29 July 1814

Logic

2

Ch.2 End &c.

3. Operations

21

8

(a) The transitive was the only original use.

+ But as to them consult Locke &c.

So much more conspicuous {however} is the transitive use of discourse or language, that, in comparison with it, the intransitive seems scarcely to have obtained notice. (a) +

In importance however it is second only to the transitive use. By its transitive use the collection of these signs is only the vehicle of thought; by its intransitive use it is an instrument employed in the creation and fixation of thought itself. Unclothed as yet in words, or stripped of them, thoughts are but dreams: like /as/ the shifting clouds of the sky, they float in the mind one moment, and vanish out of it the next. But for these fixed and fixative signs, nothing that ever bore the name of art or science could ever have come into existence. Whatsoever may have been the more remote and recondite causes, it is to the superior amplitude to which, in respect of the use made of it in his own mind, man has been able to extend the mass of his language, that, as much as to anything else, man, it should seem, stands more immediately indebted for whatsoever superiority in the scale of perfection and intelligence he possesses, as compared with those animals who come nearest to him in this scale.

Without language, not only would men have been incapable of communicating each man his thoughts to other men, but, compared with what he actually possesses, the stock of his own ideas would, in point of number, have been as nothing; while each of them, taken by itself, would have been as flitting and indeterminate as {those of the animals which he deals with at his pleasure.}

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