and words, applies to what is strictly and distinctively thought, i. e. a distinct mental act or conception; for though all which is thought may not and must not be worded in language, yet what is thus worded must in a manner stand for and represent the rest, as a flower may be said to represent the entire plant. But there is a whole department or province in the soul, a deep and fertile province, which is not made up of thought, which therefore cannot be represented by words; the province of feeling. Who has not experienced at times the utter inadequacy of words to measure and express what he felt. Who has not found a broad chasm, as it were, between his meaning and his words, which he wanted another language to bridge over; for want of which, while his thought has found its way out in words, the feeling which was blended with it, and was its soul, remained unexpressed. We pity the man, we had almost said, who can tell all that he means; whose soul is never visited by an inspiration which he cannot utter in words; which all the powers of language, aided by tone, looks, action, everything in nature and in man, can only suffice barely to indicate. It is to meet this want of a language to express what is below and greater than thought, that music exists. Music comes from a depth and reaches a depth in the soul where thought and feeling are one; or rather, where feeling has not yet emerged into thought, but swells and heaves in its first chaotic ferment, and must express itself, if at all, in broad, interminable surges of sound. The feeling inspired and expressed by music, is of something infinite, without beginning or end, of which the sound is a sensible image or echo. Hence its appropriateness as a vehicle of worship. Its language is, "more-more." Hence a strain of music never seems to end with the words, but only to become inaudible. Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.

II. The relation of Language to Nature; or of Words to Things. Thought, as a pure idea in the mind, is formless and incorporeal; but in order to manifest itself, it must enter into or incorporate itself, in some outward form, must link itself to an image which shall locate, convey and represent the thought, as the body the soul. For this the world of nature exists, which is an exhaustless treasury of forms and images adequate for every birth of the mind. From its myriad objects and appearances, thought may supply itself with its necessary and appropriate vehicles. But here, as already observed, it is not an arbitrary choice or allotment which assigns to every thought its own body. A fixed law reigns here, as in all other organic forms of life, a law seated in the thought itself, which, from all the material elements

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around it, selects and appropriates those only which its inherent nature and wants demand. The possibility of this organic union or incorporation presupposes a certain affinity to exist between the two terms. There is, indeed, a most wonderful analogy and correspondence between the human mind and nature, as if each were created and conformed unto the other; a correspondence extending to the minutest features and operations; so that not a thought can arise or be born in the world of mind, but its corresponding image or symbol forthwith presents itself in the world of nature. The two domains are everywhere interlinked by the vital nerves of language, holding them together at every point, and weaving them into one indissoluble whole; just as in man himself, who partakes of both, these two elements are seen to meet and blend in one harmonious and vital union.

But the true relation which language holds to nature, can be understood only as we conceive of nature as being itself a language, the language of a universal mind; as the creation and embodiment of the Divine thoughts. Here we trust we shall be pardoned if we indulge in a little metaphysical analysis, for the sake of precision, on what we deem a fundamental point in the philosophy of language.

Every thing in nature embodies and represents some thought. This we presume will not be questioned, except perhaps by those who derive all thought from things sensibly perceived, and who cannot therefore conceive of the former as the ground or original of the latter. But for such it may be sufficient to reply, that the things must first have been thought of, i. e. existed as thoughts in the mind of the Creator, else how could they have been created? These thoughts, moreover, of which things are the sensible types, are not to be considered as abstractions merely, remote from the things themselves, or as resident only in the mind of Deity; but as vitally present in the objects we behold, in the same sense at least that a human thought is present in the word which expresses it. It is true we do not commonly recognize these indwelling thoughts, as such, in the things around us, partly because our conceptions of nature are so grossly material, and partly because we are wont to disguise them under a different name.

The most rigid and penetrating insight into the world we live in, conducts us to a point where we must recognize two elements as entering into the constitution of all things, the material and the spiritual; or, to speak more modestly, since we know not what is matter or spirit, the sensible and the intelligible, that which appears to sense and that which mind only can perceive. The further we get below the surface of things, the more does the former disappear, as being only the gairóueror, the outward index or symbol, of which the latter is

the substance. The dynamical theory of the universe, which is slowly but surely superseding all other views of nature, resolves all natural phenomena into certain elemental and vital forces, acting not blindly but intelligently, or at least intelligibly, and hence called laws of nature. These it is the province of science, in its various departments, to explore; and beyond these it is impossible to go in the analysis of things. These, in fact, are all with which we have to do either practically or scientifically. Thus the mechanist deals with matter only as the manifesto of a certain law or force called gravity. The chemist regards it as a complex of powers interacting in certain determinate ratios. The physiologist has to do with the higher power of life, as it develops itself by embodying its own idea in organized forms.

Now what are these laws or ideal forces? That they are something spiritual, is implied in the very idea of force or power. That they originate in mind, is evident from the fact that they are ideal and the sole matter of science. Are they anything else, if we may so designate them, than efficient thoughts, thoughts made actual, or externalizing themselves in things? Plato's "divine ideas," when rightly understood, as not merely the archetypes but the constitutive soul of all things, are not a mere fiction of poetry, but the result of the calmest and deepest philosophy, and even coincident with the highest teachings of Christian faith. These ideas differ from our own only as being themselves creative or constitutive; i. e. when interpreted into the language of theology, the divine intelligence and power, as manifested in nature, are not separated like the human, and as in our contemplation of them, but exist and act together as one and the same spiritual activity. Viewed on the side of intellect, they are ideas, after which the divine working proceeds; on the side of will, they are energies, directed always by an intelligent design. Regarded concretely, as the synthesis of both, they are laws, i. e. manifestations, in time and space, of a divine, omnipresent Spirit, of which nature is at once the language and living organ.

