LANGUAGE The differentia of man--the quality that marks him off from the other animal kinds--is undoubtedly the power of articulate speech.

Thereby his mind itself becomes articulate.

If language is ultimately a creation of the intellect, yet hardly less fundamentally is the intellect a creation of language.

As flesh depends on bone, so does the living tissue of our spiritual life depend on its supporting framework of steadfast verbal forms.

The genius, the heaven-born benefactor of humanity, is essentially he who wrestles with "thoughts too deep for words," until at last he assimilates them to the scheme of meanings embodied in his mother-tongue, and thus raises them definitely above the threshold of the common consciousness, which is likewise the threshold of the common culture.
There is good reason, then, for prefixing a short chapter on language to an account of those factors in the life of man that together stand on the whole for the principle of freedom--of rational self-direction.
Heredity and environment do not, indeed, lie utterly beyond the range of our control.