There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker to
stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto
opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below.
We can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals
the next change will not affect. What folly, then, to dream of
mapping out our minds in however general terms, of providing for
the endless mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! We
follow the vein, we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who can
tell which way the vein may trend? Language is the nourishment of
the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and
becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. You
scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude in
language, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthian
doggerel on the title-page of Nature says, "for aye," are
marvellously without imagination!

The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; all
mankind will, in the measure of their individual differences in
quality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of
thought, but the language they will speak will still be a living
tongue, an animated system of imperfections, which every individual
man will infinitesimally modify. Through the universal freedom of
exchange and movement, the developing change in its general spirit
will be a world-wide change; that is the quality of its
universality. I fancy it will be a coalesced language, a synthesis
of many. Such a language as English is a coalesced language; it is a
coalescence of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French and Scholar's Latin,
welded into one speech more ample and more powerful and beautiful
than either. The Utopian tongue might well present a more spacious
coalescence, and hold in the frame of such an uninflected or