CHAPTER VII.PRIMEVAL IMAGINATION WORKING ON NATURE—LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY.
The thought with which the last chapter closed opens up views which are boundless. Through the imaginative apprehension of outward Nature, and through the beauty inherent in it, we get a glimpse into the connection of the visible world with the realities of morality and of religion. The vivid feeling of Beauty suggests, what other avenues of thought more fully disclose, that the complicated mechanism of Nature which Science investigates and formulates into physical law is not the whole, that it is but the case or outer shell of something greater and better than itself, that through this mechanism and above it, within it, and beyond it, there lie existences which Science has not yet formulated—probably never can formulate—a supersensible world, which, to the soul, is more real and of higher import than any which the senses reveal. It is apprehended by other faculties than those through which Science works, yet it is in no way opposed to science, but in perfect harmony with it, while transcending it. The mechanical explanation ofthings—of the Universe—we accept as far as it goes, but we refuse to take it as the whole account of the matter, for we know, on the testimony of moral and spiritual powers, that there is more beyond, and that that which is behind and beyond the mechanism is higher and nobler than the mechanism. We refuse to regard the Universe as only a machine, and hold by the intuitions of faith and of Poetry, though the objects which these let in on us cannot be counted, measured, or weighed, or verified by any of the tests which some physicists demand as the only gauges of reality. This ideal but most real region, which the visible world in part hides from us, in part reveals, is the abode of that supersensible truth to which conscience witnesses,—the special dwelling-place of the One Supreme Mind. The mechanical world and the ideal or spiritual are both actual. Neither is to be denied, and Imagination and Poetry do their best work when they body forth those glimpses of beauty and goodness which flash upon us through the outer shell of Nature’s mechanism.
But
“DescendingFrom these imaginative heights,”
“DescendingFrom these imaginative heights,”
“DescendingFrom these imaginative heights,”
“Descending
From these imaginative heights,”
we must turn to the humbler task of showing by a few concrete examples how Imagination has actually worked on the plastic stuff supplied by Nature. To this the readiest way would be to turn to the works of the great poets, and see howthey, as a matter of fact, have dealt with the outward world. Before doing so, however, a few words may be given to the marks which Imagination has impressed on Nature in the prehistoric and preliterary ages. The record of this process lies imbedded in two fossil creations, Language and Mythology.
Language.—In the very childhood of the race, long before regular poetry or literature were thought of, there was a time when Imagination, working on the appearances of the visible world, was the great weaver of human speech, the most powerful agent in forming the marvelous fabric of language. It has long been well known to all who have given attention to the subject, that Metaphor has played a large part in the original formation of language. But how large that part is has only been recently made evident by the researches of Comparative Philology. Metaphor, as all know, means “the transferring of a name from the object to which it properly belongs to other objects which strike the mind as in some way resembling the first object.” Now this is the great instrument which works at the production of a large portion of language. And Imagination is the power which creates metaphor, which sees resemblances between things, seizes on them, and makes them the occasion of transferring the name from the well known original object to some other object resembling it, which still waits for a name. Even in our own day newly-invented objectsare often named by metaphor, but metaphors thus consciously formed belong to a later age. Long before such metaphors were formed, Imagination had been silently and unconsciously at work, naming the whole world of mental and spiritual existences by metaphors taken from visible and tangible things. It is quite a commonplace that the whole vocabulary by which we name our souls, our mental states, our emotions, abstract conceptions, invisible and spiritual realities, is woven in the earliest ages by the Imagination from the resemblances which it seemed to perceive between the subtle and still unnamed things of mind, and objects or aspects of the external world. This is not so easily seen in the English language, because owing to our having borrowed almost all our words expressive of mental things from other languages, the marks of metaphor are to our eyes obliterated. In fact all our words for mental and spiritual things are like coins which, having passed through many hands, have had the original image and superscription nearly quite worn out. None the less these are still to be traced by those who have their eyes exercised to it by reason of use. But it is manifest in German, which has spun a large part of its philosophical vocabulary out of native roots. It may be seen, in some measure, in Latin, but much more in Greek philosophical language.
