Even when we think we are thinking in words, we do so only in half measure.  A running accompaniment of words no doubt frequently attends our thoughts; but, unless we are writing or speaking, this accompaniment is of the vaguest and most fitful kind, as we often find out when we try to write down or say what we are thinking about, though we have a fairly definite notion of it, or fancy that we have one, all the time.  The thought is not steadily and coherently governed by and moulded in words, nor does it steadily govern them.  Words and thought interact upon and help one another, as any other mechanical appliances interact on and help the invention that first hit upon them; but reason or thought, for the most part, flies along over the heads of words, working its own mysterious way in paths that are beyond our ken, though whether some of our departmental personalities are as unconscious of what is passing, as that central government is which we alone dub with the name of “we” or “us,” is a point on which I will not now touch.

I cannot think, then, that Professor Max Muller’s contention that thought and language are identical—­and he has repeatedly affirmed this—­will ever be generally accepted.  Thought is no more identical with language than feeling is identical with the nervous system.  True, we can no more feel without a nervous system than we can discern certain minute organisms without a microscope.  Destroy the nervous system, and we destroy feeling.  Destroy the microscope, and we can no longer see the animalcules; but our sight of the animalcules is not the microscope, though it is effectuated by means of the microscope, and our feeling is not the nervous system, though the nervous system is the instrument that enables us to feel.

The nervous system is a device which living beings have gradually perfected—­I believe I may say quite truly—­through the will and power which they have derived from a fountain-head, the existence of which we can infer, but which we can never apprehend.  By the help of this device, and in proportion as they have perfected it, living beings feel ever with great definiteness, and hence formulate their feelings in thought with more and more precision.  The higher evolution of thought has reacted on the nervous system, and the consequent higher evolution of the nervous system has again reacted upon thought.  These things are as power and desire, or supply and demand, each one of which is continually outstripping, and being in turn outstripped by the other; but, in spite of their close connection and interaction, power is not desire, nor demand supply.  Language is a device evolved sometimes by leaps and bounds, and sometimes exceedingly slowly, whereby we help ourselves alike to greater ease, precision, and complexity of thought, and also to more convenient interchange of thought among ourselves.  Thought found rude expression, which gradually among other forms assumed that of words.  These reacted upon thought, and thought again on them, but thought is no more identical with words than words are with the separate letters of which they are composed.