The Art of Thinking

Four of men stood in need of speech to learn to think, they must have stood in still greater need of the art of thinking to invent that of speaking. And though we could conceive how the sounds of the voice came to be taken for the conventional interpreters of our ideas, we can scarce form any tolerable conjectures about its birth. A sublime art which philosophers still behold at such a prodigious distance from its perfection that I never met with one of them bold enough to affirm it would ever arrive there. The first language of man, the most universal and most energetic of all languages, in short, was the cry of nature.