This whole subject has been so well handled and so amply illustrated by Professor MaxMüller in the Second Series of his Lectures on “the Science of Language,” and in Archbishop Trench’s instructive and delightful volumes on “Words,” that I can but refer to these works and make here a few excerpts from them as examples of the general principle of thought to which I have adverted. Locke, as Professor Müller shows, long ago asserted that in all languages “names which stand for things which fall not under our senses have had their first rise from sensible ideas.”
Our word “spirit” comes from the Latinspiritus, the breath, andspiro, to breathe; soanimus, the soul, a seat of the affections, andanima, the living principle, are connected with the Greek ἄνεμος, wind. Indeed,animais sometimes used in Latin for a breeze, as readers of Horace will remember, and all are connected with the Greek verb ἄω, to blow. πνεῦμα, the Greek word used in Scripture to express spirit and a spiritual being, originally means wind and breath, from the verb πνέω, to blow and to breathe. Again, ψυχή, life and soul, is connected with ψύχω, which in Homer means to breathe, to blow. So that in all these cases we see that men, when they first became aware of an invisible and spiritual principle within themselves, named it by an act of imagination from the most impalpable entity their senses perceived,—the wind, or the breath. Again, take our word “ideal.” It comes from the Greek ἰδέα, from ἰδεῖν, to see, originally a wordof sight, expressing the look or appearance of a thing, which Plato in time employed to express the most spiritual entities, the supersensible pattern of all created things. Again, our words “imagination” and “imaginative,” how have they been formed? The Latin wordimaginatiooccurs but rarely; more frequently the verbimaginor, to picture to one’s self; more frequent still isimago, as ifimitago, fromimitor, to imitate. This last is connected with the Greek verb μιμέομαι, meaning also to imitate; and the original of these, and all the cognate words, both Latin and Greek, is the Sanscrit rootmâ, to measure. So from this very palpable process of measuring the land, there have been spun all the subtle and delicate words that express the working of imagination. So the mental processes expressed by “apprehend,” “comprehend,” and “conceive,” are all derived from bodily processes, and mean respectively to grasp at a thing with the hand, to grasp a thing together, to take and hold together. Again, the word “perceive,” from the Latinpercipere, was in the language of husbandry used for the farmer gathering in the fruits of his fields and storing them in his garner. Was then the mind conceived of as a husbandman who gathers in the notices of sense from the outer world, and stores them in an invisible garner? To “inculcate:” here is another mental word borrowed from husbandry. It means to tread or stamp firmly in with the heel, and was used of thefarmer, who, with his foot or some instrument, carefully pressed home into the earth the seed which he had sown. We see how well the metaphor can be transferred to the process of careful teaching—to the clergyman, for instance, who inculcates religious truth. These are but a few obvious and well-known samples of a process which has gone on in all languages, and has furnished forth our whole stock of names for mental operations and spiritual truths. And Imagination has been the power which has presided over the process, the interpreter mediating between two worlds, and naming the unseen realities of the inner world by analogies which she perceives in them to the sensible objects of the outer. Disciples of the Hume philosophy will see in these facts of language a confirmation of their master’s dictum that all ideas and thoughts are but weak and faded copies of the more vivid impressions first stamped on the senses. But those who have been learners in another school, to whom the world of thought has more power and reality than the world of sense, they will read in these facts a different lesson, that He has made all things double, the one over against the other, and that the thought by which both are pervaded is one.
Truly then has it been said, “Language is fossil poetry.” And any one who will set himself to spell out those fossils, and the meanings they contain, will find a wonderful record of the wayin which the mind of man has wrought in their formation. This record will lead him down into layers of thought as varied as any which the geologist deciphers, filled with more subtle and marvelous formations than any animal or vegetable fossils. For full exposition and illustration of the mental processes by which so large a portion of language has been created, the reader should turn to Professor Müller’s volume, to which I have already referred.
