The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1896-11-12
WRITING AND THOUGHT.

Perhaps the most suggestive event Of
the meeting (of the British Association
was the address delivered by Prof
Flinders Petrie, on Man before Writ
ing in which he described the forma-
ton of ideas prior to speech and the
development of art prior to language
Our knowledge of the first must, Of
course, be founded mainly upon ober-
walton of children and of animals, in
the former of whom ideas are plainly
antecedent to the words by which
they afterwards come toS be expressed,
while in the latter they are altogether
independent of them. For the second
Prof Petrie took his illustrations from
the pictorial writing of the ancient
Egyptians, which, as it was presumably
or certainly prior to the discovery of
alphabetical writing, remains as a
monument of intelligent expression
apart from words.
On the basis thus furnished he rests
the somewhat sweeping conclusion
that the present generation is drunk
en- with writing" that we "let it over
ride the growth of our minds and the
common use of our Senses" and that
the servant, speech, has come to be
mistaken for the master, thought He
goes even further than this, and ex-
presses his belief that writing is but
hurtful hindrance when it takes the
place of the direct knowledge Of the
senses, and that the senses cannot
grow or feed the mind when the fet-
tiers of writing are allowed to hold
them back from the living touch of
nature. He cites the Baconian aphor-
ism that words are the money of fools,
/ but the counters of wise men, and be-
lieves that the prevailing trust in
writing has clearly deadened the MEM
DRY of the senses, which is always more
ready in those who do not read and
| that in some measure it has deadened
| the senses themselves.
The assumptions underlying this
argument will appear very startling to
many people who would probably be
| said by Prof Petrie to be living under
the yoke which he condemns, and who
have been accustomed to regard an
| incapacity to read writing as the direst
of all misfortunes, and even as an in
surmountable barrier against the
| attainment of any high degree of men,
| tai activity. Dickens, who in many re-
| spects must be regarded as fair ex-
| ponent of the views of the man in the
! street, has no better way of empha-
| sizing the intellectual darkness of his
| vagabond than to describe him as
| shuffling along, unfamiliar with the
! shapes, and in utter darkness as to the
meaning, of those mysterious symbols,
! so abundant over the shops, and at the
| corner of streets, and on the doors, and
| in the windows; and he has not
| thought it necessary, keen observer
| though he was, to provide him with
any additional acuteness of sense
| memory by way of compensation for,
! or consequence of, his deficiency. 1t is
with a doctrine which runs counter
| to all ordinary prepossessions, and to
| be compelled, as it were, to turn these
| prepossessions over in the mind and to
| see what can really be urged in de-
| fence of them
The widely prevalent belief quoted by
| Prof. Petrie that words are the instru-
ments of thought, and that no thought
| is possible without language, is clearly
/ one that must be abandoned. No lines
| can he drawn between the thoughts of
| the animal, the savage, and of the
| child. and they are all, as far as they
] go, independent Of language. But it