REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 411 



old experience, though seklom questioned, have so little efTcct on tho 

 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 principles of religion, ethics, and even politics, 

 so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested (after 

 the association of that meaning with the verbal foi'mulas has ceased to 

 be kept up by the controversies which accortipanied their first intro- 

 duction) a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas; which 

 tendency, all the efforts of an education expressly and skillfully 

 ;directed to keeping the meaning alive, are barely found sufficient to 

 counteract. 



Considering, then, that the human mind, in differenjt generations, 

 occupies itself with diflerent things, and in one age is led by the cir- 

 cumstances 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 contiimally suggested by the pursuits 

 and inquiries with which mankind are at that time engrossed, should 

 "fall asleep, as it were, and fade irom the memory. It would be utterly 

 lost, if the propositions or formulas, the results of the previous expe- 

 rience, did not remain, and continue to be repeated and believed in, 

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

 and ai-e still supposed to conv,ey, a meaning : which meaning, though 

 suspended, may be historically traced, and when suggested, is recog- 

 nized by minds of the necessary endowments as being still matter ol 

 fact, or truth. While the formulfe remain, the' meaning may at any 

 time revive ; and as on the one hand the formulas progressively lose 

 the meaning they were intended to convey, so on the other, when tins 

 forgetfulness has reached its height and begun to produce consequences 

 of obvious evil, minds arise which from the contemplation of the for- 

 mulae rediscover the whole truth, and announce it again to mankind, 

 not as a discovery, but as the meaning of that which they have long 

 been taught, and still profess to believe. 



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

 spiritual doctrines of any significance, even when not truths. Thqir 

 meaning is almost always in a process either of being lost or of being 

 recovered ; a remark upon which all, history is a comment. 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 

 while recognizing verbally the very same doctrines, they attach to' 

 them at different periods a greater or a loss quantity, and even a differ- 

 ent kind, of meaning. The words in thqir original acceptation con- 

 noted, and the propositions expressed, a complication of outward facta- 

 and inward feelino-s, to different portions of which the general mind is 

 more particularly alive in different gc'uerations of mankind. To com- 

 mon minds, only that portion of the meaning is in each generation 

 suggested, of which that generation possesses the counteqiait in its , 

 own habitual experience. But the words and propositi! ms lie ready, 

 to suggest to any mind duly prepared, tho remainder of the meaning. 

 Such individual minds are almost always to be found : and the lost 

 meaning, revived by them, again by degrees works its way into tho 

 general mind. 



