Since these animal cries have purposive significance similar to that of language, in what respect do they differ from language? I shall try to give a definite answer to this question.

First, they are inarticulate while language is articulate. And what precisely does ‘inarticulate’ mean? It means (1) that these cries are not explicitly articulated sounds with clear-edged beginnings, middles, and endings, as are the word-sounds ‘h-a-p’ and ‘h-o-p,’ or ‘d-i-g’ and ‘d-i-p,’ so that one sound can be clearly and definitely differentiated from another; and (2), as a corollary to this, the sounds have no conventional meanings; that is, they are not invested each with an arbitrary and definite connptation quite apart from any natural sound-suggestion which they may have, so that one sound stands exclusively for one thing, another sound for another thing, as do the words of language like ‘wolf and ‘bear.’ In other words, the animals’ cries are natural cries as distinguished from the conventionalized sounds which we call words, and they have the characteristic vagueness or indefiniteness of significance which all natural sounds have. In this respect of natural vagueness of significance the cries of animals resemble the mechanical sounds in nature, though differing from these in expressing purpose.

In the preceding pages we have given a descriptive outline of the Space-Time picture of the life and mind of the world as it has emerged by successive steps towards freedom and individuality, up to and including animal life and intelligence. But there is as yet no language; and, from all that we can discover, no power nor problem in the animal nature which would bring language into existence. There seems to be some barrier that holds the animal’s mind back from that realm of free mind into which man has entered, where language first emerges. What is the barrier? Can it be intellectually grasped and described? These are the two questions.

What, then, is the barrier between the animals and man, that excludes the animals from man’s mental world? It is the barrier primarily of Space and Time. This, I think, can be made clear.

First, consider Time. It is clear, to begin with, that the dog holds in his memory, at least in some dim way, the time-span, or the time experiences, within the physical duration of his own life. The dog will go to-day where he found food yesterday. Darwin’s dog recognized him after an absence of five years and two days. Odysseus’s dog, Argus, according to Homer, recognized his master, even through his beggar’s disguise, after an absence of twenty years. There is no doubt that the dog has memory of this kind, which shows that he has some grasp of time within his own life-span. Whether it is conscious memory with an explicit measurement of a stretch of time between a point in past time and the present moment, as is the case with man’s memory, is extremely doubtful. It seems to be rather a recognition of the master’s identity, or sameness, through a succession of experiences, each of which is for the dog a present experience without any explicit differentiation of time into past and present.

If we now relate this unique characteristic of man in a definite and explicit way with the general Time-and-Space picture which we have been drawing, we shall see plainly the full significance of this last step—where mind in man emerges to freedom from space and time, and encompasses them in its grasp—in the unfolding life and mind of the world.

Recall again our working hypothesis, the organic unity of the world from matter to man. For aeons, if science speaks truly, our earth, to human perception at least, stood stark and naked, a mineral mass. In the process of time this seeming mineral mass clothed itself in life, in sensitivity, in mind. These later emergents, if the world is, as science asserts, an organic whole, are not adventitious decorations like tinsel on a Christmas tree, nor alien visitants extraneous to reality. They are the children of the earth who owe to her creating and shaping energy their multivarious forms and powers, physical and mental, and derive from her directly and indirectly their hourly nourishment, all without design on their own part.

Obviously, what man required was a system of mental symbols of some kind or other in the inner world of mind, to represent the system of actual types in the outward world of sense. Each species or type of object in the outward world of nature would require its corresponding symbol in the inward world of mind. Without such mental symbols no articulated advance could be made in that process which we now speak of familiarly as the accumulation of the knowledge of the world. The advance could be made only step by step, and each step would have to be recorded, registered, and fixed by means of its symbol within the rising mental fabric. The discovery or creation of adequate symbols of reason, then, was an obvious necessity for man even to get definitely started at all upon the elaboration or actualization of the world of mind.

‘Behold at last the poet’s sphere!
But who,’ I said, ‘suffices here?
For, ah! so much he has to do;
Be painter and musician too!
. . . .
No painter yet hath such a way,
Nor no musician made, as they;
And gather’d on immortal knolls
Such lovely flowers for cheering souls.
Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach
The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach.’

ARNOLD, Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön.

Nevertheless, the sensuous sound element does remain as the substratum of articulate language, and as language issues from the lips it issues in the same time sequence as does pure sound, for example, in music. But here is the unique difference which separates language fundamentally from the other four arts. As language issues from the lips, the pure ‘timeness’ of it, as we might say, is immediately transmuted and absorbed in the conventionalized connotation which is arbitrarily given to the differentiated sounds. Hence in the thought-process of intellecting the world by language the actual space-time world is translated first into pure time, that is, into sound, but is immediately, in the very act as it were, retranslated by the conventionalization of sound into its former space-time structure within the world of mind.

And now we come to the final step in the making of language. By the conventionalization of sound in oral speech, which is the actual language, man accomplished two things. First, he changed the vague suggestiveness of natural sounds into perfectly defined, articulated, limited sound symbols, that can be clearly differentiated from one another by the ear, as ‘rat,’ ‘cat.’ Second, by conventionalization he transformed the pure time symbols into space-time symbols, as in the sentence, ‘The bird sings,’ where ‘bird’ is a representation of space, ‘sings’ of time, though both are carried from the lips of the speaker to the ear of the listener upon the common substratum of sound, that is, time.

It may be worth while now to summarize in a page or two the view of world evolution as outlined above, a spiral structure of which man’s created language forms the final story. In this summary I adopt the organic hypothesis, which assumes that mind is a basic and permanent element in the world, self-determining and purposive in its nature, and the directing agency in the evolutionary process throughout its history. While the acceptance or rejection of this metaphysical hypothesis is not essential to the acceptance or rejection of the scientific exposition of the birth and structure of language given in the preceding pages, the choice of one or other hypothesis does, of course, make a rather complete difference in the diction and phraseology chosen to set out the specific exposition. To a mechanist many of the terms which I have used may appear altogether unwarranted or quite wrong.