Our language, and that of all civilized peoples on the globe, must be
thoroughly recast, not only in its philological and etymological
character, but in its ideologic, etiologic, and other significations,
before we can successfully fall back on an antecedent cause without an
effect, or an effect without an antecedent cause. Besides, the human mind
would have to undergo as complete a subversion of structure as language
itself, before any such attempt at recasting it, on the basis of modern
materialistic ideas, could possibly prove successful. And then, at least
one-third of our language would have to disappear in this iconoclastic
reform. For instance, take any well-tabulated synopsis of our categories
and their relations, and they would nearly all have to be recast or
entirely abandoned. Time, space, matter, motion, intellect, abstract
ideas, volitions, affections, etc., with their several correlates or
co-relations, would all have to undergo a thorough recasting process. The
personal, intersocial, sympathetic, moral, and religious relations and
obligations, would have to be summarily set aside for future revision, if
not for sweeping rejection. All our ideas of life, materiality,
spirituality, animality, vegetability, sensibility, etc., would have to
fall into greater or less desuetude, the language disappearing with the
ideas. All the words expressing our ideas of a superhuman agency, of God,
angels, heaven, revelation, religious doctrines, sentiments, acts of
worship, piety, human accountability to divine institutions, rites,
ceremonies, etc.,--to say nothing of maleficent spirits, mythological and
other fabulous divinities, entering so largely into the spirit and
machinery of all our best poetry--would utterly disappear from our
language. All our churches, minsters, chapels, tabernacles, cathedrals,
and temples erected to the "living God," embracing the finest and most
majestic architecture of the world, would have to succumb to the
iconoclastic zeal of these materialistic reformers. The ten categories of