PRIMEVAL IMAGINATION WORKING ON NATURE—LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY.
The thought with which the last chapter closed opens up views which are
boundless. Through the imaginative apprehension of outward Nature, and
through the beauty inherent in it, we get a glimpse into the connection
of the visible world with the realities of morality and of religion. The
vivid feeling of Beauty suggests, what other avenues of thought more
fully disclose, that the complicated mechanism of Nature which Science
investigates and formulates into physical law is not the whole, that
it is but the case or outer shell of something greater and better than
itself, that through this mechanism and above it, within it, and beyond
it, there lie existences which Science has not yet formulated—probably
never can formulate—a supersensible world, which, to the soul, is more
real and of higher import than any which the senses reveal. It is
apprehended by other faculties than those through which Science works,
yet it is in no way opposed to science, but in perfect harmony with it,
while transcending it. The mechanical explanation of things—of the
Universe—we accept as far as it goes, but we refuse to take it as the
whole account of the matter, for we know, on the testimony of moral and
spiritual powers, that there is more beyond, and that that which is
behind and beyond the mechanism is higher and nobler than the mechanism.
We refuse to regard the Universe as only a machine, and hold by the
intuitions of faith and of Poetry, though the objects which these let in
on us cannot be counted, measured, or weighed, or verified by any of the
tests which some physicists demand as the only gauges of reality. This
ideal but most real region, which the visible world in part hides from
us, in part reveals, is the abode of that supersensible truth to which
conscience witnesses,—the special dwelling-place of the One Supreme Mind.
The mechanical world and the ideal or spiritual are both actual. Neither
is to be denied, and Imagination and Poetry do their best work when they
body forth those glimpses of beauty and goodness which flash upon us
through the outer shell of Nature’s mechanism.
But
“Descending
From these imaginative heights,”
we must turn to the humbler task of showing by a few concrete examples
how Imagination has actually worked on the plastic stuff supplied by
Nature. To this the readiest way would be to turn to the works of the
great poets, and see how they, as a matter of fact, have dealt with the
outward world. Before doing so, however, a few words may be given to the
marks which Imagination has impressed on Nature in the prehistoric and
preliterary ages. The record of this process lies imbedded in two fossil
creations, Language and Mythology.
_Language._—In the very childhood of the race, long before regular
poetry or literature were thought of, there was a time when Imagination,
working on the appearances of the visible world, was the great weaver of
human speech, the most powerful agent in forming the marvelous fabric of
language. It has long been well known to all who have given attention
to the subject, that Metaphor has played a large part in the original
formation of language. But how large that part is has only been recently
made evident by the researches of Comparative Philology. Metaphor, as
all know, means “the transferring of a name from the object to which it
properly belongs to other objects which strike the mind as in some way
resembling the first object.” Now this is the great instrument which
works at the production of a large portion of language. And Imagination
is the power which creates metaphor, which sees resemblances between
things, seizes on them, and makes them the occasion of transferring the
name from the well known original object to some other object resembling
it, which still waits for a name. Even in our own day newly-invented
objects are often named by metaphor, but metaphors thus consciously
formed belong to a later age. Long before such metaphors were formed,
Imagination had been silently and unconsciously at work, naming the
whole world of mental and spiritual existences by metaphors taken from
visible and tangible things. It is quite a commonplace that the whole
vocabulary by which we name our souls, our mental states, our emotions,
abstract conceptions, invisible and spiritual realities, is woven in the
earliest ages by the Imagination from the resemblances which it seemed
to perceive between the subtle and still unnamed things of mind, and
objects or aspects of the external world. This is not so easily seen in
the English language, because owing to our having borrowed almost all
our words expressive of mental things from other languages, the marks of
metaphor are to our eyes obliterated. In fact all our words for mental
and spiritual things are like coins which, having passed through many
hands, have had the original image and superscription nearly quite worn
out. None the less these are still to be traced by those who have their
eyes exercised to it by reason of use. But it is manifest in German,
which has spun a large part of its philosophical vocabulary out of native
roots. It may be seen, in some measure, in Latin, but much more in Greek
philosophical language.
