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In short, language is “only divine in proportion to the divinity of our nature and our soul;” it is only a gift of God because the faculty naturally resulted from the physical and spiritual organism which God had created. This seems a more natural and philosophic supposition than the belief that even the embryonic germ of language was revealed. The exercise of the faculty in the original utterance of primitive words has ceased to be called into play because it has ceased to be required. We cannot now invent original words because there is no longer any necessity for doing so. In the same way—as is well known—a deaf mute when once instructed in an artificial language loses the quick instinctive power of creating intelligible natural signs.

We conclude, then, that language is neither innate and organic; nor a mechanical invention; nor an external gift of revelation;—but a natural faculty swiftly developed by a powerful instinct, the result of intelligence[52] and human freedom which have no place in purely organic[53] functions. It was “the living product of the whole[54] inner man.” It was “not[55] a gift bestowed ready formed to man, but something coming from himself.” It is “essentially[56] human; it owes to our full liberty both its origin and its progress; it is our history, our heritage.” Objectively considered, it was the result of organism: subjectively, the product of intelligence. It was “a primitive intuition, impersonal and yet influenced by individual genius;” in a word, its character is “at once[57] objective and subjective, at once individual and general, at once free and necessary, at once human and divine.”