REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 477 



But in order that it may do so, it is necessary that the predicates should 

 themselves retain their association with the properties which they several- 

 ly connote. For the propositions can not keep the meaning of the words 

 alive, if the meaning of the propositions themselves should die. And noth- 

 ing is more common than for propositions to be mechanically repeated, 

 mechanically retained in the memory, and their truth undoubtingly assented 

 to and relied on, while yet they carry no meaning distinctly home to the 

 mind ; and while the matter of fact or law of nature which they originally 

 expressed is as much lost sight of, and practically disregarded, as if it never 

 had been heard of at all. In those subjects which are at the same time 

 familiar and complicated, and especially in those which are so in as great a 

 degree as moral and social subjects are, it is a matter of common remark 

 how many important propositions are believed and repeated from habit, 

 while no account could be given, and no sense is practically manifested, of 

 the truths which they convey. Hence it is, that the traditional maxims of 

 old experience, though seldom questioned, have often so little effect on the 

 conduct of life ; because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, 

 until personal experience has brought it home. And thus also it is that so 

 many doctrines of religion, ethics, and evCn politics, so full of meaning and 

 reality to first converts, have manifested (after the association of that mean- 

 ing with the verbal formulas has ceased to be kept up by the controversies 

 which accompanied their first introduction) a tendency to degenerate rap- 

 idly into lifeless dogmas ; which tendency, all the efforts of an education 

 expressly and skillfully directed to keeping the meaning alive, are barely 

 suflicient to counteract. 



Considering, then, that the human mind, in different generations, occu- 

 pies itself with different things, and in one age is led by the circumstances 

 which surround it to fix more of its attention upon one of the properties 

 of a thing, in another age upon another; it is natural and inevitable that 

 in every age a certain portion of our recorded and traditional knowledge, 

 not being continually suggested by the pursuits and inquiries with which 

 mankind are at that time engrossed, should fall asleep, as it were, and fade 

 from the memory. It would be in danger of being totally lost, if the prop- 

 ositions or formulas, the results of the previous experience, did not remain, 

 as forms of words it may be, but of words that once really conveyed, and 

 are still supposed to convey, a meaning : which meaning, though suspended, 

 may be historically traced, and when suggested, may be recognized by 

 minds of the necessary endowments as being still matter of fact, or truth. 

 While the formulas remain, the meaning may at any time revive ; and as, 

 on the one hand, the formulas progressively lose the meaning they were in- 

 tended to convey, so, on the other, when this forgetfulness has reached its 

 height and begun to produce obvious consequences, minds arise which from 

 the contemplation of the formulas rediscover the truth, when truth it was, 

 which was contained in them, and announce it again to mankind, not as a 

 discovery, but as the meaning of that which they have been taught, and 

 still profess to beUeve. 



Thus there is a perpetual oscillation in spiritual truths, and in spiritual 

 doctrines of any significance, even when not truths. Their meaning is 

 almost always in a process either of being lost or of being recovered. 

 Whoever has attended to the history of the more serious convictions of 

 mankind — of the opinions by which the general conduct of their lives is, 

 or as they conceive ought to be, more especially regulated — is aware that 

 even when recognizing verbally the same doctrines, they attach to them at 



