1848.] Necessity of Speech is a part of our Constitution. 659 comes both fluent and appropriate in the use of language when his mind glows with his subject and feeling is awakened. But the use of language is the same in kind and character with its origin. The processes through which language passes from the beginning to the end of its existence are all of the same nature. As in the wide sphere of the universe, preservation is a constant creation, and the things that are, are sustained and perpetuated on principles in accordance with the character impressed upon them by the creative fiat, so in all the narrower spheres of the finite, the use and development are coincident and harmonious with the origin and nature. We may therefore argue back from the use and development to the origin and nature; and when we find that in all periods of its history human language is suggested, and that too in its most expressive form, by feeling and passion, we may infer that these had to do in its origin, and have left something of themselves in its nature. For how could there be a point and surface of communication between words and feeling, so that the latter should start out the former in all the freshness of a new creation, if there were no interior connection between them. For language as it falls from the lips of passion is tremulous with life-with the life of the soul, and imparts the life of the soul to all who hear it. If, then, in the actual every-day use of language, we find it to be suggested by passion, and to be undergoing changes both in form and signification, without the intervention of a formal compact on the part of men, it is just to infer that no such compact called it into existence. If, upon watching the progress and growth of a language, we find it in continual flux and reflux, and detect everywhere in it, change and motion, without any consciously directed effort to this end on the part of those who speak it, it is safe to infer that the same unconscious spontaneousness characterized it in its beginning. Moreover, if in every-day life we unconsciously, yet really, use language not as a lifeless sign of our thought, but believe that in employing it we are really expressing our mind, and furthermore, if we never in any way agreed to use the tongue which we drank in with our mother's milk, but were born into it and grew up into its use, even as we were born into and grew up under the intellectual and moral constitution imposed upon human nature by its Creator, we may safely conclude that language, too, is a provision on the part of the author of our being, and consequently is organic and alive. Indeed, necessity of speech, like necessity of religion and government and social existence, is laid upon man by his constitution, and as in these latter instances, whatever secondary arrangements may be made by circumstances, the primary basis and central form is fixed in human nature, so in the case of language, whatever may be the secondary modifications growing out of national differences and peculiarities of vocal organs, the deep ground and source of language is the human constitution itself. Frederick Schlegel, after quoting Schiller's lines: Thy knowledge, thou sharest with superior spirits; calls language "the general, all-embracing art of man." This is truth. For language is embodiment-the embodiment not indeed of one particular idea in a material form, but of thought at large, in an immaterial yet sensible form. And the fact that the material used is sound -the most ethereal of media-imparts to this "all embracing art" a spirituality of character that raises it above many of the fine arts, strictly so called. It is an embodiment of the spiritual, yet not in the coarse elements of matter. When the spiritual passes from the intelligible to the sensible world by means of art, there is a coming down from the pure ether and element of incorporeal beauty into the lower sphere of the defined and sensuous. The pure abstract idea necessarily loses something of its purity and abstractedness by becoming embodied. By coming into appearance for the sense it ceases to be in its ineffable, original, highest state for the reason-for the pure intelligence. Art, therefore, is degradation-a stooping to the limitations and imperfections of the material world of sense, and the feeling awakened by the form, however full it may be of the idea, is not equal in purity, depth and elevation, to the direct beholding of the idea itself in spirit and in truth.1 We may, therefore, add to the assertion of Schlegel, and say, that language is also the highest art of man. With the exceptions of poetry and oratory, all the fine arts are hampered in the full, free expression of the idea by the uncomplying material. Poetry and oratory, in common with language, by employing the most ethereal of media, approach as near as is possible for embodiments, to the nature of that which they embody, but the latter is infinitely superior to the two former, by virtue of its infinitely greater range and power of exhaustive expression. Poetry and eloquence are confined to the par It is interesting in this connection to notice that the Puritan, though generally charged with a barbarian ignorance of the worth of art, nevertheless in practice took the only strictly philosophic view of it. That stripping, flaying hatred of form, per se, which he manifested, grew out of a (practically) intensely philosophic mind which clearly saw the true relation of the form to the idea-of the sensible to the spiritual. 1848.] Greek and English Languages. 