vitality only by timely recitation. In itself it is not an epyov, but an évépyeta." It is not, in itself, a completed work, but it is an internal energy in the soul begetting new creations.

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

§ 18. There is the same reason for the study of language that there is for the study of thought.

It is by means of language that the thoughts and emotions of one mind are projected upon another. Language is the medium through which the object of thought in the mind of the speaker or writer is exhibited to the hearer or the reader, and the object is projected upon the receiving mind in an image that is true, distinct, and bright, or in one that is distorted, blurred, and dim, according as that mind is acquainted or not with the medium. If language is only expressed thought, or the "incarnation of thought," and if thought is the copy of things, then the value of things becomes transferred to language, or, rather, is connate with it. As a matter of fact, so entirely are words the exponents of the thought, and purpose, and character of him who uses them, that they form the ground of judging of character for ourselves in our estimate of each other, and for God in his estimate of us all. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." "By thy words shalt thou be justified, and by thy words shalt thou be condemned." It is true that there is a difference between words and things as well as an identity.

Things are the sons of God, and words are the daughters of men;" still, practically, they are so wedded to each other that they are one.

THE

CONNECTION BETWEEN WORDS AND THINGS.

§ 19. Such is the connection between words and things, that a thorough study of language makes the student acquainted both with those minds of which it is the expression, and with those objects to which it is applied.

A language borrows its character, first, from the minds of those who use it in view of the objects to which it is applied, and, secondly, from the objects with which it is associated. The language of a nation is the accumulation of the experience, the wisdom, and the genius of a nation. "The heart of a people is

its mother tongue," and it is only by learning that mother tongue that you can know that heart. It is only while listening to the thoughts that breathe and the words that burn," from the lips of her poets and her orators, her historians and her dramatists, that you can feel that heart beating responsive to your own The great events that have shaped the destiny of that nation, the master-minds who infused their own spirit through the mass of the people, whatever relates to the government, religion, arts, moral sentiment, and social life, you can see distinctly portrayed in the language as you can see them nowhere else, even after that nation is extinct, and the language itself numbered with the dead.

THE

CONNECTION BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND HISTORY.

§ 20. It is, too, only by means of their language that we are able to trace the history and migration of the early inhabitants of the world. Describing philology as it was at the end of the last century, says Niebuhr, in his preface to the History of Rome, "It had recognized its calling to be the mediator between the remotest ages, to afford to us the enjoyment of preserving through thousands of years an unbroken identity with the noblest and greatest nations of the ancient world, by familiarizing us, through the medium of grammar and history, with the works of their minds and the course of their destinies, as if there were no gulf that divided us from them." In this way, fleeting as language in itself may be, it has raised for the primeval history of man more lasting monuments than those of stone or brass.

The study even of the English language, developing the meaning of names of the prominent objects of nature, which are significant in the Celtic, the solid substratum of Teutonic, the terms of war and government in the Norman-French, the Latin terms in ecclesiastical use, would enable us, in the absence of other histories, to draw inferences in respect to the early condition of England, and even now enables us to verify many of the doubtful statements of written history. Even the names of places would tell us much. When we hear a stream called Wansbeck-water, and know that the three words of which the word is made up each signify "water," the first being Celtic (as in Wansford, Avon), the second German (beck=back), we at once

D

recognize three changes of inhabitants to whom the former name successively lost its significance. See DONALSON'S New Cratylus.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE LOST MEANING OF WORDS.

§ 21. In the flow of centuries, words often lose their meaning by being used in new applications; and to disinter that meaning out of the alluvium and drift of ages, and bring it up to the light, affords as much pleasure to the linguist as to disinter a fossil does to the geologist. In digging down from the surface to the original meaning of words, applied first to some physical object, and then to a spiritual one, he often meets with this "fossil poetry," which is to him a medal of the nation, or of the race, just as the other is to the geologist a "medal of the creation." The word God means the Deity; but in the original Anglo-Saxon, besides this, it also meant good, or the Good. The word man, in English, means a human being, but in the Anglo-Saxon original its meaning, besides this, was sin, or the sinful. The full history of language would be a history of the human race. "He," says Niebuhr, "who calls departed ages back again into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating. The philologer does this."

