Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/82

 and future. And so it appears that a word can not exist in any one simple phase through which it passes, but that it must maintain its complex being in many phases at the same instant in time, or lose its integrity. Any other conception of words only leads us in a circle.

The mystery of words therefore forces us to consider several sciences: physiology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, physics, semiology, comparative grammar, philology, linguistic and grammatic norms.

Of course the great grammar exists in the mind of the multitude. The grammar of our books is more or less dead and more than less embalmed. The only perfect grammar is a mutable sea of laws bearing on its bosom flexible but constant relations between series of phenomena in a system of signs. Through the mind of the masses this sea ebbs and flows, forever beating on the shores of consciousness. Never does the individual mind perceive more than a narrow horizon of this mysterious sea.