THE CONSTITUTION OF THOUGHT. 495 point through a series of terms. And as the system of pro- duction expands, the time will come when the dull, quasi- instinctive procedure, the constant, uninquiring following of habit, with occasional meetings of special incidental oc- currences with flashes of analytic insight, will serve no longer. Man will be forced to think more constantly and consecutively by the very progress of the works of his own hands. The arrested significance which he is giving to the forms he fashions only for the sake of other forms will at last have to be distinctly apprehended and language may help him to apprehend it. He will have to give the deter- minative bearing of one class of physical abstractions, if we may so call them, that he has fashioned, upon other classes, a distinct and controlled recognition in his mind. He must -deal with things more and more definitely as having a mediate and conditional significance. So his creations be- come the awakeners of his ideas to new power : that into which he has put something of his own mind calls him to think. Thought is here supposed to be applied to objects and their behaviour always under natural conditions, whatever elements of manipulation may enter in. Such application can hardly be supposed to proceed very far before being accompanied by a similar application to processes under natural conditions with no actual element of manipulation entering in though not, perhaps, without some gradually refined consciousness resembling that which goes with mani- pulation. And here the instrument of assertive speech, immeasurably more subtle, penetrative, and comprehensive in its operations than the fashioning hands, may begin to hasten forward * distinctly to take the lead as the means of the development of thought. I am disposed to believe that man's more peculiar use of language may be regarded as an extension of what he does in making. A certain assertive 2 element foreign, I suppose, to " animal language " is an important psychical character- istic of the utterance of a statement. And this I would trace to the mastery of things as a maker being representatively carried out to regions where such mastery is not at the moment in operation, and may be impossible. Doing may underlie saying : the actual arranging may lend substance 1 1 am not assuming that no unthinking sort of speech exists at all -before tools. 2 1 use the word with a tinge of its vigorous ordinary modern sense.