661 ticular and individual, while language seeks to embody thought in all its relations and transitions, and feeling in all its manifoldness and depth. The sphere in which it moves and of which it seeks to give an outward manifestation is the whole human consciousness, from its rise in the individual, on through all its modifications in the race. It seeks to give expression to an inward experience, that is co-infinite with human life itself." Viewed in this aspect, human language ceases to be the insignificant and uninteresting phenomenon it is so often represented to be, and appears in all its real meaning and mystery. It is an organization, as wonderful as any in the realm of creation, built up by a necessary tendency of human nature seeking to provide for its wants, and constructed too, upon the principles of that universal nature, which Sir Thomas Brown truly affirms to be "the art of God."1 Contemplate, for a moment, the Greek language as the product of this tendency and necessity to express his thought imposed upon man by creation. This wonderful structure could not have been put together by the cunning contrivance, and adopted by the formal consent of the nation, and it certainly was not preserved and improved in this manner. Its pliancy and copiousness and precision and vitality and harmony, whereby it is capable of expressing all forms of thought, from the simplicity of Herodotus to the depth of Plato, are qualities which the unaided and mechanizing understanding of man could not have produced. They grew spontaneously and gradually, out of the fundamental characteristics of the Grecian mind, and are the natural and pure expression of Grecian thought. Contemplate, again, our own mother tongue as the product of this same foundation for speech laid in human nature by its constitution. Its native strength and energy and vividness, and its acquired copiousness and harmony, as exhibited in the simple artlessness of Chaucer, and "the stately and regal argument" of Milton, are what might be expected to characterize the Latinized Saxon. A creative power, deeper and more truly artistic than the inventive understanding, produced these languages. It was that plastic power, by which man creates form for the formless, and which, whether it show itself universally in the production of a living language, or particularly in the works of the poet or painter, is the crowning power of humanity. In view of the wonderful harmonies and symmetrical gra 1 Die philosophische Bildung der sprachen, die vorzüglich noch an den ursprünglichen sichtbar wird, ist ein wahrhaftes durch den mechanismus des menschlichen Geistes gewirktes Wunder.-Schelling's vom Ich. u. s. w. § 3. dations of these languages, may we not apply the language of Wordsworth: Point not these mysteries to an art Lodged above the starry pole, Pure modulations flowing from the heart Of Divine love, where wisdom, beauty, truth, With order dwell, in endless youth.' We should not, however, have a complete view of the relation of language to thought, if we failed to notice that in its best estate it is an imperfect expression. Philosophy ever labors under the difficulty of finding terms by which to communicate its subtile and profound discoveries, and there are feelings that are absolutely unutterable. Especially is this true of religious thought and feeling. There is a limit within this profound domain beyond which human speech cannot go, and the hushed and breathless spirit must remain absorbed in the awful intuition. Here, as throughout the whole world of life, the principle obtains but an imperfect embodiment. There is ever something more perfect and more glorious beyond what appears. The intelligible world cannot be entirely exhausted, and therefore it is the neverfailing source of substantial principle and creative life. In the case before us, truth is entirely exhausted by no language whatever. There are depths not yet penetrated by consciousness, and who will say that even the consciousness of such a thinker as Plato can have had a complete expression, even through such a wonderful medium as the Greek tongue? The human mind is connected with the Divine mind, and thereby with the whole abyss of truth; and hence the impossibility of completely sounding even the human mind, or of giving complete utterance to it; and hence the possibility and the basis of an unending development for the mind and an unending growth for language. In conclusion, we are aware that the charge of obscurity may be brought against the theory here presented, by an advocate of the other theory of the origin and nature of language. We have no disposition to deny the truth of the charge, only adding that the obscurity, so far as it pertains to the theory (in distinction from the presentation of the theory, for which the individual is responsible), is such as grows out of the very nature and depth and absolute truth of the theory itself. We have gone upon the supposition that human language as a form, is neither hollow nor lifeless-that it has a living principle, and that this principle is thought. Now life is and must be mysterious; and at no point more so than when it begins to organize itself into a body. 1 Power of Sound. 1848.] Journey from Aleppo to Mount Lebanon. 663 Furthermore, the spontaneous, and to a great extent, unconscious processes of life, are and must be mysterious. The method of geniusone of the highest forms of life—in the production of a Hamlet, or Paradise Lost, or the Transfiguration, has not yet been explained, and the method of human nature, by which it constructs for itself its wonderful medium of communication-by which it externalizes the whole inner world of thought and feeling-cannot be rendered plain like the working of a well poised and smoothly running machine throwing off its manufactures. Simply asking then of him who would render all things clear by rendering all things shallow, by whom, when, where and how the Greek language, for example, was invented, and by what historical compact it came to be the language of the nation, we would turn away to that nobler, more exciting, and more rational theory, which regards language to be "a necessary and organic product of human nature, appearing contemporaneously and parallel with the activity of thought." This theory of the origin of language throws light over all departments of the great subject of philology, finds its gradual and unceasing verification as philological science advances under a spur and impulse derived from this very theory, and ends in that philosophical insight into language, which, after all, is but the clear and full intuition of its mystery of its life. ARTICLE V. JOURNEY FROM ALEPPO TO MOUNT LEBANON BY JEBLE EL-AALA, APAMIA, RIBLA, ETC. By Rev. William M. Thomson, American Missionary in Syria. Aug. 27th, 1846. Having accomplished the objects of my visit, and made all the necessary preparations for my journey back to Lebanon, I left Aleppo this morning at 10 o'clock. For the first few hours the road led over low, rocky hills, entirely deserted, naked and barren. We encountered a drove of more than 500 female camels, and my companions were not a little rejoiced when we were fairly rid of their wild and savage masters. In two and a half hours' rapid riding we came to a ruined khan, with the mellifluous name of 'Asil (honey). The only living things, in sight, were flocks of pigeons, which appear |