find the expressions already formed, so that we have an instructor for the thinking powers in that speech which we are apt to deem no more than their handmaid and minister.

§ 22. The superiority of spoken language over the language of painting and sculpture, has been the frequent subject of remark. One reason for it is that whilst the artist can only effect with certainty an impression upon the eye, and must depend upon the sensibility, often imperfect, of the spectators for the reproduction in their minds of the emotions that suggested his subject and guided his hand, the poet by his description can himself call up the appropriate feelings. Upon the forehead of the Dying Gladiator what chisel could inscribe plainly that which the poet bids us read there?

In the picture of the Crucifixion at Antwerp, by Rubens, one of the most powerful specimens of "the brute-force of his genius," the action and purpose of more than one of the figures have been variously understood, and therefore by one party or another misunderstood. It is a disputed question whether the mounted soldier is looking with reverence at the chief Figure, or with cruel calmness at the agonies of one of the thieves; and whether the soldier on the ladder

has broken the legs of the thief, or is preparing to do So. Art finds few to understand its sweet inarticulate language; but the plainer and fuller utterances of poetry cannot be misunderstood. Another reason of its superiority may be found in the greater power of words to suggest associations that knit up our present impression with others gained from the past, or, better still, bring our emotions and moral feelings into connexion with our present impression. What painting of a house can ever convey so much to a feeling heart as the short description-"This is the home in which I spent my childhood?" The sculptor

raises a tomb, and covers it with the ensigns of piety and death, but his art tells us less after all than the brief inscription, "He died for his country," or, "he looks for immortality." The painter cannot dip his pencil in the hues of the spirit; the sculptor's drill and chisel cannot fix in matter the shapes which the mind assumes. The artist's thought remains unexplained, or depends upon the casual advent of congenial interpreters. In the comments upon our famous pictures and statues we have so many acknowledgments of the inferiority of the language of art to that of speech. Art would need no commentators, if it were thoroughly competent to tell its own story.

* Compare Cousin, Philosophie du Vrai, &c. leçon 27.; and Burke, on the Sublime, § vii. 5.

§ 23. (ii.) The second function we ascribed to language was that of preserving and recording our thoughts for future use; nomina sunt notionum notæ. A discovery can hardly be said to be secured, until it has been marked by a name which shall serve to recall it to those who have once mastered its nature, and to challenge the attention of those to whom it is still strange. Such words as inertia, affinity, polarisation, gravitation, are summaries of so many laws of nature, and are so far happily chosen for their purpose, that, except perhaps the third, each of them guides us by its etymology towards the nature of the law it stands to indicate. When Gay-Lussac and Mitscherlich discovered that some chemical substances either crystallise in the same form, or may be substituted for one another in compounds without change in the form which the compounds assume, they were not content with a statement of this beautiful and instructive law, but they invented the name of isomorphism (tendency to equal forms) to be an index and summary of the law and the experiments that illustrated it. When two opposite theories of medicine are termed Homœopathy and Allopathy, these two compound words contain in fact an account of the opposing theories. A recent popular and instructive book* has reminded us that it is possible to

* Trench on the Study of Words, Parker, 1851. A logical student will find both amusement and profit in the little volume.

exhume from under the words that are their monuments, many a buried and forgotten theory. Thus we speak of a jovial, a saturnine or a mercurial temper, without remembering that this implies an ascription of its qualities to the planet Jove or Saturn or Mercury. Physiologists now ignore the systems from which such terms as animal spirits, good humour, vapours, proceed. But if words often serve as tombstones, and remain when the theory has mouldered away, they are as often the keys by which we unlock the casket of the living and precious discovery, to exhibit it to the world. On the other hand, our eminent anatomist, Professor Owen, complains of the embarrassments produced in his science, by having to use a description where a name would serve ; for instance, a particular bone is called by Soemmering "pars occipitalis stricte sic dicta partis occipitalis ossis spheno-occipitalis," a description so clumsy that we may be certain the bone will not be mentioned more frequently than absolute need requires. In many cases, the privilege of giving the name which all the world shall employ, is conceded to the man or the nation who first clearly perceives the attributes, sees that they make one notion, and determines how it shall be designated. We are indebted to the

* See Owen on the vertebrate skeleton in Report of British Association for 1846.

finer observation of the French for the names ennui,

*

naïveté, and finesse, for which we have given our own comfortable in exchange: and an Englishman may notice with a smile of satisfaction that das gentlemanlike makes its appearance in a German author.

§ 24. But it is not only in the higher laws of science, or the more subtle qualities which social refinement developes in men and in society, that the power of naming is the power of fixing the fleeting colours of thought. So long as we are content with the bare reception of visual impressions, we can in a measure dispense with words, because our remembrance of the image of each object will serve instead of its name to ourselves, and a picture of it may represent it, though by a cumbrous and difficult process, to the minds of others. But thought never stops with the mere inspection of objects. In the simplest case, we proceed to decompose the sensitive impression into its parts. The tree which our eyes behold is found, upon reflection, to be tall or stunted, blooming or withered, old or young, straight or gnarled, waving in the wind or still; and these properties have no independent existence, but are parts of the visible object; they are entia rationis, and exist separately in

*"Mot Anglais," says M. Philarete-Chasles (ix. p. 16.), “né d'un vieux mot Français." But confortare is found in the Latin of the Vulgate.