IO UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



And in assigning their rights we must not forget that they still 

 raise the individual from mere animal existence to human life, even 

 as they have led the race in its weary clambering up the steeps of the 

 ages. With reference to their part in personal development we could 

 do no better than quote the felicitous judgment rendered by Edmund 

 Gosse in the most intimate of his writings, Father and Son: 



When I read Shakespeare and came upon the passage in which Prospero tells 

 Caliban that he had no thoughts till his master taught him words, I remember 

 starting with amazement at the poet's penetration, for such a Caliban had I been : 



I pitied thee, 

 Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour, 

 One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, 

 Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like 

 A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes 

 With words that made them known. 



For my Prospero I sought vaguely in such books as I had access to, and I 

 was conscious that as the inevitable word seized hold of me, with it out of the 

 darkness into strong light came the image and the idea. 



Passing from the unit to the race we find an almost miraculous 

 bond between speech and thought, as every thinker has recognized. 

 On this point the cold evolutionary naturalist is at one with the 

 dreaming mystic or glowing symbolist. Haeckel, for instance, who 

 may be taken as a perfect representative of the contemporary investi- 

 gator interested in ideas rather than in words, pays reasoned and 

 unemotional tribute to articulate conceptual speech and insists that 

 "the higher grade of development of ideas, of intellect and reason, 

 which raises man so much above the brute, is intimately connected 

 with the rise of language." But his conclusion is only a scientific 

 restatement of the feeling in the heart of the theologizing eastern seer 

 of olden days who put forth the following phantasy : 



I dreamed that God became a myriad words, infusing into each something 

 of His own essence, that men should no longer be as the beasts of the field, but 

 should rise to a knowledge of the divine. Thereby it was brought to pass that the 

 race of man became even as gods, having dominion over all things upon the earth, 

 yea, even over the powers of life and death. 



In one striking sense, the word has been God. 