This whole subject has been so well handled and so amply illustrated
by Professor Max Müller in the Second Series of his Lectures on “the
Science of Language,” and in Archbishop Trench’s instructive and
delightful volumes on “Words,” that I can but refer to these works and
make here a few excerpts from them as examples of the general principle
of thought to which I have adverted. Locke, as Professor Müller shows,
long ago asserted that in all languages “names which stand for things
which fall not under our senses have had their first rise from sensible
ideas.”
Our word “spirit” comes from the Latin _spiritus_, the breath, and
_spiro_, to breathe; so _animus_, the soul, a seat of the affections, and
_anima_, the living principle, are connected with the Greek ἄνεμος, wind.
Indeed, _anima_ is sometimes used in Latin for a breeze, as readers of
Horace will remember, and all are connected with the Greek verb ἄω, to
blow. πνεῦμα, the Greek word used in Scripture to express spirit and a
spiritual being, originally means wind and breath, from the verb πνέω, to
blow and to breathe. Again, ψυχή, life and soul, is connected with ψύχω,
which in Homer means to breathe, to blow. So that in all these cases we
see that men, when they first became aware of an invisible and spiritual
principle within themselves, named it by an act of imagination from the
most impalpable entity their senses perceived,—the wind, or the breath.
Again, take our word “ideal.” It comes from the Greek ἰδέα, from ἰδεῖν,
to see, originally a word of sight, expressing the look or appearance
of a thing, which Plato in time employed to express the most spiritual
entities, the supersensible pattern of all created things. Again, our
words “imagination” and “imaginative,” how have they been formed? The
Latin word _imaginatio_ occurs but rarely; more frequently the verb
_imaginor_, to picture to one’s self; more frequent still is _imago_,
as if _imitago_, from _imitor_, to imitate. This last is connected with
the Greek verb μιμέομαι, meaning also to imitate; and the original of
these, and all the cognate words, both Latin and Greek, is the Sanscrit
root _mâ_, to measure. So from this very palpable process of measuring
the land, there have been spun all the subtle and delicate words that
express the working of imagination. So the mental processes expressed by
“apprehend,” “comprehend,” and “conceive,” are all derived from bodily
processes, and mean respectively to grasp at a thing with the hand,
to grasp a thing together, to take and hold together. Again, the word
“perceive,” from the Latin _percipere_, was in the language of husbandry
used for the farmer gathering in the fruits of his fields and storing
them in his garner. Was then the mind conceived of as a husbandman who
gathers in the notices of sense from the outer world, and stores them in
an invisible garner? To “inculcate:” here is another mental word borrowed
from husbandry. It means to tread or stamp firmly in with the heel, and
was used of the farmer, who, with his foot or some instrument, carefully
pressed home into the earth the seed which he had sown. We see how well
the metaphor can be transferred to the process of careful teaching—to the
clergyman, for instance, who inculcates religious truth. These are but a
few obvious and well-known samples of a process which has gone on in all
languages, and has furnished forth our whole stock of names for mental
operations and spiritual truths. And Imagination has been the power which
has presided over the process, the interpreter mediating between two
worlds, and naming the unseen realities of the inner world by analogies
which she perceives in them to the sensible objects of the outer.
Disciples of the Hume philosophy will see in these facts of language a
confirmation of their master’s dictum that all ideas and thoughts are but
weak and faded copies of the more vivid impressions first stamped on the
senses. But those who have been learners in another school, to whom the
world of thought has more power and reality than the world of sense, they
will read in these facts a different lesson, that He has made all things
double, the one over against the other, and that the thought by which
both are pervaded is one.
Truly then has it been said, “Language is fossil poetry.” And any one
who will set himself to spell out those fossils, and the meanings they
contain, will find a wonderful record of the way in which the mind of
man has wrought in their formation. This record will lead him down into
layers of thought as varied as any which the geologist deciphers, filled
with more subtle and marvelous formations than any animal or vegetable
fossils. For full exposition and illustration of the mental processes by
which so large a portion of language has been created, the reader should
turn to Professor Müller’s volume, to which I have already referred.
