صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

transferences, those metaphorical uses of words, which are based upon the identity of force, substance and their limitations, as well as from those based upon analogy or the identity of relations. Here are ideas which rise above the plane of the senses, with the objects of which they have, properly, no analogy. They are ideas, however, which do not stand alone, self-manifested; they cannot be thought apart from sensuous presentations, apart from concrete images of a more or less complex nature, which images are, therefore, their very body, but which, nevertheless, must be distinguished as images. Such images are properly termed symbols, and the extension of meaning which words receive in this quarter may be termed symbolical. Words that have been thus transmuted bear the same relation to the idéas they embody that art-forms bear to their contents.

To give a few examples. The word right means straight; wrong means bent, crooked. But the significance of these words does not stop here; the mind figures to itself the most fundamental distinction in morals by the contrast of straightness with crookedness, and thus immediately sees in these words-right and wrong—a higher significance than is naturally theirs. So, too, upright may carry to the mind something more than is written on the face of the word, since it symbolizes truth and firmness of moral character. Legere, as we have seen, obtains, metaphorically, the meaning of to read; but it takes a still higher flight, and becomes, symbolically, to choose, for what is choice, as the mind necessarily figures it, but the picking out of one thing from a number. So, too, the compound intelligere means to perceive, to understand, which is to pick out one thing from among others, to select the essential from the incidental. Not only the names of acts or processes, but also those of concrete things often obtain a like symbolical significance. Such words grow in meaning with the growth of man's insight. Virtue, primarily simple manhood, has already an abstract value from the figurative force imparted by the suffix; but when the moral sense rises to the perception that the highest quality of man does not lie simply in strength of limb and brute force,

but in a certain spiritual strength and devotedness, the word gains a new development, grows upward, so to speak, into a higher atmosphere. And so it is throughout the whole realm of words that express supersensuous notions; they all have their root in the soil, but are endowed with a constitutional vitality, by virtue of which they shoot upward into ethereal air and light, and blossom into a radiance of beauty that till then lay dormant in them.

The employment of certain sensuous images for the expression of certain supersensuous notions is not at all a matter of arbitrary choice. Those general conceptions which are the common heritage of man, into the recognized enjoyment of which he comes at the right moment of his intellectual progress, always find utterance in substantially the same set of images. There is here an à priori necessity governing the tendency of language, a necessity arising from that inseparability of thought from form, of which we have spoken. Behind the concrete image, or, rather, necessarily involved in it, there is the intuitional image, to which the idea must conform as to a mould. In the selection of intuitional images all choice is out of the question; the idea and the form are one. But in the associated concrete image there enters an element of variety, determined by external conditions and national characteristics. Yet even here there is found a uniformity, arising from the natural impulse of man to seize upon that concrete image which lies nearest to him, and is most universally familiar. The intuitional image involved in intellectual comprehension is that of a grouping in space about a common centre; the concrete image which this word presents is that of a seizing together by the hand. The use of the English word grasp to express the same conception-as in the phrase, “Do you grasp the idea" ?—well illustrates that necessity which compels languages to designate the most general conceptions by substantially the same set of images.

In proportion as these conceptions are less general in their nature, a widening degree of diversity arises among the concrete images in which they are embodied-a diversity due to

varying modes of life, varying aspects of nature, peculiar historical experiences, the outbreak and spread of peculiar enthusiasms, in short, to all those circumstances and conditions that give to a people or an age its special characteristic. Hence the impossibility of arraying the idiom and poetry of one people in the dress of another. The peculiar imagery of a language gives to the lesser shades of thought their hue and shape, which are, therefore, not communicable by imagery of a different complexion, such as is found interwoven in the language of some other people.

Similar causes lead to even still greater diversity in the metaphorical use of words, for various peoples ascribe varying degrees of prominence to the attributes and uses of things, and associate effects with causes, and causes with effects, in various manners, and discover peculiar analogies in the processes of nature and the operations of man, the national characteristic being, in this diversity, the determining condition.

