[122] If this book were not merely an essay, we should have had to study language as an instrument of the practical life in its relations to the creative imagination, especially the function of analogy, in the extension and transformation of the meanings of words. Works on linguistics are full of evidence on this point. One could do better still by attending exclusively to the vernacular, to slang, which shows us creative force in action. "Slang," says one philologist, "has the property of figuring, expressing, and picturing language.... With it, however low its origin, one could reconstruct a people or a society." Its principal, not only, means, are metaphor and allegory. It lends itself equally to methods that degrade or ennoble existing words, but with a very marked preference for the worse or degrading meanings.
[123] Ample information on this point will be found in the work of Espinas, Les Origines de la Technologie.
[124] The same correspondent, without my having asked him in regard to this, gives me the following details: "When about seven years old I saw a locomotive, its fire and smoke. My father's stove also made fire and smoke, but lacked wheels. If, then, I told my father, we put wheels under the stove, it would move like a locomotive. Later, when about thirteen, the sight of a steam threshing-machine suggested to me the idea of making a horseless wagon. I began a childish construction of one, which my father made me give up," etc. The tendency toward mechanical invention shows itself very early in some children—we gave examples of it before. Our inventor adds: "My imagination was strongest at about the age of 25 to 35 (I am now 45 years old). After that time it seems to me that the remainder of life is good only for producing less important conceptions, forming a natural consequence of the principal conceptions born of the period of youth."
[125] See above, Part Two, [chapter V].
[126] L. Bourdeau, Les Forces de l'Industrie, Paris, 1884. This very substantial work, abounding in facts, conceived after a systematic plan, has aided us much in this study.
[127] Op. cit., pp. 45-46.
[128] Quoted by L. Bourdeau (op. cit., p. 354), who also mentions many other attempts: an anonymous Scot in 1753, Lesage of Geneva, 1780, Lhomond (France, 1787), Battencourt (Spain, 1787), Reiser, a German (1794), Salva (Madrid, 1796). The insufficient study of dynamic electricity did not permit them to succeed.
[129] E. Veron, L'Esthétique, p. 315.
[130] L. Bourdeau, op. cit., p. 233.