One knows how a shepherd can take in the numbers of a flock at a glance.

For the higher flights of experience, however, especially when the unseen and merely possible has to be dealt with, percepts must give way to concepts; massive consciousness must give way to thinking by means of representations pieced together out of elements rendered distinct by previous dissection of the total impression; in short, a concrete must give way to an analytic way of grasping the meaning of things.

Moreover, since thinking is little more or less than, as Plato put it, a silent conversation with oneself, to possess an analytic language is to be more than half-way on the road to the analytic mode of intelligence--the mode of thinking by distinct concepts.
If there is a moral to this chapter, it must be that, whereas it is the duty of the civilized overlords of primitive folk to leave them their old institutions so far as they are not directly prejudicial to their gradual advancement in culture, since to lose touch with one's home-world is for the savage to lose heart altogether and die; yet this consideration hardly applies at all to the native language.

If the tongue of an advanced people can be substituted, it is for the good of all concerned.

It is rather the fashion now-a-days amongst anthropologists to lay it down as an axiom that the typical savage and the typical peasant of Europe stand exactly on a par in respect to their power of general intelligence.