Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/38

 cated. You can only speak of mercy among a people who, in some respects, are already merciful.

A language is not a universal mode of expressing all ideas whatsoever. It is a limited mode of expressing such ideas as have been frequently entertained, and urgently needed, by the group of human beings who developed that mode of speech. It is only during a comparatively short period of human history that there has existed any language with an adequate stock of general terms. Such general terms require a permanent literature to define them by their mode of employment.

The result is that the free handling of general ideas is a late acquirement. I am not maintaining that the brains of men were inadequate for the task. The point is that it took ages for them to develop first the appliances and then the habits which made generality of thought possible and prevalent. For ages, existing languages must have been ready for development. If men had been in contact