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!_
“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.
If it be impossible for us to _know_ any single particle of matter in itself; if we are unable to do more than express the _relations_ of any single external phenomenon; how can we hope to give an accurate nomenclature to the _noumena_, the inward emotions, the immaterial conceptions, the abstract entities which we cannot touch or handle, and which have an existence only for the intellect and the heart? How can we make the modulations of the voice the symbols[152] for the passions of the soul?
In mathematics there is a line, known as the _asymptote_, which continually approaches to a curve, but, being produced for ever, does not cut it, though the distance between the asymptote and the curve becomes, in the course of this approach, less than any assignable quantity. Language, in relation to thought, must ever be regarded as an _asymptote_. They can no more _perfectly_ coincide than any two particles of matter can be made absolutely to touch each other. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil.” Now, as ever, a curtain of shadow must hang between--