Note F, [page 145].—Meaning of Proper Names—Original Fertility and Beauty.
Mr. Blunt in his “Undesigned Coincidences” (a very interesting book) has shown how important the most insignificant fact or allusion may be if quite incidental and undesigned in confirming the veracity of the historian. Applying this test as to the reality of the original fertility and beauty of the Promised Land, I think these points so often questioned nowadays are satisfactorily established. Taking the proper names of persons and places alone a very large portion of them mean “Brook,” “Fountain,” and the like; “Trees,” “Flowers,” “Fruit,” “Sheep,” and the like; “Fruitful Field,” “Plantation,” “Green Herb,” “Thicket,” “Pleasantness,” “Grape Clusters,” “Pomegranate,” “Honeycomb,” “Married Land,” and the like. These I give merely as specimens. Besides this there are also very numerous direct allusions made to these things unconnected with names. For instance, I have seen it stated in an old scripture catalogue of subjects and objects that words connected with Agriculture (including such words as Planting, Fencing, Granary, and the like) occur in the Bible more than two hundred times.
Note G, [page 169].—Philosophers—Sublime Presumption—Carlyle.
To me this digression appears to arise naturally out of our subject, and will, I hope, so appear to my reader. There are Philosophers and Philosophers, but all will listen with respect to the words of the profound Sage of Chelsea in that wonderful book—his “Sartor Resartus”—a perfect mine of intellectual golden nuggets:—
“Who am I; what is this Me? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;—some embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am; and lately was not; but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies around, written in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not. This Dreaming, this Somnambulism, is what we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing.
“What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no knowledge will come to lodge.” (Book I. Chap. 8.)
“My kind Mother, for as such I must ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: she taught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look and habitude, her own simple version of the Christian Faith.” ... “Such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the divinest in man, springs forth.” (Book II. Chap. 2.)
“But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct. Nay, properly Conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices, only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system. Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that ‘Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action.’ On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,’ which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.” (Chap. 9.)
“Deep significance of Miracles. Littleness of human Science: Divine incomprehensibility of Nature. Custom blinds us to the miraculousness of daily-recurring miracles; so do Names. Space and Time, appearances only; forms of human Thought: A glimpse of Immortality. How Space hides from us the wondrousness of our commonest powers; and Time, the divinely miraculous course of human history.” (Book III. Chap. 8, Summary.)