Wholly different from this primeval process of naming things by unconscious metaphors is the modern metaphor, as we find it in the poets. When Shelley speaks of the moon as
“That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,Whom mortals call the Moon,”
“That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,Whom mortals call the Moon,”
“That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,Whom mortals call the Moon,”
“That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,”
he is using a metaphor, and a very fine one, but he does so with perfect consciousness that it is a metaphor, and there is not the least danger of the poet, or any one else, confounding the moon with any maiden, earthly or heavenly.
Again, when Mrs. Hemans addresses the moaning night-winds as
“Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!At whose tones my heart within me burns,”
“Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!At whose tones my heart within me burns,”
“Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!At whose tones my heart within me burns,”
“Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!
At whose tones my heart within me burns,”
there is no likelihood of any confusion between the winds and mortal singers, no chance of the metaphor ever growing into mythology.
Once more: to return to Shelley—
“Winter came; the wind was his whipOne choppy finger was on his lip:He had torn the cataracts from the hills,And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,His breath was a chain that without a soundThe earth, and the air, and the water bound;He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throneBy the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”
“Winter came; the wind was his whipOne choppy finger was on his lip:He had torn the cataracts from the hills,And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,His breath was a chain that without a soundThe earth, and the air, and the water bound;He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throneBy the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”
“Winter came; the wind was his whipOne choppy finger was on his lip:He had torn the cataracts from the hills,And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,His breath was a chain that without a soundThe earth, and the air, and the water bound;He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throneBy the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”
“Winter came; the wind was his whip
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,
His breath was a chain that without a sound
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne
By the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”
Here is not only metaphor, but personification so strong and vivid that it is only kept from passing into mythology by the conscious and reflective character of the age in which it was created.
Mythology.—The other great primitive creation wrought by the action of the human imagination, in its attempts to name and explain the appearances of visible Nature, was ancient mythology. That huge unintelligible mass of fable which we find imbedded in the poets of Greece and Rome has long been a riddle which no learning could read. But just as modern telescopes have resolved the dim masses of nebulæ into distinct stars, so the resources of that modern scholarship called Comparative Philology seems at last on the way to let in light on the hitherto impenetrable secret of the origin of religious myths. It has gradually been made probable that the Olympian gods, whatever capricious shapes they afterward assumed, were in their origin but the first feeble efforts of the human mind to name the unnamable, to give local habitation and expression to the incomprehensible Being who haunted men’s inmost thoughts, but was above their highest powers of conception. In making this attempt, the religious instinct of our Aryanforefathers wrought, not through the abstracting or philosophical faculty, but through the thought-embodying, shaping power of imagination, by which in later ages all true poets have worked, that in the dim foretime fashioned the whole fabric of mythology. It was the same faculty of giving a visible shape to thought.
As soon as man wakes up to think of himself, what he is, how he is here, he feels that he depends not on himself, but on something other than and independent of himself; that there is One on whom “our dark foundations rest.” “It is He that made us, and not we ourselves;” this is the instinctive cry of the human heart when it begins to reflect that it is here, and to ask how it came here. This consciousness of God, which is the dawn of all religion, is reached not as a conclusion reasoned out from premises, not as a law generalized from a multitude of facts, but as a first instinct of intelligence, a perception flashed on the soul as directly as impressions are borne in upon the sense, a faith which may be afterward fortified by arguments, but is itself anterior to all argument.[8]When this thought awoke, when men felt the reality of “that secret thing which they see by reverence alone,” how were they to conceive of it, how name it? for a name was necessary to retain any thought as a permanent possession, much more this thought, the highest of all thoughts. The story of the well-knownDyaus, or the formation of this name for the Supreme God, has been told so often of late by Professor M. Müller, in his various works, that I should not have ventured to repeat it after him once again, had it not been necessary for the illustration of my present subject. It has been proved that in almost all the Aryan languages—Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic—the name for the Highest, the Supreme Being, has sprung from one root. “The Highest God received the same name in the ancient mythology of India, Greece, Italy, Germany, and retained the name whether worshiped on the Himalayan mountains or among the oaks of Dodona, or in the Capitol of Rome, or in the forests of Germany.” The Sanscrit Dyaus, the Greek Zeus, the Latin Jupiter (Jovis), the Teutonic Tiu (whence our Tuesday), are originally one word, and spring from one root. That root is found in Sanscrit, in the old worddyu, which originally meant sky and day. Dyaus therefore meant the bright heavenly Deity. When men began to think of the incomprehensible Being who is above all things, and comprehends all things, and when they sought to name Him, the name must be taken from some known visible thing, and what so natural as that the bright, blue, boundless, all-embracing, sublime, and infinite vault, which contains man and all that man knows, should be made the type and symbol to furnish that name?
