LANGUAGE.
Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the
vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and threefold degree.
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to
give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to
give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if
traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material
appearance. _Right_ means _straight_; _wrong_ means _twisted_. _Spirit_
primarily means _wind_; _transgression_, the crossing of a _line_;
_supercilious_, the _raising of the eyebrow_. We say the _heart_ to
express emotion, the _head_ to denote thought; and _thought_ and
_emotion_ are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated
to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is
made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but
the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and
savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into
verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import,--so
conspicuous a fact in the history of language,--is our least debt to
nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are
emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every
appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that
state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural
appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a
fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is
innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate
affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge
and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us,
is respectively our image of memory and hope.
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the
flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that
propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is
conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life,
wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love,
Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is
not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men.
And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its
eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That
which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation
to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in
itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language,
as the FATHER.
It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these
analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not
the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and
studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings,
and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither
can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without
man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no
value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human
history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnæus’ and Buffon’s
volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these
facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect,
applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in
any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and
agreeable manner. The seed of a plant,--to what affecting analogies in
the nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse,
up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed,--“It is sown
a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” The motion of the earth
round its axis, and round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These
are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent of
an analogy between man’s life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain
no grandeur or pathos from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are
very unimportant, considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of
relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen
to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits,
even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become
sublime.
Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human
thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures.
As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its
infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented
by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original
elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the
idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest
eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the
last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion
of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never
loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to
the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all
men relish.
A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to
utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his
love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The
corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When
simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the
prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of
power, and of praise,--and duplicity and falsehood take place of
simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the
will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old
words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency
is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the
fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the
understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in
every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make
others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves
clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on
the language created by the primary writers of the country, those,
namely, who hold primarily on nature.
But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to
visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding
certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and
God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar
facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes
itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his
intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less
luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which
furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and
brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is
spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of
the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause
through the instruments he has already made.
These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses
for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities.
We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light
flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the
orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their
fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without
heed,--shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or
the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in
national councils,--in the hour of revolution,--these solemn images
shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the
thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble
sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and
shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them
in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the
keys of power are put into his hands.
3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of
particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn
informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion
of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the
dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand
cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we
have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers
using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that
it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the
question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have
mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously
give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is
emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature
is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to
those of matter as face to face in a glass. “The visible world and the
relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.” The axioms
of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, “the whole is greater
than its part;” “reaction is equal to action;” “the smallest weight may
be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated
by time;” and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well
as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and
universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to
technical use.
In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of
nations, consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or
parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird
in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will
beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; ’Tis hard to
carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last ounce broke
the camel’s back; Long-lived trees make roots first;--and the like. In
their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the
value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true of
all fables, parables, and allegories.
This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet,
but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It
appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder
this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not
blind and deaf;
----“Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,
Without our special wonder?”
for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than
its own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has
exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world
began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of
Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits
the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes
by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a
necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and
night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preëxist in
necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of
preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last
issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the
circumference of the invisible world. “Material objects,” said a French
philosopher, “are necessarily kinds of _scoriæ_ of the substantial
thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation
to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a
spiritual and moral side.”
This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of “garment,” “scoriæ,”
“mirror,” &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of
subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. “Every scripture is
to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,”--is the
fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of
truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By
degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects
of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form
significant of its hidden life and final cause.
A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we
contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since “every
object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” That which was
unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a
part of the domain of knowledge,--a new weapon in the magazine of
power.