Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise!
By virtue of an active imagination the fathers of the human race produced the mighty heritage of speech, and made the utterance of their lips a means of recalling their sensations and expressing their thoughts; in consequence of the activity of the imagination, our words become the tyrants of our convictions, and our phrases “often repeated, ossify the very organs of intelligence.”
Hence the blood of nations has often ere now been shed from an inability to see the synthesis of various truths in some single threadbare shibboleth of party; and a mistaken theory embalmed in a[150] widely-received word has retarded for centuries the progress of knowledge. For, as Bacon wisely says, “Men believe that their reason is lord over their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a reciprocal and reactionary power over the intellect,” and that “words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”
There is one moral application of the truths we have been considering, which we should do well not to omit; it is the far-reaching danger of idle[151] or careless words; it is the solemn admonition—
Guard well thy thoughts, for thoughts are heard in Heaven!
[CHAPTER VI.]
METAPHOR.
“Die Sinnlichkeit erzeugt, auf der ersten stufe der Wortschöpfung, ein Abbild; die Einbildungskraft, auf der zweiten, ein Symbol; der Verstand, endlich, auf der dritten, ein Zeichen für das object.”—Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft, s. 95.
“Every language is a dictionary of faded metaphors.”—Richter.