i
THOUGHT pure and simple is as near to God as we can get; it is through
this that we are linked with God. The highest thought is ineffable; it
must be felt from one person to another but cannot be articulated. All
the most essential and thinking part of thought is done without words or
consciousness. It is not till doubt and consciousness enter that words
become possible.
The moment a thing is written, or even can be written, and reasoned
about, it has changed its nature by becoming tangible, and hence finite,
and hence it will have an end in disintegration. It has entered into
death. And yet till it can be thought about and realised more or less
definitely it has not entered into life. Both life and death are
necessary factors of each other. But our profoundest and most important
convictions are unspeakable.
So it is with unwritten and indefinable codes of honour, conventions,
art-rules—things that can be felt but not explained—these are the most
important, and the less we try to understand them, or even to think about
them, the better.
ii
Words are organised thoughts, as living forms are organised actions. How
a thought can find embodiment in words is nearly, though perhaps not
quite, as mysterious as how an action can find embodiment in form, and
appears to involve a somewhat analogous transformation and contradiction
in terms.
There was a time when language was as rare an accomplishment as writing
was in the days when it was first invented. Probably talking was
originally confined to a few scholars, as writing was in the middle ages,
and gradually became general. Even now speech is still growing; poor
folks cannot understand the talk of educated people. Perhaps reading and
writing will indeed one day come by nature. Analogy points in this
direction, and though analogy is often misleading, it is the least
misleading thing we have.
iii
Communications between God and man must always be either above words or
below them; for with words come in translations, and all the interminable
questions therewith connected.
iv
The mere fact that a thought or idea can be expressed articulately in
words involves that it is still open to question; and the mere fact that
a difficulty can be definitely conceived involves that it is open to
solution.
v
We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what
comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint
a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect
that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless
there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to
treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst
of them. But they are parvenu people as compared with thought and
action. What we should read is not the words but the man whom we feel to
be behind the words.
vi
Words impede and either kill, or are killed by, perfect thought; but they
are, as a scaffolding, useful, if not indispensable, for the building up
of imperfect thought and helping to perfect it.
vii
All words are juggles. To call a thing a juggle of words is often a
bigger juggle than the juggle it is intended to complain of. The
question is whether it is a greater juggle than is generally considered
fair trading.
viii
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual
use.
ix
Gold and silver coins are only the tokens, symbols, outward and visible
signs and sacraments of money. When not in actual process of being
applied in purchase they are no more money than words not in use are
language. Books are like imprisoned souls until some one takes them down
from a shelf and reads them. The coins are potential money as the words
are potential language, it is the power and will to apply the counters
that make them vibrate with life; when the power and the will are in
abeyance the counters lie dead as a log.