WONDER
There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, in manhood, and we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind will not entirely pass away. If we analyse this feeling of wonder carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned—that I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say 'I wonder' we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple with these novel expressions or experiences, grasp them, it may be, know them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we ourselves may not be able to find it. Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance, from what might be called a fertile ignorance; an ignorance which, if we look back at the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the mother of all human knowledge.
Chips.
WORDS
What people call 'mere words' are in truth the monuments of the fiercest intellectual battles; triumphant arches of the grandest victories won by the intellect of man. When man had formed names for body and soul, for father and mother, and not till then, did the first art of human history begin. Not till there were names for right and wrong, for God and man, could there be anything worthy of the name of human society. Every new word was a discovery, and these early discoveries, if but properly understood, are more important to us than the greatest conquests of the kings of Egypt and Babylon. Not one of our greatest explorers has unearthed more splendid palaces, than the etymologist. Every word is the palace of a human thought, and in scientific etymology we possess the charm with which to call these ancient thoughts back to life.
Chips.