Wholly different from this primeval process of naming things by
unconscious metaphors is the modern metaphor, as we find it in the poets.
When Shelley speaks of the moon as
“That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,”
he is using a metaphor, and a very fine one, but he does so with perfect
consciousness that it is a metaphor, and there is not the least danger of
the poet, or any one else, confounding the moon with any maiden, earthly
or heavenly.
Again, when Mrs. Hemans addresses the moaning night-winds as
“Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!
At whose tones my heart within me burns,”
there is no likelihood of any confusion between the winds and mortal
singers, no chance of the metaphor ever growing into mythology.
Once more: to return to Shelley—
“Winter came; the wind was his whip
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,
His breath was a chain that without a sound
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne
By the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”
Here is not only metaphor, but personification so strong and vivid
that it is only kept from passing into mythology by the conscious and
reflective character of the age in which it was created.
_Mythology._—The other great primitive creation wrought by the action
of the human imagination, in its attempts to name and explain the
appearances of visible Nature, was ancient mythology. That huge
unintelligible mass of fable which we find imbedded in the poets of
Greece and Rome has long been a riddle which no learning could read.
But just as modern telescopes have resolved the dim masses of nebulæ
into distinct stars, so the resources of that modern scholarship called
Comparative Philology seems at last on the way to let in light on the
hitherto impenetrable secret of the origin of religious myths. It has
gradually been made probable that the Olympian gods, whatever capricious
shapes they afterward assumed, were in their origin but the first feeble
efforts of the human mind to name the unnamable, to give local habitation
and expression to the incomprehensible Being who haunted men’s inmost
thoughts, but was above their highest powers of conception. In making
this attempt, the religious instinct of our Aryan forefathers wrought,
not through the abstracting or philosophical faculty, but through the
thought-embodying, shaping power of imagination, by which in later ages
all true poets have worked, that in the dim foretime fashioned the whole
fabric of mythology. It was the same faculty of giving a visible shape to
thought.
As soon as man wakes up to think of himself, what he is, how he is
here, he feels that he depends not on himself, but on something other
than and independent of himself; that there is One on whom “our dark
foundations rest.” “It is He that made us, and not we ourselves;” this
is the instinctive cry of the human heart when it begins to reflect
that it is here, and to ask how it came here. This consciousness of
God, which is the dawn of all religion, is reached not as a conclusion
reasoned out from premises, not as a law generalized from a multitude
of facts, but as a first instinct of intelligence, a perception flashed
on the soul as directly as impressions are borne in upon the sense,
a faith which may be afterward fortified by arguments, but is itself
anterior to all argument.[8] When this thought awoke, when men felt the
reality of “that secret thing which they see by reverence alone,” how
were they to conceive of it, how name it? for a name was necessary to
retain any thought as a permanent possession, much more this thought,
the highest of all thoughts. The story of the well-known Dyaus, or the
formation of this name for the Supreme God, has been told so often of
late by Professor M. Müller, in his various works, that I should not have
ventured to repeat it after him once again, had it not been necessary for
the illustration of my present subject. It has been proved that in almost
all the Aryan languages—Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic—the
name for the Highest, the Supreme Being, has sprung from one root. “The
Highest God received the same name in the ancient mythology of India,
Greece, Italy, Germany, and retained the name whether worshiped on the
Himalayan mountains or among the oaks of Dodona, or in the Capitol of
Rome, or in the forests of Germany.” The Sanscrit Dyaus, the Greek Zeus,
the Latin Jupiter (Jovis), the Teutonic Tiu (whence our Tuesday), are
originally one word, and spring from one root. That root is found in
Sanscrit, in the old word _dyu_, which originally meant sky and day.
Dyaus therefore meant the bright heavenly Deity. When men began to think
of the incomprehensible Being who is above all things, and comprehends
all things, and when they sought to name Him, the name must be taken from
some known visible thing, and what so natural as that the bright, blue,
boundless, all-embracing, sublime, and infinite vault, which contains man
and all that man knows, should be made the type and symbol to furnish
that name?
