Note (return) — Chapter XIV

Now it is the doctrine of the best philologists that language is a growth. Gradually, and by combined efforts of successive generations, it has been brought to the perfection which we so much admire in the idioms of the Bible, the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare, and the prose compositions of Demosthenes, Cicero, Johnson, and Macaulay. The material or root-element of language may have been the product of mental instinct, or perhaps the immediate gift of God by revelation; but the formal element must have been the creation of thought, and the result of rational combination. Language is really the incarnation of thought; consequently the growth of a language, its affluence, comprehension, and fullness must depend on the vigor and activity of thought, and the acquisition of general ideas. Language is thus the best index of intellectual progress, the best standard of the intellectual attainment of an age or nation. The language of barbaric tribes is exceedingly simple and meagre; the paucity of general terms clearly indicating the absence of all attempts at classification and all speculative thought. Whilst the language of educated peoples is characterized by great fullness and affluence of terms, especially such as are expressive of general notions and abstract ideas. All grammar, all philology, all scientific nomenclature are thus, in fact, psychological deposits, which register the progressive advancement of human thought and knowledge in the world of mind, as the geological strata bear testimony to the progressive development of the material world. "Language," says Trench, "is fossil poetry, fossil history," and, we will add, fossil philosophy. Many a single word is a concentrated poem. The record of great social and national revolutions is embalmed in a single term. 857 And the history of an age of philosophic thought is sometimes condensed and deposited in one imperishable word. 858