Adam and Eve did not owe the exercise of the operations of their soul to experience. As they came from the hands of God, they were able, by special assistance, to reflect and communicate their thoughts to each other. But I am assuming that two children, one of either sex, sometime after the deluge, had gotten lost in the desert before they would have known the use of any sign. The fact I have just stated gives me the right to make this assumption. Who can tell whether some nation owes its origin only to such an event? So that I am permitted to make the assumption. The question is to know how this budding nation made a language for itself.

The language of action and that of articulated sounds considered from their point of origin

§I So long as the children I am speaking of lived apart, the exercise of the operations of their soul was limited to that of perception and consciousness, which do not cease so long as we are awake; to that of attention, which occurred whenever some perceptions affected them in a particular manner; to that of reminiscence, when the circumstances which engaged them stayed before their minds before the connections they had formed were destroyed; and to a very limited exercise of the imagination. The perception of a need, for instance, was connected with the object which had served to relieve it.