LANGUAGE.
LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature
is the vehicle, 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
Linnaeus' 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, cotemporaneous 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; 'T is
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,
preexist 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 _scoriae_ 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,"
"scoriae," "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.