Therefore speech is not an independent, perfected gift of the Creator, but an incidental acquirement. Furthermore language is an attribute of society. It belongs to the people and not to the individual. The child before mentioned, if dropped by the Apaches among the bears and by them nurtured and reared, is doomed to mutism or bear-language. Man was made a social being; speech was made as a means of communicating intelligence between social beings; one individual alone never could originate, or even preserve a language.
But how then happens it, if man did not make it, and God did not give it him, that human speech is universal? With the organism of man the Creator implants the organs of speech. With the elemental and progressional life of man the Creator implants the germ of speech. In common with the element of progress and civilization, innate from the beginning, speech has developed by slow degrees through thousands of cycles and by various stages, marching steadily forward with the forward march of the intellect. Comparative philology, in common with all other sciences, accords to man a remote antiquity. Bunsen estimates that at least twenty thousand years are required for a language to pass from one rudimentary stage to another.
The mind receives impressions and the soul intuitions, and to throw them off in some form is an absolute necessity. Painful impressions tend to produce bodily contortions and dolorous sounds; pleasant impressions to illumine the features and to make musical the voice. And not only is this compressed emotion destined to find expression, but to impress itself upon others. Emotion is essentially sympathetic. Why certain objects are represented by certain sounds we can never know. Some think that between every word and the object or idea which it represents, there was in the first instance an intimate relationship. By degrees certain natural articulations became associated with certain ideas; then new names were suggested by some fancied analogy to objects already named. Everything else being equal, similar conditions and causations produce similar impressions and are expressed by similar sounds. Hence a certain uniformity between all human tongues; and a tendency in man to imitate the sounds in nature, the cries of animals, the melodies of winds and waters, accounts for the origin of many words.