Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

I do not remember to have remarked that any writer notices how uniformly, in almost all languages, the same primary idea has been attached to the eye. This universal consent is the more remarkable, inasmuch as the connexion in question, though of course most appropriate and significant in itself, hardly seems to indicate the most prominent characteristic, or what we should deem to be par excellence the obvious qualities of the eye; in a word, we should scarcely expect a term derived from a physical attribute or property.
The eye is suggestive of life, of divinity, of intellect, piercing acuteness ( acies ); and again, of truth, of joy, of love: but these seem to have been disregarded, as being mere indistinctive accidents, and the primary idea which, by the common consent of almost all nations, has been thought most properly to symbolise this organ is a spring— fons , πηγή.
Thus, from
עִין
, manare, scatere , a word not in use, according to Fuerst, we have the Hebrew
עַיִן
, fons aquarum et lacrimarum , h. e. oculus . This word however, in its simple form, seems to have almost lost its primary signification, being used most generally in its secondary— oculus . (Old Testament Hebrew version, passim .) In the sense of fons , its derivative
מַעְיָן
is usually substituted.
Precisely the same connexion of ideas is to be found in the Syriac, the Ethiopic, and the Arabic.
Again, in the Greek we find the rarely-used word ὀπή, a fountain, or more properly the eye , whence it wells out,—the same form as ὀπή, oculus ; ὢψ, ὄψις, ὄπτομαι. Thus, in St. James his Epistle, cap. iii. 11.: μήτι ἡ πηγὴ ἐκ τῆς αὐτῆς ὀπῆς βρύει τὸ γλυκὺ καὶ τὸ πικρόν.