The Russellville Democrat., 1893-08-31
MEANING AND METAPHOR.

When we speak of infection we no longer mean what we used to mean before mi. crobes had been heard of. When we talk of "heat' we no longer mean what we used to mean even fifty years age. And when a man says that he believes in the sun, the planets, the cosmos, the heavens and the earth, in mind and matter, in soul and body, in spirit and flesh, he cannot, if he would, mean just what his forefathers did, or, indeed, anything at all absolutely ard finally. Whether we will or no, the mean
 ing of such words is changing on our very tongues, and ever swaying between the extremes which we call literal and metaphorical; Heaven" @. E. ranging in value from sky to human destiny; ''ear.h," from soil to the visible home of man. We may appeal, and are right to appeal, to ''hard, dry'' facts; but we ger force put something out of ourselves even iato these. They become facts" under the quickening touch of "mind,p while that emerges from dim world of prepos- session, bequeathing us many primitive legacy from pre-intelligent sentence, and perhaps from little suspected sources lying yet further back. For instance primitive terror in its "superstitious" forms tended to represent man as inferior to and depend ent on powers of some sort; and this was true to natural order in the fact that his very world was not elf-centered and was dependent for its best boon upon greater than itself. As language advanced he be. gan quite naturally to express his meaning in appropriate metaphors;" to use, e.. the figures of of light and then of sight to describe what he had, as we now say, lin his mind,p or what sense-messages, as we now say, had s.put into his head" For "something told him" that light as it had been the first pleasure was also the great means of life. And he "saw," in however grotesque guise, the unbroken continuity of the orgabic and the inorganic, and perhaps even more clearly than most of us yet do, that of so-called matter" and of so-called "mind.o Per haps in some cases therefore he chose his imagery better than (after long ages of dualism carried to a splitting pcint) we generally do now.
 Man begins by doing, by acting out i'm pulse; then he learns to "lhiuk' little by little, observing, questioning, pond ring, testing bis way onward and upward. And throughout his patient, often painful jour ney, he is himself perpetually challenged. Natures stimulating appeals rain upon him ceaselessly from every side she orders him to master all her meanings He re sponds:-at fist again, .'blindly," but ever rising to higher grades of answer. Both deficiency and error are no doubt more or less present in all mental response to actual fact that is, in all experience. Bnt the essence of sanity from the first lies in corrective power. Everywhere there is either absence of notice, absence of response, or there is experimental ac- tiyity (broadly speaking) corrected at once; automatically or by the combined effect of the related organic activities. For instance, in health, if in using the hand, one fDger accidentally goes astray, the co ordinating muscles promptly recall it to a ''sense of duty" We know how the sams rule works in speech writing. Therefore, unless voluntary" and ca pricious' Cor wiling and "willfap,) are synonyms, the advent of volition ought not to mean the abrogation of this rule
 1t is, however, obvious that .snatural selection" can only operate in cases where death or s.erility is the consequence of failure in adaptation and appropriate reac tion, or segregation the consequence of ex cessive variation. But the point here is, why does not a tendency to correction, thus established, survive autom atically in incipient imagination and therefore in Ian guagef It seems almost a burlesque of popular notions of "free wilp' to sup pose that the moment the death penalty is taken of, the newborn intelligence, unique in adapting power, should go astrsy persistently without let or bindr .nce. Many nov merely formal or even iocular customs still prevailing testify, as legacies from remote time of danger needing to be ayerted. to the strength of tendencies organized during myriads of generations under the pressure of the struggle for life. Why does not this apply to 'anguagef But sight gives us here perhaps the most sug. gestive lesson; for therein the ascending series seems especially gradual and un,