RELATIONS OF LANGUAGE TO THE LAWS OF THE MIND.

§ 22. The careful study of language can not fail to make the student acquainted with the laws of the human mind. The origin and formation of words, and the structure of sentences, as exhibited in etymology and syntax, taken as a whole, are but a counterpart of those mental phenomena which have been collected and classified by the masters of mental science. The laws of suggestion, of memory, of imagination, of abstraction, of generalization and reasoning, are distinctly exhibited, not merely in the higher specimens of eloquence and poetry, but also in the common forms of language; so that there is truth in the remark, "that we might turn a treatise on the philosophy of mind into one on the philosophy of language by merely supposing that every thing said in the former of the thoughts as subjective is said again in the latter of the words as objective."

MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF LANGUAGE AND OPINION.

§ 23. The study of language is necessary in order to understand the influence which language and opinion have upon each other. The opinion entertained of an object influences the mind in the application of a term to that object, and the term, when applied, influences the opinion. Call thunder "the bolt of God's wrath," and you excite the emotion of terror, as if it were an instrument of destruction. Call it, like the German peasant, the "dear thunder," das liebe gewitter, and you excite a different emotion. "The good old man is passing along the air," der gute alte faehret. The good old man is God, and his passing along the air is thunder. Here God is presented to us under the aspect of a benefactor. "From the black cloud he makes barc his red, wrathful hand." Here God is presented to us under the image of a destroyer. When Schiller, in his boyhood, climbed the tree in the thunder-storm, was it not that he might get nearer the "good old man?" As illustrating the connection between language and opinion, "It is a significant circumstance, that no large society of which the language is not Teutonic (Gothic) has ever turned Protestant, and that wherever a language derived from ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails."-MACAULAY'S England, p. 64.

THE STUDY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

§ 24. From the general relations of language considered in this chapter, we gather an argument of great power in favor of carefully studying one's own language, whether for its own sake as an end, it being a subject of great intrinsic interest, or for its uses and applications to the great purposes of life. To an Englishman or an American, the study of the English language offers a twofold advantage, to wit, in the mental discipline it furnishes, and in the knowledge it imparts. The discipline he can obtain without the necessity of studying a foreign language. The knowledge gained is appropriate to him as an Anglo-Saxon, embodied as it is in his native tongue. "If language is the outward appearance of the intellect of nations, if their language is their intellect and their intellect their language," then, by studying the English language, he becomes acquainted with the intel

lect of the Anglo-Saxon race, while his own intellect is improved by the disciplinal process through which the study must lead him. By studying the language, he is brought into contact, and thus into close sympathy with the race who have written and spoken it. By understanding and using it in its full power, he becomes a teacher, a leader of those of the race who hear or read his words. Thus he at once takes possession of the inheritance bequeathed to him from past generations, constantly becoming more valuable by the contributions of the present; and, at the same time, he qualifies himself to use that inheritance for his own advantage and that of others, and to transmit it, enriched and improved, to future generations.

QUESTIONS UNDER CHAPTER I.

1. What is the derivation of the word language?

2. What is the primary meaning of the term?

3. What is the secondary meaning of the term?

4. Will you mention the three classes of signs which constitute language in the secondary sense?

5. Compare language in the primary sense with language in the secondary sense as a sign of thought and emotion.

6. Mention the three opinions with respect to the origin of language.

7. Give the argument for the third opinion, with a full statement of the opinion itself.

8. Is language stationary or progressive?

9. Explain the growth of language as connected with the growth of thought.

10. Is there any natural connection between words and the ideas which they represent?

11. Give examples of onomatopoetic words.

12. Give illustrations of the law of growth in the English language.

13. Where is the birth-place of language?

14. Give the opinion of Sir HUMPHRY DAVY, and of Sir WILLIAM JONES, and of ADELung.

15. State the grounds of ADELUNG's opinion.

16. What do you say concerning the search for the primitive language?

17. In what condition does the primitive language exist?

18. What do you say of the value of language as related to reason?

19. From what is the permanent value of language derived?

20. State your author's views of the imperfection of language, and in what

respects it is imperfect.

21. Describe the decay of languages.

22. Describe the death of languages.