Page images
PDF
EPUB

INTRODUCTION.

This

It is well known that religion, as well as philosophy, depends upon language for the expression of its truths. seems a simple proposition, but what are its consequences? If language is the sole medium of development of the higher thoughts and feelings, in its genesis may we not hope to discover the deepest truths of life and mind?

Before the complex symbols which we call words came into use, and hence before the mind acquired the faculty of forming thoughts or extended comparisons, activities or motions were the only medium of expression between sentient beings. Language is the development of these expressive actions, and so highly complex has it become, so far removed from its rude beginnings, that it seems another order of creation, a system of miraculous origin. But when we remember that intelligence is a concomitant development with language, that thought or spirit is but a building up of words into ideas, and that these words are merely condensed memories, common experiences which have become current from tongue to tongue, is it not evident that there is no impenetrable mystery in speech, and that its product, mind, is a synthesis of simple and familiar truths?

Again, when we retrace sensibility or feeling, from which language has been gradually evolved, to its beginnings in organic life, we find no absolute demarcations; we find that all life, whether mental or physical, is interdependent.

Hence the wonders of the intellect or the soul are only wonders of complexity. The activities so intricately combined in thought and feeling are perfectly familiar to us in their simpler forms, and in the course of their development.

vii

they include no facts which are not assimilable with our experiences. But this announcement of the divine unity of life, is not a welcome one to the majority of minds; on the contrary, it is generally regarded as an attack upon an ancient privilege of the mind,—the right to declare itself incomprehensible.

Thus, in endeavoring to construct a true philosophy, we encounter at the outset a deep-rooted prejudice against those simple explanations of life which spring from a comprehension of the nature of language. When the play of thought and feeling which constitutes every thing that is spiritual in our existence is discovered to be but a refinement of organic activities, the first impulse is to look with suspicion and dread upon such a levelling of the imagination. Alarmed for the safety of its venerable myths, religion opposes the analysis of mind, and loudly proclaims against a synthesis of knowledge which will bring all facts, whether human or superhuman, into the true order of their development.

Before the power of such an analysis as this, mysticism shrinks a frightened spectre from the theatre of mind, dragging in its train all the dissembling images of an undisciplined fancy. The hierarchy of heaven and the hosts of hell, that have so long ruled over us, awake in their precipitous retreat a tempest of emotions which rise to call them back in the name of all that is holy. The light which drives these spectres away leaves those who have worshipped them almost sightless. The God which they could touch and measure with their limited thoughts and feelings has vanished in the pure light of day, and in the cold immensity they are left alone, and, as they would believe, spiritually ruined. To such as these the truth seems terrible, that life is only action, that its possibilities lie in the direction of moral achievements, that its hopes, so far as they overstep these limits, are wild and fruitless fancies.

To language, then, which is responsible for the extravagances of human belief, we must look for the solution of the

great enigma. The central truth of language is that it is an elaboration of the single principle of motion. In this fact all lines of thought and feeling converge. God is the divine unity of life, of which principle all individual existences are but limited expressions. Every event, every happening, whether human or extra-human, repeats this truth.

Mind, therefore, is the function of conditions which are far wider and deeper than human life; its images, so far as they are not true reflections of this universal order, are deceptive; its perceptions spring from the concurrence of laws which are as independent of consciousness as they are capable of explaining the whole range of mental activity.

Perception accounts for mind, not mind for perception; because perception is a simpler fact than language, and mind is the product of language. The activities of nature express conditions which are merely repeated in the processes of mind, for the simplest activity declares a truth as profound as any of the imaginings of the intellect. In this sense, and only in this sense, nature perceives itself, intelligence is universal.

But man would appropriate the principle of life and knowledge to himself. He would affirm that the infinity and eternity of relations, of which humanity is but the passing form, are subservient to his existence; that every thing happens in reference to himself; and, as the great currents of nature toss him about in his struggle at self-maintenance, he builds a world of phantom beings supposed to be independent of natural processes in order to keep his theories in countenance. As the history of the race progresses, and the mastery of ignorance increases, this burlesque of nature moves further and further into the background of thought, for, as our view of cause and effect is widened, fewer and fewer inconsistencies appear demanding to be clothed in these unearthly forms.

The discovery of the nature of language imparts to us the true knowledge of life. It discloses sensibility and feeling (which are but forms of motion) as inarticulate perception, and thought as an organic activity.

Language is the first fruit of social life. For ages, gestures or expressive motions were employed to eke out the indefinite meaning of words, and where the faculty of speech did not exist or was but slightly developed, gestures have constituted of themselves a rude language. It is the growth of definiteness in language which marks the progress of humanity. In the delicate and intricate articulations of thought we have the only instrument by which man can establish extended relationships between himself and the universe. Thought is not a thing apart from language; the spirit of a race breathes in the words and sentences which have grown up to express the common life, and in the simple laws which govern this development we find written the nature of the thinking being. The nature of a being, its origin and destiny, are revealed in the relations it bears with surrounding life. To adequately express such relations a definiteness of speech, hitherto unattained, is the first requisite; for how are we to weigh in the balance of the mind. such fine proportions of thought unless the values of the terms we employ are first clearly distinguished?

The mind, then, is an activity which illuminates existence, exalting the delicacy and range of human relations, and giving to each individual that spirit of universal sympathy which we call morality.

Religion and philosophy are ever offering us symbols of existence, promising clearer views of life. But when we find that these symbols do not harmonize, we are told that there is an innate disorder in the uttermost regions of knowledge, that all analyses lead at last to impenetrable mysteries. And yet the universal measure of success in thought is the establishment of order in the place of disorder, of definite knowledge in the place of mystery. Does it not seem as though this explanation were but a subterfuge?

Ever since man has been able to state categorically his beliefs concerning life and nature, the problem of Motion has occupied the highest place among his thoughts. The effort to solve this problem can be traced in an unbroken thread

[ocr errors]
« PreviousContinue »