What we wish to come to, from this preliminary view, and which may have been already anticipated, is briefly this: that the soul of language and the soul of things are the same. Things, i. e. sensible objects, are the original, divine words, from which our words are derived. In language, we do but imitate or repeat the creative process of nature, and embody in words the same thoughts which are there embodied in things.

If we are understood in what we have here rather summarily advanced, it will be seen that language, as the offspring of reason, deals wholly with the ideal, with thought in its immaterial and spiritual essence, and has to do with things only as they are the exponents

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287 of thought. Words represent ideas, whether these be considered as furnished to the mind from without, or as generated in it. When applied to external objects, language denotes, not the outward and sensible type, the material of the thing, but that which this represents. In short, the process involved in language is precisely the same as when we read or translate a book. We first apprehend the thought through its written symbol, and then express or interpret it into another symbol or language of our own. Hence too it will be seen, that the name of a thing, the "word" (2óyos) by which it is known, is not that arbitrary and insignificant matter it is sometimes taken to be. It indicates the true substance of the thing itself.1

To know the full significance of names or words, therefore, is to know and understand things; and to be able to give its true name to any object, requires a previous insight into its real and essential nature. Hence the opinion entertained by Plato, that a superhuman intelligence must have imposed the first names on things.

Again, since words represent something fixed and substantial underneath phenomena, we may see how language, ever wiser than all skeptical philosophy, recognizes even in its most common and popular usage, the identity of things, which a superficial reasoning from appearances would lead us to deny. Thus we speak of a tree, a forest, etc., as being the same from one generation to another, although not one of its original materials may remain. The form or appearance, too, is continually changing, yet it is still the same tree; and this not in a loose sense, but verily and strictly the same. On this ground alone are we able to rest the identity of the human body at the resurrection.2

The senses alone do not give us the notion of substance when we look at a thing, but only certain isolated sensations or appearances, as color, shape, hardness, etc. These the mind receives, combines into unity, and attributes to an individual thing or sub-stance, which stands under or behind them. This is properly an inference or induction of the mind, as truly so as the law of gravitation. Hence we understand a thing, when we look through its ontward phenomena to its idea or substance. Hence the brute does not attain to the notion of an individual thing, because he does not think. These words, it is hardly necessary to say, are primarily one and the same.

2 As we have here touched upon the great question of what constitutes identity, we take the liberty to subjoin a few remarks. Some writers have thrown a good deal of needless confusion over this subject, by confounding identity of substance with identity of matter or material phenomena. Thus it is argued that there cannot be a resurrection of the same body, because the body itself does not continue the same from one period to another, since its particles are constantly changing, etc. Now without stop, ping to inquire whether the popular notions respecting this doctrine are right or wrong, let us simply ask ourselves what we mean when we utter the word "body?"

Nature, we have said, is a universal language, whose words are things, and the true prototypes of our words. But these single terms, i. e. individual things, do not comprise the whole of this language, any more than the terms found in a dictionary are the whole of human language. They are only its elements or materials. There are other and deeper thoughts in nature than those which a scientific analysis can discover, thoughts and meanings which can be expressed only by combinations of these terms which are thus expressed everywhere and constantly, in the thousand-fold linked forms and aspects and voices around us; in the mountain and vale and forest, the deep blue ocean, and the deeper heaven and all which it contains and canopies; moral and spiritual meanings, which carry us far into the heart and mind of nature, or rather of that Being who, in all this wonderful and stupendous language, is evermore expressing Himself! Now as individual objects must be read before they can be named, or become words, so these deeper spiritual meanings must be apprehended before they can pass into language, and become the symbols of corresponding thoughts within us; and this is the province or prerogative of the poet, as the former is of scientific insight. The man of science and the poet are both properly interpreters of nature. Both are conversant with the thoughts embodied and expressed in nature; only the former stops at the scientific thought; the latter passes beyond this, to the moral and spiritual. Nature is a language, the meaning of which is deep or shallow according to the insight we bring to it; and it is no less absurd to limit its significance to the literal, i. e. scientific import

Simply the sum of its material particles? If so, these would still be a human body, though decomposed and scattered to the four winds. We mean something else; that viz. which makes or constitutes it a body and not a heap of dust, that which lives and walks before us as the incarnation of spirit. The substance of the body, or the idea which is represented by the word, is something besides matter or which appears to the senses. It is one and permanent, notwithstanding the manifoldness and flux of the latter. The same identical substance stands under, lives through, and causes each successive change of form and particles. It includes in itself all the changes and successions of growth, as the mind includes all its own thoughts; and we might just as well say that the mind loses its identity with every successive thought, as the body with every change of its particles.

The bearing of these remarks on the doctrine of the resurrection is obvious. Since the idea or law of the body, and not the matter of it, constitutes its identity, the same body which lives through successive changes of matter, may, for aught we can see, survive or live over successive organizations. What we bury in the earth, is manifestly not the same body which lived and moved as the incarnation of spirit, but only its exuviae, the “remains" of what was a body, but is now-dust. It therefore need not be raised again. The Bible teaches the resurrection of the body, not of the corpse.