Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian ‘inner’ minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources. But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot. Indeed, it may be that the intellectual explosion in recent evolutionary time is due as much to this linguistically-enabled extension of cognition as to any independent development in our inner cognitive resources.#
Grammarians . . . may have a great influence on the language, and the rules they work out may well react on the linguistic use of their country; but grammarians cannot create a language – they are simply given it.#
Language is indeed very deficient, in regard of terms to express precise truth concerning our own minds, and their faculties and operations. Words were first formed to express external things; and those that are applied to express things internal and spiritual, are almost all borrowed, and used in a sort of figurative sense. Whence they are, most of them, attended with a great deal of ambiguity and unfixedness in their signification, occasioning innumerable doubts, difficulties, and confusions, in inquiries and controversies about things of this nature. But language is much less adapted to express things existing in the mind of the incomprehensible deity, precisely as they are.#
Although man is not, perhaps, the world’s only liar he is surely the world’s foremost liar. Certainly his reliance upon symbolic communication exceeds that of other animals to such an extent that it is probably for man alone that the transmission of false information becomes a serious problem.#
[The infant] learns to trust before he learns, or perhaps can learn, language. It may be argued that it is the development of this trust that enables him to accept symbolic messages, first from the mother and then from others.#
The concept of the sacred has not only been made possible by symbolic communication, but it has made symbolic communication (upon which human adaptation rests) possible. This implies that the idea of the sacred is as old as language and that the evolution of language and of the idea of the sacred were closely related, if not indeed bound together in a single mutual causal process. It may be suggested, further, that the emergence of the sacred was perhaps an instance of the operation of Romer’s Rule, for it possibly helped to maintain the general features of some previously existing social organization in the face of new threats posed by an ever-increasing capacity for lying.#