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Untitled Article
apprehension , these differences are still mote conspicuous ; and in figurative expressions * iri the gfener&l structure of Iango age , in relation , arrangement , and Syntax * they are almost incalculable ; feo that the genius of a people is nowhere more decisively indicated than in the physiognomy of its speech . Wtfuld that the wish of Bacon , Leibnitz * and others , for a general physiognomy of nations , drawn from their languages , had been only in any degree fulfilled ! A task of like kind would be a history of the language of a single people , traced through their
revolutions . A comparison of different cultivated languages with the different revolutions which the nations speaking them have undergone , would exhibit , in the successive alternations of light and shade , a varying picture * as it were , of that manifold development of the human rdind arid character , which , as I believe , iri
very different dialects , has always taken place in all ages of the World ; Then there is writing ; the most effectual of all the vehicles of tradition , arid the only means of refined intellectual education . He who devised this method of fettering the fugitive spirit , not only in words but in letters , did the work of a god amongst men . What , however , was perceptible iri regard to speech , is still more so in regard to writing , —viz ., that this means of
perpetuatirig our thoughts , while it gives them precision , at the same time confines and in various ways shackles them ; riot only because ihte use of letters gradually extinguishes that living light of accent and gesture , with which speech was once so irresistibly flashed into the hearty not only because the dialects and idiomatic pecu * liarities of different tribes arid nations are hereby rendered less striking and effective ; but because even the memories of men and
the vitality of their spiritual powers Ate enfeebled by the artificial assistance of these prescribed formulas of thought . The human tnind would long ago have sunk under the load of books and learning , had not Providence from time to time revived and excited it anew by various destructive revolutions . Chained down by letters , the understanding creeps slowly and painfully Onward to its object , and its best thoughts are dumbly enunciated in the deadness
of a written character . Notwithstanding this * We must still look upon a written vehicle of our ihoughts as the most lasting and powerful of the silent agencies , by which God has provided that nation should act on nation and age oh age , arid through the ultimate diffusion of which perhaps the whole human race will 6 t last firid itself linked together in one vast chain of brotherly tradition */ There are few , probably , of our readers that tvill subscribe to the very unqualified terms in which Herder stated this most itividious comparison of written with otbl language , arid seems dlmoftt to deprecate teaming , ad & weight that crufthea the native * Book IX . ch . u ., p . 205—2019 .
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94 The Philosophy of the &istor $ of Mankind .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1832, page 94, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1806/page/22/
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