1. It is a syntax of position. There are no “parts of speech,” i. e., terms having a fixed linguistic function: substantive, adjective, verb, etc. The terms (gestures) borrow their grammatical value from the place which they occupy in the series, and the relations between the terms are not expressed.
2. It is a fundamental principle that the signs are disposed in the order of their relative importance, everything superfluous being omitted.
3. The subject is placed before the attribute, the object (complement) before the action, and, most frequently, the modified part before the modifying.
Some examples will serve for the better comprehension of the ordinary procedure of this syntax. To explain the proposition: After running, I went to sleep, the order of gesture would be: to run, me, finished, to sleep.—My father gave me an apple: apple, father, me, give.—The active state is distinguished from the passive by its position: I struck Thomas with a stick; me, Thomas, strike, stick. The Abbé Sicard, on asking a deaf-mute, Who created God? obtained the answer: God created nothing. Though he had no doubt as to the meaning of this inversion, he asked the control question, Who makes shoes? Answer, shoes makes cobbler.
The dry, bare character of this syntax is evident: the terms are juxtaposed without relation; it expresses the strictest necessity only; it is the replica of a sterile, indistinct mode of thought.
Since we are endeavoring by its aid to fix an intellectual level, it is not without interest to compare it with a syntax that is frequent among the weak in intellect. “These do not decline or conjugate; they employ a vague substantive, the infinitive alone, or the past participle. They leave out articles, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, reject prepositions, employ nouns instead of pronouns. They call themselves “father,” “mother,” “Charles,” and refer to other people by indeterminate substantives, such as man, woman, sister, doctor, etc. They invert the regular order of substantives and adjectives.”[32] Although this is a case of mental regression, hence not rigorously comparable with a mind that is sane but little developed, the mental resemblance between the two syntaxes, and especially the absence of all expression of relations deserves to be signalised, because it cannot be the result of a fortuitous coincidence. It is the work of intellectual inferiority and of relative discontinuity of thought.
There is little to say about numeration in deaf-mutes. When untrained, they can count up to ten with the help of their fingers, like many primitive people. Moreover (according to Sicard and Gérando), they make use of notches upon a piece of wood or some other visible mark.
To conclude, their mental feebleness, known since the days of antiquity by Aristotle, by the Roman law which dispossessed them of part of their civil rights, later on by many philosophers who refused even to concede them memory, arises from their inaptitude to transcend the inferior forms of abstraction and kindred operations. In regard to the events of ordinary life, in the domain of the concrete (admitting, as is not always done, that there are individual varieties, some being intelligent, and others stupid), deaf-mutes are sufficiently apt to seize and to comprehend the practical connexion between complex things.[33] But the world of higher concepts, moral, religious, cosmological, is closed to them. Observations to this effect are abundant, though here again—as must be insisted on—they reveal great individual differences.
Thus, a deaf-mute whose friends had tried to inculcate in him a few religious notions, believed before he came under instruction that the Bible was a book that had been printed in heaven by workmen of Herculean strength. This was the sole interpretation he gave to the gestures of his parents, who endeavored to make him understand that the Bible contains a revelation, coming from an all-powerful God who is in heaven.[34] Another who was taken regularly to church on Sunday, and exhibited exemplary piety, only recognised in this ceremony an act of obedience to the clergy. There are many similar cases on record. Others on the contrary, seek to inquire into, and to penetrate, the nature of things. W. James[35] has published the autobiography of two deaf-mutes who became professors, one at the asylum of Washington, the other in California.
The principal interest attaching to the first is the spontaneous appearance of the moral sense. After stealing small sums of money from the till of a merchant, he accidentally took a gold coin. Although ignorant of its value, he was seized with scruples, feeling “that it was not for a poor man like him, and that he had stolen too much.” He got rid of it as best he could, and never began again.
