Words

I recently began reading Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant. The book is the first in an interminable series called "The Story of Civilization." I found a passage today about language that I found particularly insightful:

In the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to individual objects or experiences sensorily -- for the most part visually -- remembered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of objects as distinct from their qualities. Without words as class names one might think of this man, or that man, or than man; one could not think of Man, for the eye sees not Man but only men, not classes but particular things. The beginning of humanity came when some freak or crank, half animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain to invent the first common noun, the first sound-sign that would signify a group of like objects: house that would mean all houses, man that would mean all men, light that would mean every light that ever shone on land or sea. From that moment the mental development of the race opened upon a new and endless road. For words are to thoughts what tools are to work; the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.

What a wonderful observation. And leave it to a volume originally published in the 1930s to refer to humanity's beginning as coming from "some freak or crank."