Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree. Words are signs of natural facts. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
Words are signs of natural facts.
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, so conspicuous a fact in the history of language, is our least debt to nature. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.