94 I^RAisrsACTiONS 1899-^00 



strengthen the idea of marriage as an indissoluble bond. To take 

 an example of another type, the flower which we call daffodil 

 owes its first " d " to a popular corruption ; but I do not think 

 anyone to-day would feel disposed to quarrel with the corruption, 

 certainly not anybody who had read Wordsworth's well-known 

 verses ending with the lines : 



' ' And then my heart with pleasure fills 

 And dances with the daffodils. ' ' 



I^anguage is the measure of thought. What can we say ? 

 That we have thought. What have we thought ? That we can 

 say. The rule is absolute : general poverty of language means 

 poverty of thought. He who cannot state a case strongly has 

 not conceived it strongly, has not seized it in its full logical de- 

 velopment, has never clothed the bare skeleton of fact with the 

 flesh and nerves and sinews that are needed to make it a thing of 

 life. 



It is a great miracle this of language ; and it is an impressive 

 fact that it should be possessed by one only of the innumerable 

 tribes of living creatures. To the human race alone was given 

 the word, to profit withal. Some sections of the human family 

 have not made much of the gift ; and yet its possession establishes 

 an absolute gulf between them and even the highest of the lower 

 animals. By others it has been put to better use, and the result 

 is seen in the great systems of thought, the great literatures, and 

 the great civilisations which give dignity and significance to 

 human history. Our forefathers, down to a comparatively recent 

 time, held that language was distinctly miraculous in its origin ; 

 and certainly if, as they supposed, Adam and Eve talked excellent 

 Hebrew in the Garden of Eden, they must have been mir- 

 aculously taught it. What former thinkers overlooked was that 

 the words of every developed language rest on a basis of ex- 

 perience — that no word can have more meaning than experience 

 has put into it, and that the primal pair could not have used a 

 language ombodjdng experiences which their descendants, the 

 human race had y^\. to gain. Milton tells us that after Adam 

 and Eve had got into trouble over their indiscretion in the Garden, 

 they spent hours in mutual recrimination, 



" And of their vain contest appeared no end." 



