read, for instance, in a purely visual sense, that is, without the intermediating link of an inner flow of the auditory images that correspond to the printed or written words) or by still other, more subtle and elusive, types of transfer that are not so easy to define.  Hence the contention that one thinks without language merely because he is not aware of a coexisting auditory imagery is very far indeed from being a valid one.  One may go so far as to suspect that the symbolic expression of thought may in some cases run along outside the fringe of the conscious mind, so that the feeling of a free, nonlinguistic stream of thought is for minds of a certain type a relatively, but only a relatively, justified one.  Psycho-physically, this would mean that the auditory or equivalent visual or motor centers in the brain, together with the appropriate paths of association, that are the cerebral equivalent of speech, are touched off so lightly during the process of thought as not to rise into consciousness at all.  This would be a limiting case—­thought riding lightly on the submerged crests of speech, instead of jogging along with it, hand in hand.  The modern psychology has shown us how powerfully symbolism is at work in the unconscious mind.  It is therefore easier to understand at the present time than it would have been twenty years ago that the most rarefied thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an unconscious linguistic symbolism.