this, that they abandon the standard of humanity, by seeking to wrest, and to conquer an unhuman, if we may so say, _i.e._, a wholly independent and absolute knowledge, which, however, it is not in their power to attain to, and in pursuit of which they lose the certainty which lies within their reach, and so at last grasp nothing but an absolute not-knowing, or an endless controversy. If, as we can not but suppose, a communication does take place among those spiritual beings, who in intelligence are preferred to man, then must the immediate speech of these spirits be very different from our half-sensuous half-rational, half-earthly half-heavenly language of nature and humanity. For, even as spiritual, it can not but be immediate--never employing figure and those grammatical forms which human language first analyzes, to form again out of them new and fresh compounds. According to the two properties which constitute the essence of mind [_geist_], it can only be a communication, a transmission, an awakening or immission of thought--some wholly definite thought--by the will, or else the communicating, exciting, and producing by the thought of some equally definite volition. It may be that something of this, or at least something not absolutely dissimilar, occurs in human operations. It is possible that this immediate language of mind, as a secret and invisible principle of life--as a rare and superior element--is contained also in human language, and, as it were, veiled in the outer body, which, however, becomes visible only in the effects of a luminous and lofty eloquence, in which is displayed the magic force of language and of a ruling and commanding thought. Taken on the whole, however, human speech is no such immediate and magically-working language of mind or spirit. It is rather a figurative language of nature, in which its great permanent hieroglyphics are mirrored again in miniature, and in rapid succession. And it retains this natural and figurative character even in the ordinary form of rational dialogue, which must observe so many varieties and details of grammar, of which superior intelligences have no need for their immediate intercommunion, but in which, as in all other human things, many greater or less grammatical oversights creep in and give rise to important consequences in science and thought, and also in life itself. But in the next place, language is intimately connected and co-ordinate with tradition, whether sacred or profane, with all the recorded fruits of human speculation and inquiry. And as the word is the root out of which the whole stem of man’s transmitted knowledge, or tradition, has grown up, with all its branches and offshoots, so, too, in the eloquent speech, in the elegant composition, and even in all lofty internal meditation--which form, as it were, the leaves, flowers, and fruits of this goodly tree of living tradition--it is again the word by which the whole is carried on and ultimately perfected.