The Alchemy of Thought
by Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (9780217618601)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III.?THE USURPATIONS OF LANGUAGE How can the Universe tell its own story save by making use of human speech; how convey its meanings to finite minds save by employing a thinker to declare them ? So long as the story remains unspoken, unwritten, can we say it exists at all ? Does not the significance of things become a story by the very process which ends in the movement of an intelligently guided pen over a sheet of paper, in the reading of printed types, in the utterance of recognised vocables; and until this process has been accomplished is not the " meaning " a mere promise or unrealised potency ? Can we learn the history of the world, and of human life, otherwise than by reading, or hearing it spoken ? How, then, can we receive it without the intermediation of a writer, a speaker ? If a story be defined in advance as the work of a tongue or pen, then it is plain that the story of the Universe cannot be told without the intervention of a human raconteur. But have we the right to enforce this definition ? True, there is no story without form; but to treat language as the one and only form by which connected meaning can be expressed or conveyed is a preposterous assumption. Are there not many Arts which, though speechless, express their meanings with perfect adequacy, with satisfaction tothe recipient, and serve at the same time as a medium of communication between soul and soul ? Is not a drama a thing to be acted ? Is speech, after all, anything more than one of a vast number of arts by which dramatic meaning is expressed and intercourse carried on, and does it hold any prerogative or special excellence which entitles it to supersede all the others and absorb their functions into itself ? Or, looking at the matter from another point of view, is not every man familiar wit...

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