POWERS OF SIGNS COMPARED WITH SPEECH.

Sign language, being the mother utterance of nature, poetically styled by Lamartine the visible attitudes of the soul, is superior to all others in that it permits every one to find in nature an image to express his thoughts on the most needful matters intelligently to any other person.  The direct or substantial natural analogy peculiar to it prevents a confusion of ideas.  It is to some extent possible to use words without understanding them which yet may be understood by those addressed, but it is hardly possible to use signs without full comprehension of them.  Separate words may also be comprehended by persons hearing them without the whole connected sense of the words taken together being caught, but signs are more intimately connected.  Even those most appropriate will not be understood if the subject is beyond the comprehension of their beholders.  They would be as unintelligible as the wild clicks of his instrument, in an electric storm, would be to the telegrapher, or as the semaphore, driven by wind, to the signalist.  In oral speech even onomatopes are arbitrary, the most strictly natural sounds striking the ear of different individuals and nations in a manner wholly diverse.  The instances given by SAYCE are in point.  Exactly the same sound was intended to be reproduced in the “bilbit amphora” of Naevius, the “glut glut murmurat unda sonans” of the Latin Anthology, and the “puls” of Varro.  The Persian “bulbul,” the “jugjug” of Gascoigne, and the “whitwhit” of others are all attempts at imitating the note of the nightingale.  Successful signs must have a much closer analogy and establish, a consensus between the talkers far beyond that produced by the mere sound of words.

Gestures, in the degree of their pantomimic character, excel in graphic and dramatic effect applied to narrative and to rhetorical exhibition, and beyond any other mode of description give the force of reality.  Speech, when highly cultivated, is better adapted to generalization and abstraction; therefore to logic and metaphysics.  The latter must ever henceforth, be the superior in formulating thoughts.  Some of the enthusiasts in signs have contended that this unfavorable distinction is not from any inherent incapability, but because their employment has not been continued unto perfection, and that if they had been elaborated by the secular labor devoted to spoken language they might in resources and distinctiveness have exceeded many forms of the latter.  Gallaudet, Peet, and others maybe right in asserting that man could by his arms, hands, and fingers, with facial and bodily accentuation, express any idea that could be conveyed by words.