At any rate, it will
be enough if I take Professor Max Muller's own definition, and say
that its essence consists in a bringing together of mental images
and ideas with deductions therefrom, and with a corresponding power
of detaching them from one another. Hobbes, the Professor tells us,
maintained this long ago, when he said that all our thinking
consists of addition and subtraction--that is to say, in bringing
ideas together, and in detaching them from one another.
Turning from thought to language, we observe that the word is
derived from the French langue, or tongue. Strictly, therefore, it
means tonguage. This, however, takes account of but a very small
part of the ideas that underlie the word. It does, indeed, seize a
familiar and important detail of everyday speech, though it may be
doubted whether the tongue has more to do with speaking than lips,
teeth and throat have, but it makes no attempt at grasping and
expressing the essential characteristic of speech. Anything done
with the tongue, even though it involve no speaking at all, is
tonguage; eating oranges is as much tonguage as speech is.
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