culminating in philosophy. But there remains an element which cannot be
explained, or even adequately described. We can understand how man creates
or constructs consciously and by design; and see, if we do not understand,
how nature, by a law, calls into being an organised structure. But the
intermediate organism which stands between man and nature, which is the
work of mind yet unconscious, and in which mind and matter seem to meet,
and mind unperceived to herself is really limited by all other minds, is
neither understood nor seen by us, and is with reluctance admitted to be a
fact.

Language is an aspect of man, of nature, and of nations, the
transfiguration of the world in thought, the meeting-point of the physical
and mental sciences, and also the mirror in which they are reflected,
present at every moment to the individual, and yet having a sort of eternal
or universal nature. When we analyze our own mental processes, we find
words everywhere in every degree of clearness and consistency, fading away
in dreams and more like pictures, rapidly succeeding one another in our
waking thoughts, attaining a greater distinctness and consecutiveness in
speech, and a greater still in writing, taking the place of one another
when we try to become emancipated from their influence. For in all
processes of the mind which are conscious we are talking to ourselves; the
attempt to think without words is a mere illusion,--they are always
reappearing when we fix our thoughts. And speech is not a separate
faculty, but the expression of all our faculties, to which all our other
powers of expression, signs, looks, gestures, lend their aid, of which the
instrument is not the tongue only, but more than half the human frame.

The minds of men are sometimes carried on to think of their lives and of
their actions as links in a chain of causes and effects going back to the
beginning of time. A few have seemed to lose the sense of their own