What, then, is the word (e.g. rainbow) to us? In itself it is worthless, a mere hieroglyphic, which cannot even teach us one iota about the phenomenal world. We are very far from agreeing with the “divers philosophers” mentioned by Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives[205] of Windsor, who “hold that the lips is parcel of the mind.” We still believe that objects do exist in the external world, even although it be absurd to say that they resemble our “ideas” of them. Although to us they can only exist as “ideas,” and not as objects, we do not therefore deny that they have a real independent existence of their own. And precisely in the same way, whatever may be the derivation of the word truth, and however much our conceptions of that word must be modified by the laws of thought, we yet believe, as firmly as we believe anything, that truth has an independent, eternal, immutable existence; that it is infinitely more than a mere “flatus vocis;” that its indestructible idea, its original, its antetype, exists in the Divine[206] mind, and that if man and the works of man were to sink for ever into annihilation in the flames of a fiery surge, truth and wisdom would still exist, even as they existed when God prepared the heavens, “from the[207] beginning, or ever the earth was.”
There is then no reason to complain of the materialism of language, or to be afraid of the conclusions which nominalists like Horne Tooke and his Dutch predecessor would willingly draw from the origin of words. No system of materialism will account for grammar, that form of language which is due to the pure reason. No treatise on the history of words will be able to point to any external source as sufficient to account for the relation[208] of words among themselves. No language is a mere collection of words; and Locke in all that he has written about words has offered no proof that any system of syntax is ultimately due to sensible ideas. His followers have attempted this, but they have failed. An eminent modern scholar has observed that a “careful[209] dissection of the whole body of inflected speech will make it plain, that while words are merely outward symbols, designating certain notions of the mind, those notions do not stand related in all cases, just as the words or inflections which express them, and that we cannot by means of mere words convert into physical truth all that is logically and metaphysically true.”
Language is not what it has been called, “la pensée[210] devenue matière.” The very expression involves a contradiction. Words can be nothing but symbols, and, at the best, very imperfect ones. To make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought, is to bring down the infinite to the measure of the finite. Our words mean far more than they express, they shadow forth far more than it is in their power to define. When two men converse their words are but an instrument; the speaker is descending from[211] thoughts to words, the listener rising from words to thoughts. Onomatopœia and metaphor are sufficient to provide us with the material part of language, the articulate sounds; but to translate those sounds into signs or words is the effort of a faculty which transcends the sense. On the one hand we have a spiritual perception,[212] the thought; on the other hand a material accident, the combination of articulate utterances;—but what power can bridge the abysm between the two? The reason, and the reason only. Without reason, the use of metaphor would be impossible, and the result of imitation would be a collection of sounds as meaningless as the screams of a parrot or the chatterings of an ape.
Surely these considerations are sufficient to show that there is no danger to true philosophy in the inferences to which language leads us. But, indeed, the whole of nominalism rests on a vast petitio principii. Because our primitive vocabulary is deduced solely from corporeal or sensible images, it is assumed, per saltum, that our intellect only admits of conceptions directly derived from the agency of the senses, and that therefore thought is nothing but sensation. But the consciousness of the metaphor has vanished for ages from language, and when we use such a word as “spirit,” we do not even remember that our word means in itself no more than “a whisper of the wind.” Our primitive conceptions admitted only of expression by means of a material analogy:—this is the sole ground of nominalism, and it will not bear the enormous structure of inferences built upon it; 1st, that our conceptions were themselves originally material; and, 2ndly, that they are and must be so still, because we are incapable of any others.
Finally, there are in every language “a vast number of words which may be explained by the idea, although the idea cannot be discovered by the word, as is the case with whatever belongs to the mystery of the mind.” Such words are sacrifice, sacrament, mystery, eternity. The conclusion to which they lead us is a plain one, and it is one which will render us fearless of the arguments which the sensational philosophy has so long paraded with triumph as the main support of its unbeliefs. It is that “Words are at most intellectual symbols, and symbols are, at the best, words. Neither the words of language, nor the symbols of religion, are the basis and reality of thought or of worship; they have no reality but in reason and conscience, and are of no use but in so far as they express this reality, and are so[213] understood and applied.”
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE LAWS OF PROGRESS IN LANGUAGE.
The history of almost every language points to the action of certain general law’s of progress, which laws are psychological as well as linguistic, i.e. they correspond and are parallel to the growth and progress of the human mind. They may be briefly summed up by saying that languages advance from exuberance to moderation, from complexity and confusion to grammatical regularity, and from synthesis to analysis. The explanation and illustration of these laws will occupy the present chapter.
1st. Languages advance from exuberance to moderation, by eliminating superfluities.