REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 261 



dered indirectly, but powerfully, instrumental to the 

 revival of those truths. 



The doctrine, therefore, of the Coleridge school, 

 that the language of any people among whom cul- 

 ture is of old date, is a sacred deposit, the property 

 of all ages, and which no one age should consider itself 

 empowered to alter is far from being so devoid of 

 important truth as it appears to that class of logicians 

 who think more of having a clear than of having a 

 complete meaning ; and who perceive that every age 

 is adding to the truths which it has received from its 

 predecessors, but fail to see that a counter-process of 

 losing truths already possessed, is also constantly going 

 on, and requiring the most sedulous attention to coun- 

 teract it. Language is the depositary of the accumu- 

 lated body of experience to which all former ages have 

 contributed their part, and which is the inheritance of 

 all yet to come. We have no right to prevent our- 

 selves from transmitting to posterity a larger portion 

 of this inheritance than we may ourselves have pro- 

 fited by. We continually have cause to give up the 

 opinions of our forefathers ; but to tamper with their 

 language, even to the extent of a word, is an operation 

 of much greater responsibility, and implies as an in- 

 dispensable requisite, an accurate acquaintance with 

 the history of the particular word, and of the opinions 

 which in different stages of its progress it served to 

 express. To be qualified to define the name, we must 

 know all that has ever been known of the properties 

 of the class of objects which are, or originally were, 

 denoted by it. For if we give it a meaning according 

 to which any proposition will be false which philoso- 

 phers or mankind have ever held to be true, it is at 

 least incumbent upon us to be sure that we know all 

 which those, who believed the proposition, understood 

 by it. 