The other biography—from which we make a few brief extracts—may be taken as the type of an intelligent and curious deaf-mute. He was not placed in an institution until he was eleven years old. During his childhood he accompanied his father on long expeditions, and his curiosity was aroused as to the origin of things: of animals and vegetables, of the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars (at eight or nine years). He began to understand (from five years) how children were descended from parents, and how animals were propagated. This may have been the origin of the question he put to himself: whence came the first man, first animal, first plant, etc. He supposed at first that primæval man was born from the trunk of a tree, then rejected this hypothesis as absurd, then sought in various directions without finding. He respected the sun and moon, believed that they went under the earth in the West, and traversed a long tunnel to reappear in the East, etc. One day, on hearing violent peals of thunder, he interrogated his brother, who pointed to the sky, and simulated the zigzag of the lightning with his finger; whence he concluded for the existence of a celestial giant whose voice was thunder. Puerile as they may be, are these cosmogonic, theological conceptions inferior to those of the aborigines of Oceanica and of the savage regions of South America, who, nevertheless, have a vocal idiom, a rudimentary language?
To sum up. That which dominates among the better gifted, is the creative imagination: it is the culminating point of their intellectual development. Their primitive curiosity does not seem inferior to that of average humanity; but since they cannot get beyond representation by images they lack an instrument of intellectual progress.
ANALYTICAL GESTURES.
The question of signs is so closely allied to our subject—the evolution of general ideas—that we must insist upon the language of gesture as an instrument of analysis, before going on to speech—of which it is an imperfect substitute.
St. George Mivart (Lessons from Nature) gives the following as a complete classification of every species of sign, omitting those that are written:
1. Sounds which are neither articulate nor rational, such as cries of pain, or the murmur of a mother to her infant.
2. Sounds which are articulate but not rational, such as the talk of parrots, or of certain idiots, who will repeat, without comprehending, every phrase they hear.
3. Sounds which are rational but not articulate, such as the inarticulate ejaculations by which we sometimes express assent to or dissent from given propositions.
4. Sounds which are both rational and articulate, constituting true “speech.”
5. Gestures which do not answer to rational conceptions, but are merely the manifestations of emotions and feelings.
6. Gestures which do answer to rational conceptions, and are therefore “external” but not “oral” manifestations of the verbum mentale.
This last group, the only one which concerns us for the moment, would to my thinking be conveniently designated by the term analytic gestures, as opposed to the synthetic gestures which manifest the different modes of affective life, and constitute what is called the expression of the emotions.
This language of gesture, intellectual and non-emotional, which translates ideas, not sentiments, is more widely distributed than is generally known, among primitive peoples. It has been observed in very distinct regions of our globe; among the aborigines of North and South America, the Bushmen, etc. It is a means of communication between tribes who do not speak the same language; often, indeed, it is an indispensable auxiliary to these indigent idioms. The most important work on this subject is by an American, Col. Mallery, who with indefatigable patience has collected and interpreted the gestures in use among the Indians of North America.[36] This work alone reveals the variety of sign-language, which hardly ever leaves the region of practical life: description of the countries traversed, hints for travellers, directions to be followed, distances, time required for halts, manner, habits, and dispositions of tribes. We may cite a brief quotation, from another author:
“Meeting an Indian, I wish to ask him if he saw six waggons drawn by horned cattle, with three Mexican and three American teamsters, and a man mounted on horseback. I make these signs: I point ‘you,’ then to his eyes, meaning ‘see’; then hold up all my fingers on the right hand and the forefinger on the left, meaning ‘six’; then I make two circles by bringing the ends of my thumbs and forefingers together, and, holding my two hands out, move my wrists in such a way as to indicate waggon-wheels revolving, meaning ‘waggons’; then, by making an upward motion with each hand from both sides of my head, I indicate ‘horns,’ signifying horned cattle; then by first holding up three fingers, and then by placing my extended right hand below my lower lip and moving it downward, stopping it mid way down the chest, I indicate ‘beard,’ meaning Mexican; and with three fingers again, and passing my right hand from left to right in front of my forehead, I indicate ‘white brow’ or ‘pale face.’ I then hold up my forefinger, meaning one man, and by placing the forefinger of my left hand between the fore and second finger of my right hand, representing a man astride of a horse, and by moving my hands up and down, give the motion of a horse galloping with a man on his back. I in this way ask the Indian, ‘You see six waggons, horned cattle, three Mexicans, three Americans, one man on horseback?’... The time required to make these signs would be about the same as if you asked the question verbally.”[37]
Tylor says that the language of gestures is substantially the same all the world over, and this assertion is confirmed by all who have practised and studied it. Its syntax resembles that of deaf-mutes, and it is unnecessary to repeat it. The parable of the Prodigal Son was translated by Mallery into analytic gestures; and from this language translated afresh into the spoken tongue: “Formerly, man one, sons two,” etc., etc. The comparison of the two texts is instructive: in the one, the thought unfolds itself by a movement of complete analysis with relations and shades of meaning: in the other, it resembles a line of badly quarried blocks, put together without cement.