When the old Aryan people, before their dispersion, thus named their
thought about the Supreme as the Shining One, Professor Müller does not
think that it was any mere personification of the sky, or Nature-worship,
or idolatry that led to their so naming Him. Rather he thinks that that
old race were still believers in one God, whom they worshiped under
the name Heaven-Father. This inquiry, however, lies beyond our present
purpose. What it more concerns us now to note is that it was a high
effort of thought to make the blue, calm, all-embracing sky the type
and symbol of the Invisible One, and that the power which wrought out
that first name for the Supreme was Imagination working unconsciously,
we might almost say involuntarily—the same power which in its later
conscious action, under control of the poet’s will, has found a vent for
itself in Poetry.
In the same way Comparative Philology accounts for all the stories about
the beautiful youth Phœbus Apollo, Athene, and Aphrodite.
“I look,” Professor Müller says, “on the sunrise and sunset, on the daily
return of night and day, on the battle between light and darkness, on
the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted every day, every
month, every year, in heaven and in earth, as the principal subject of
early mythology. I consider that the very idea of Divine powers sprang
from the wonderment with which the forefathers of the Aryan family
stared at the bright (_deva_) powers that came and went no one knew
whence or whither, that never failed, never faded, never died, and were
called immortal, _i. e._, unfading, as compared with the feeble and
decaying race of man. I consider the regular recurrence of phenomena
an almost indispensable condition of their being raised, through the
charms of mythological phraseology, to the rank of immortals: and I give
a proportionably small place to the meteorological phenomena, such as
clouds, thunder, and lightning, which, although causing for a time a
violent commotion in nature and in the heart of man, would not be ranked
together with the immortal bright beings, but would rather be classed
together as their subjects or as their enemies.”
In this eloquent passage Professor Müller expresses his well-known “Solar
Theory” of mythology. At the close of the passage he alludes to a counter
theory which has been called the Meteoric, which makes mythology find
its chief field, not in the calm and uniform phenomena of the sun’s
coming and going, and of day and night, but in the occasional and violent
convulsions of storm, thunder, and earthquake. Not what is fixed and
uniform, but what is sudden and startling, most arrests the imagination,
according to this latter theory. But it does not concern us here to
discuss the claims of these rival views, but rather to remark that in
both alike it is the imagination in man to which the aspects of heaven,
whether uniform or occasional, calm or turbulent, make their appeal,
and that when, according to that tendency of language noted by Professor
Müller, words assume an independent power and dominate over the mind
instead of being dominated by it, it is Imagination which throws itself
into the tendency, and takes occasion from it to weave its many-tissued,
many-colored web of mythologic fable.
But however adequate such theories may be to people the whole Pantheon
of Olympus, they seem quite out of place when brought to account for the
inhabitants of this lower world. Nothing can seem less likely than that
the conceptions of Achilles and Hector can have arisen from myths of the
dawn. Characters that stand out so firmly drawn, so human and so natural,
in the gallery of human portraiture, can hardly have been shaped out
of such skyey materials. One could as readily believe that Othello or
Macbeth had such an origin.
It is easy to laugh at those early fancies which men dreamed in the
childhood of the world, and took for truth; and to congratulate ourselves
that we, with our modern lights of Science, have long outgrown those
mythic fables; but with the exacter knowledge of the world’s mechanism
which Science has taught us, is there not something we have lost?
Whither has gone that fine wonder with which the first men gazed on
the earth and the heavens from the plains of Iran and Chaldea? It lies
buried beneath the mass of second-hand thought and information which
Science has heaped upon us. Would it not be well if we could win back
the truth, of which a dull mechanical or merely logical way of thinking
has long robbed us, that the outward world, with all its movements, is
not a mere dead machine, going by ropes and pulleys and cog-wheels, but
an organism full of a mysterious life, which defies our most subtle
analysis, and escapes us when placed in the crucible? This feeling, that
things are alive and not dead, rests at the bottom of all mythology, the
one root of truth underlying the huge mass of fable. How to regain this
perception of something divine in Nature, more than eye and ear discover,
and to do this in harmony with all the facts and laws which Science has
ascertained, this is a problem reserved for thoughtful men in the future
time.