he puts his ideas before us in a rough and fragmentary way; he carries our understandings with him, but only at the cost of labour and pains on our part. And though he may be able to comprehend all that is said by the other, he has not in the same sense made the language his own, any more than the student of a foreign tongue who can translate from it with facility, but can express himself in it only lamely. Thus the infinite variety of the native and acquired capacity of different individuals comes to light in their idiom. It would be as hard to find two persons with precisely the same limits to their speech, as with precisely the same lineaments of countenance.
Once more, not all who speak the same tongue attach the same meaning to the words they utter. We learn what words signify either by direct definition or by inference from the circumstances in which they are used. But no definition is or can be exact and complete; and we are always liable to draw wrong inferences. Children, as every one knows, are constantly misapprehending the extent of meaning and application of the signs they acquire. Until it learns better, a child calls every man papa; having been taught the word sky, it calls the ceiling of a room the sky; it calls a donkey or a mule a horse—and naturally enough, since it has had to apply the name dog to creatures differing far more than these from one another. And so long as the learning of language lasts, does the liability to such error continue. It is a necessity of the case, arising out of the essential nature of language. Words are not exact models of ideas; they are merely signs for ideas, at whose significance we arrive as well as we can; and no mind can put itself into such immediate and intimate communion with another mind as to think and feel precisely with it. Sentences are not images of thoughts, reflected in a faultless mirror; nor even photographs, needing only to have the colour added: they are but imperfect and fragmentary sketches, giving just outlines enough to enable the sense before which they are set up to seize the view intended, and to fill it out to a complete picture; while yet, as regards the completeness of the filling out, the details of the work,
