COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



equal to its part is a proposition that may be 

 quite comfortably entertained so long as neither 

 wholes nor parts are imagined." This is one of 

 the ways in which so many absurd theories ob- 

 tain currency, and having once become current 

 are so difficult to banish from circulation. The 

 philologist A. W. Schlegel once suggested that 

 the terminations of words may have grown out 

 from the roots, just as branches of trees grow 

 from axillary buds. Inductive philology has 

 proved this notion to be false ; and has shown 

 that in all cases a termination is the abraded 

 relic of an originally distinct qualifying word, 

 which by constant use and through rapid pro- 

 nunciation, during primitive ages when words 

 were addressed only to the ear, has become in- 

 separably agglutinated to the qualified word or 

 root. This discovery, which has long been com- 

 pletely verified, of course supersedes and ren- 

 ders antiquated the hypothesis of Schlegel. But 

 the point which here concerns us is that no such 

 elaborate induction was needed to show that 

 the notion of a budding termination is in it- 

 self absurd. All that was needed to reveal its 

 absurdity was to stop and translate the words 

 used into ideas. To say that a termination buds 

 out from a root is to combine words which 

 severally possess a meaning into a phrase which 

 has no meaning. We can severally form con- 

 cepts of a word-termination, of a word-root, 



96 