After what has already been said, there is nothing surprising in finding a fundamental analogy, or even identity, between the language of deaf-mutes and the analytic gestures of primitive peoples. It was indeed pointed out by Akerly in an institution in New York in the beginning of the century. Gérando gave a good many examples,[38] remarking that the “gestures of reduction,” i. e., abridged gestures, are often enough identical in the two cases. Mallery brought together some Utah Indians, and a deaf-mute, who gave them a long account of a marauding expedition, followed by a dialogue: they understood each other perfectly.
The language of analytical gesture is thus a substitute for spoken language, and this leads us to a question which, though purely speculative, deserves our attention for a moment.
At a time when it was almost universally admitted that man is unable to think without words, Dugald Stewart ventured to write: “If men had been deprived of the organs of voice or the sense of hearing, there is no doubt that they would have invented an alphabet of visible signs wherewith to express all their ideas and sentiments.”[39] This is no rash assertion; we have just seen proofs of it. But is this pantomime-language susceptible of progress?
We can hardly doubt that if humanity, with its proper cerebral constitution, had at the same time been unable to speak, the language of analytic gesture would, by the initiative of certain inventors, under press of necessity, and by the influence of co-operation and of life in common, have advanced beyond the imperfect phase at which it has remained; and no one can say what it might have become in the accumulated effort of centuries. Speech, too, had to traverse an embryonic period, and oral language developed slowly and painfully. At the same time it is an exaggeration to say that “phonetic language assumed its extraordinary importance almost by chance, and that we cannot doubt that the language of mimicry, had it been fashioned by social relations during secular ages, would be hardly inferior to speech in force, facility, and variety.”[40] In fact, man had originally two languages at his disposal; he used the one and the other interchangeably and simultaneously. They helped each other in the development of ideas that were as yet chaotic and vacillating. Under these conditions, speech prevailed; the language of gesture remained only as a survival or a substitute. There is nothing fortuitous in this: speech has won because of its greater value.
First, for practical reasons. And this is the capital factor, since the main point is to communicate with one’s fellow-men. The language of gesture—besides monopolising the hands, and thus keeping them from other work—has the great disadvantage of not carrying far, and of being impossible in the dark. To this we may add the reasons cited above: its vague character, and (with regard to the abstract) its imitative nature, which forbids emancipation, or complete detachment, from the concrete, or the translation of that which cannot be represented. It is to be remarked, however, that the invention of “reduced” signs seems to be a transition from pure imitation to symbolism, a first step in the path of emancipation.
Speech, on the contrary, is transmitted to a distance, and challenges darkness. It is dependent upon the ear, an organ whose sensations are infinite in number and kind; and in the finest expression of ideas and of feelings, language participates in this opulence. It lends itself to variety, delicacy, to an extreme complexity of movement in a small space, with very little effort. We are, for the moment, citing physiological reasons only. But these will suffice to show that the triumph of speech has not been fortuitous, but that it is a very special case of natural supremacy.[41]
In conclusion, there is nothing to add as to generic images, and the logic of images. The important part which they play amongst children and deaf-mutes testifies to their extension and importance as inferior forms of abstraction, without in any way altering their essential nature, as previously determined.