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II. ‘Another law, which played a no less essential part in the creation of language, was the association[75] of ideas. In virtue of this law, the sound which accompanied an intuition, associated itself in the soul with the intuition itself, so closely that the sound and the intuition presented themselves to the consciousness as inseparable, and were equally inseparable in the recollection.’ This was the second step.

III. Finally, the word became a middle term of reminiscence, a tach between the external object and the inward impression. “The sound[76] became a word by forming a bond between the image obtained by the vision, and the image preserved in the memory; in other words, it acquired significance, and became an element of language. The image of the remembrance, and the image of the vision, are not wholly identical; e.g., I see a horse; no other horse that I have ever seen resembles it absolutely in colour, size, &c.: the general conception recalled by the word ‘horse’ involves only the abstracted[77] attributes common to all the animals of the same genus. It is this collection of common attributes that constitutes the significance of the sound.”