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.