Book Description

"It is well known that religion, as well as philosophy, depends upon language for the expression of its truths. This seems a simple proposition, but what are its consequences? If language is the sole medium of development of the higher thoughts and feelings, in its genesis may we not hope to discover the deepest truths of life and mind? Before the complex symbols which we call words came into use, and hence before the mind acquired the faculty of forming thoughts or extended comparisons, activities or motions were the only medium of expression between sentient beings. Language is the development of these expressive actions, and so highly complex has it become, so far removed from its rude beginnings, that it seems another order of creation, a system of miraculous origin. But when we remember that intelligence is a concomitant development with language, that thought or spirit is but a building up of words into ideas, and that these words are merely condensed memories, common experiences which have become current from tongue to tongue, is it not evident that there is no impenetrable mystery in speech, and that its product, mind, is a synthesis of simple and familiar truths? Again, when we retrace sensibility or feeling, from which language has been gradually evolved, to its beginnings in organic life, we find no absolute demarcations; we find that all life, whether mental or physical, is interdependent"--Introduction.