323. Let us consider the position of speech among human modes of self-expression. The whole person of one human being is more or less expressive to others of his kind. In repose it tells of action and emotion in the past; in movement it shows action and emotion as now going forward. Gesture - the way in which the body is held - is even now used along with speech as the most general term for communication.

Now, if we are thus communicating by the movement of our muscles, we shall naturally seek out such groups of muscles as we can move the most rapidly and delicately. There are four such groups, namely: the muscles (i) of the eye and orbit; (2) of the mouth and throat; (3) of the fingers, and (4) of the toes.

Three of these groups we all of us use. With the muscles of the eye and orbit we express emotion; with the muscles of mouth and throat we express both emotion and definite ideas; with the fingers we write; and the experience moreover of such men as are born without fingers has shown us that the toes can be trained to nearly equal efficiency; as with certain handless copyists of pictures familiar for many years now in Continental galleries.

Now among many ways of self-expression which can be educed from these groups of muscles, taken singly or together, one great system has dominated the rest. Above all things men have needed definite sound to carry the message to a distance in space, and fixed record in order to preserve it in time. Spoken language has become an absolute necessity for any intellectual life much above the level of brutes; and written language - a symbolic and summarised gesture - has become an absolute necessity for anything which we can call civilisation. The constant use of throat and fingers for verbalisation has relegated to the background all other forms of gesture.

There is, however, no à priori ground for supposing that language will have the power to express all the thoughts and emotions of man. It may indeed be maintained that the inevitable course of its development tends to exhibit more and more clearly its inherent limitations. "Every language," it has been said, "begins as poetry and ends as algebra." To use the terms employed in this work, every language begins as a subliminal uprush and ends as a supraliminal artifice. Organic instincts impel to primitive ejaculation; unconscious laws of mind shape early grammar. But even in our own day - and we are still in the earth's infancy - this naïvete of language is fast disappearing. The needs of science and of commerce have become dominant. Science has deliberately created for herself an arbitrary system of signs; - either actual arrangements of letters and numerals, or technical vocabularies, constructed on elaborate plans. Commerce is endeavouring to reach the same algebraical pitch, with bookkeeping, telegraphic codes, pidgin English, Volapuk and the like.

Of course, the development of language is not left entirely to the counting-house and the laboratory. In other directions a spiritualisation of human speech is being pushed on, and our vocabulary, based as it is on concrete objects and direct sensations, is refined for the expression of philosophical thought. But this is as though one were to try to chip flint arrow-heads into razors; nor can we wonder if our supraliminal manipulation leaves us with an instrument less and less capable of expressing the growing complexity of our whole psychical being.

324. What then, we may ask, is the attitude and habit of the subliminal self likely to be with regard to language? Is it not probable that other forms of symbolism may retain a greater proportional importance among those submerged mental operations which have not been systematised for the convenience of communication with other men?

I think that an intelligent study of visual and motor automatism will afford us sufficient proof that symbolism, at any rate pictorial symbolism, becomes increasingly important as we get at the contents of those hidden strata. Telepathic messages, especially, which form, as we shall see, the special prerogative or characteristic of subliminal communication, seem to be conveyed by vague impression or by inward or externalised picture oftener than by articulate speech. And I may so far anticipate later discussion of automatic writings (whether self-inspired or telepathic), as to point out a curious linguistic quality which almost all such writings share. The "messages" of a number of automatists, taken at random, will be sure to resemble each other much more closely than do the supraliminal writings of the same persons. Quite apart from their general correspondence in ideas - which belongs to another branch of our subject - there is among the automatic writings of quite independent automatists a remarkable correspondence of literary style. There is a certain quality which reminds one of a translation, or of the compositions of a person writing in a language which he is not accustomed to talk.

These characteristics appear at once in automatic script, even of the incoherent kind; they persist when there is no longer any dream-like incoherence; they are equally marked, even when, as often happens, the automatic script surpasses in intelligence, and even in its own kind of eloquence, the products of the waking or supraliminal mind.

And side by side and intercurrent with these written messages come those strange meaningless arabesques which have been baptized as "spirit-drawings" - though they rarely show any clear trace of the operation of an external intelligence. Instances of this form of automatism are described in a book called Spirit Drawings: a Personal Narrative, by W. M. Wilkinson, some account of which is given in Appendix 811 A (Vol. II.). These complex and fanciful compositions - often absolutely automatic - appear to me like a stammering or rudimentary symbolism; as though the subliminal intelligence were striving to express itself through a vehicle perhaps more congenial to its habits than articulate language.