It is through these psychological conditions underlying the evolution of words, that it has become possible for the genius of language to elaborate a copious and complex vocabulary from the few root-words which etymological researches unearth. It may be deemed a fanciful speculation, yet it would not be unphilosophical to affirm that language is the outgrowth of a single word, from which, by various transferences to new uses, and its subsequent differentiation in these, its new uses, the earliest stock of vocables was derived. Language is a cosmos, which, by ever-increasing differentiations, has developed from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex.

A few remarks in application of these distinctions to the English language. The Saxon element of our tongue is replete with words of metaphorical origin; it covers the whole field of sense with a more elaborate net-work of discriminating epithets than can be found in the body of any other speech. But it supplies comparatively few instances of the established use of certain words as vehicles of supersensuous ideas, and, in general, the few Saxon words possessing a fixed use of this nature have lost their

hold upon their original meaning as names for things of sense. For the expression of intellectual distinctions and perceptions we are, therefore, chiefly dependent upon compounds of Latin origin. But this very defect, if it be one, in the organization of the English language, is the great source of its strength and pliability. Words that are restricted in common usage to their natural meaning can be handled with all the more freedom in poetic speech; not having already received a fixed figurative sense-which often overrides and dims the natural one-they come fresh into the hands of the poet, with the odor of earth upon them, and moist with the dews of morning; they are still plastic and yield to the forming hand of genius, which moulds them anew for the figurative uses of the moment. When, however, a word of natural significance has been cast already in the die of higher thought by the creative genius of language itself, the poet of the age and the hour must accept it as it comes, ready-formed, from this poet of the ages; it may stand him in good stead in his temple of the beautiful, but he is powerless to carve upon it his own peculiar thought. The richer then a language is in words that smack of the soil, that retain their earlier use as names of natural things and relations, the richer the fund of poetic armory which it supplies, and the more vivid and vigorous it falls from the tongue of the impassioned speaker.

ART. III.-1. Natural History of Hallucinations. DE BOISMONT. London. 1850.

2. Biographical History of Philosophy. LEWIS. London. 3. Northern Antiquities. MALLET. London. 1847.

4. Traditions of the New Zealanders. SHORTLAND. Ed. 1870.

THE Effendi Kbaja in his day, though when that was historian saith not, was the wit and Douglass Jerrold of

Turkey. It is related of him in household stories that he was once asked what became of the old moon when the new one came in. The clever Mussulman was puzzled, and, no doubt, inserted his thumb in his mouth, with a grimace of profound meditation, after the manner of a modern philosopher pending the incubation of an idea. But puzzled as he was, and as anybody would have been previous to the publication of the Copernican system of astronomy, he answered, after some moments of deep abstraction quite befitting the gravity of the subject" What becomes of it?—becomes of it!" rejoined the Effendi with an interrogation in his first, and an exclamation point (of wonder that so silly a question should be propounded), in his second repetition. "Becomes of it!" interjected the Effendi, removing his thumb very carefully, and smoothing his beard with the complacency of a Mussulman. "Allah is great! They break up the old moon and make stars of it."

In this jeu d'esprit from the Turkish, though of mythical date and referred to a rather mythical personage, the student of comparative philology and its adjuncts may find the origin of that more modern solution of the cosmical problem so often attributed to the precocious boy of the period, who avers in answer to the question of the origin of the stars, that the moon lays them. The variations sounded on this mythical witticism have, indeed, been almost numberless; and, in the jokers' column of the current newspaper, it has more than once made its débût as something novel, quite in the original form in which the student laughs over it in his elementary Turkish reader.

Like souls in old legends, witticisms and proverbs are subject to a sort of transmigration; and it would be possible, no doubt, to trace the greater proportion of those supposedly modern bon-bons of wit and wisdom to an origin in the ancient " wrong end foremost," so often repeated of unpronounceable names, as translated from the Spanish, whence it can be traced to the Latin. So, too, the proverbial "Keep your jacket buttoned," which finds its equivalent in the Shakespearian "Mum's the word." "Supper without lights,"

« السابقةمتابعة »