Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 122.djvu/71

Rh hieroglyphic: representative, that is, in form, or imitative in sound.

'Words,' said Democritus, 'are but the shadows of actions.' It is true; and while the shadows keep in contact with that of which they are the reflections, their nature runs little risk of being mistaken. It is when shadows begin to wander about unattended, that we feel that we have passed out of the world of realities. When linguistic signs, therefore, began to depend on arbitrary agreement rather than on intrinsic fitness,—when language, that is, became abstract and static,—the danger became imminent of taking the sign for the reality. From the moment, somewhere in the dim past, when this error was first made, dates that fatal idealistic illusion, which, slowly and subtly infecting the human intellect, culminated in the great biblio-scholastic aberration (what a ghastly example of language!) of the last twenty-odd centuries. During that period, language which has made man threatened to unmake him. (Like the dyer's hand, his spirit was subdued to what it worked in.) It did indeed make him insane. It made him as one who, seeing the word 'God' on the page, should bow down to the book in which it was written; or the word 'food,' should seek to devour it; or the word 'horse,' should leap on it and ride. Mad as these comparisons seem, they are no false images of the condition of man while he is ruled by the dynasty of language.

But there are other and better ways of deposing autocrats than by destroying them. The movement for the abolition of language, accordingly, need not proceed to the bitter end. Let it but become conscious of itself, and it will recognize that what is wanted is not so much the doing away with words as it is the doing away with the confusion in function between two kinds of word: between those, on the one hand, which are genuine emanations of things and actions, spirits, real representatives of life and possessed therefore with truly magical and creative power, and those, on the other, which, like algebraic signs or the technical terms of science, are the arbitrarily chosen tools of the intellect.

From the natural but fatal confusion between these two types of word between creative language and intellectual language—an incredibly large share of the woes of humanity has arisen. All slaveries, I had almost said, are traceable to this source. The chains that really bind humanity are chains the links of which are abstract words. All other chains are chains of sand. The kings and the capitalists, the priests and the pedants, the lawyers and the doctrinaires—not for a day could they retain their sway over the masses of mankind if the verbal bonds in which they fetter their victims were shattered.

And they are being shattered. The dethronement of abstract and static language is under way. It will go on until man learns to distinguish between that which is close to the divinest part of his nature and that which is but a tool in the hands of his mind. With which consummation will come the end of man's long scholastic digression and the twilight of the autocratic gods. VOL. 122-NO. 1