AE in the Irish TheosophistRussell, George William
Religion
AE in the Irish Theosophist
Russell, George William
Theosophy
I should not be understood to say that all the so-called roots can
be made to yield a secret meaning when analysed. Philologists are
not all agreed as to what constitutes a root, or what words are roots,
and in this general uncertainty it should not be expected that these
correspondences, which as I have said are not complete, will apply
in every instance. There are many other things which add to the
difficulty; a root is often found to have very many different meanings;
some of these may have arisen in the manner I suggest, and many
more are derived from the primary meanings and are therefore not
intuitive at all. The intuition will have to be exercised to discover
what sensations would likely be awakened by the perception of an
action or object; or if the root has an abstract significance,
the thought must be analysed in order to discover its essential
elements. I described previously the manner in which I thought a
single sensation, the perception of the colour Red, would suggest
its correspondence in sound, the letter R. Where the idea is more
complex, a combination of two, tree or four sounds are necessary
to express it, but they all originate in the same way. The reader
who desires to prove the truth of the theory here put forward can
adopt either of two methods; he can apply the correspondences to
the roots, or he may try for himself to create words expressing
simple, elemental ideas by combining the necessary letters; and
then, if he turns to the roots, he will probably find that many
of the words he has created in this way were actually used long ago,
and this pratice will enable him more easily to understand in what
sense, or on what plane, any particular letter should be taken.
I think it probably that in the Sacred Language before mentioned,
this could at once have been recognized by a difference in the
intonation of the voice. This may have been a survival to some
extent of the chanting which was the distinguishing characteristic
of the speech of the Second Race. (Secret Doctrine, vol. II, p. 198)
In the written language it is not easily possible to discover this
without much thought, unless endeavour has previously been made to
re-awaken the faculty of intuitive speech, which we formerly possessed
and which became atrophied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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