Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/325

 for instance, of the “charm” in words such as liberty, equality, fraternity; and on the other hand of the gloomy associations which are aroused by the words compounded with “blood,” such as blood-guiltiness, blood-feud, etc.

45. It is a part of the art of the orator, to awaken and to maintain by the right application, emphasis and accentuation of such words, the “mood” which prepares his hearers to accept his thoughts and to follow his counsels.

46. Artistic and poetic language is essentially allied to religious and all ceremonial speech. It, too, gets its original power and validity from the popular belief for which that is real and true which endures as image and simile in poetic language. Credulous imagination fills the world with living active spirits; natural man, and the teachers who lead him—priests and poets—believe that with all things it is as with men; they read human will, human passions into things, and in this way make them familiar and comprehensible—poesy is also explanation. All remarkable natural phenomena, and also events in human life, are for such modes of thought supersensuous demons, giants, gods and the like, or they are caused by these. The inclination and habit of filling, as it were, every corner with living beings, is heightened and strengthened by particular stories, fables and myths, in which it reveals itself; and there is constant interaction between these myths and language—sometimes the verbal expression is evoked by the myth, sometimes the myth by the verbal expression. But the former relation is by far the most frequent; the personification of things, or of the causes of events, is the natural assimilation of the strange to the familiar, and this naturally happens when speech is there through the material which it offers, though this material is modified by the myth for its use. The stories, as well as the generic modes of expression, are taught, handed down, and felt in and with the language; they grow with the spirit of the people, with custom, with religion, but they fall apart from it when the common mode of thought becomes more sober, thoughtful and reasonable, when poetry elevates itself as art above life. The meaning of many words, once as real as that of statements about actual experiences, is diminished, they are no longer regarded as signs of realities, but only as signs of images, and so “thoughts that had once a more real sense, fade into mere poetic forms of speech” (Tylor). But on the other hand, language also makes, first myths, and then at least sensuous ideas of things which persist much more