When the old Aryan people, before their dispersion,thus named their thought about the Supreme as the Shining One, Professor Müller does not think that it was any mere personification of the sky, or Nature-worship, or idolatry that led to their so naming Him. Rather he thinks that that old race were still believers in one God, whom they worshiped under the name Heaven-Father. This inquiry, however, lies beyond our present purpose. What it more concerns us now to note is that it was a high effort of thought to make the blue, calm, all-embracing sky the type and symbol of the Invisible One, and that the power which wrought out that first name for the Supreme was Imagination working unconsciously, we might almost say involuntarily—the same power which in its later conscious action, under control of the poet’s will, has found a vent for itself in Poetry.
In the same way Comparative Philology accounts for all the stories about the beautiful youth Phœbus Apollo, Athene, and Aphrodite.
“I look,” Professor Müller says, “on the sunrise and sunset, on the daily return of night and day, on the battle between light and darkness, on the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted every day, every month, every year, in heaven and in earth, as the principal subject of early mythology. I consider that the very idea of Divine powers sprang from the wonderment with which the forefathers of the Aryan family stared at the bright (deva) powers that came andwent no one knew whence or whither, that never failed, never faded, never died, and were called immortal,i. e., unfading, as compared with the feeble and decaying race of man. I consider the regular recurrence of phenomena an almost indispensable condition of their being raised, through the charms of mythological phraseology, to the rank of immortals: and I give a proportionably small place to the meteorological phenomena, such as clouds, thunder, and lightning, which, although causing for a time a violent commotion in nature and in the heart of man, would not be ranked together with the immortal bright beings, but would rather be classed together as their subjects or as their enemies.”
In this eloquent passage Professor Müller expresses his well-known “Solar Theory” of mythology. At the close of the passage he alludes to a counter theory which has been called the Meteoric, which makes mythology find its chief field, not in the calm and uniform phenomena of the sun’s coming and going, and of day and night, but in the occasional and violent convulsions of storm, thunder, and earthquake. Not what is fixed and uniform, but what is sudden and startling, most arrests the imagination, according to this latter theory. But it does not concern us here to discuss the claims of these rival views, but rather to remark that in both alike it is the imagination in man to which the aspects of heaven, whether uniform or occasional, calm or turbulent,make their appeal, and that when, according to that tendency of language noted by Professor Müller, words assume an independent power and dominate over the mind instead of being dominated by it, it is Imagination which throws itself into the tendency, and takes occasion from it to weave its many-tissued, many-colored web of mythologic fable.
But however adequate such theories may be to people the whole Pantheon of Olympus, they seem quite out of place when brought to account for the inhabitants of this lower world. Nothing can seem less likely than that the conceptions of Achilles and Hector can have arisen from myths of the dawn. Characters that stand out so firmly drawn, so human and so natural, in the gallery of human portraiture, can hardly have been shaped out of such skyey materials. One could as readily believe that Othello or Macbeth had such an origin.
It is easy to laugh at those early fancies which men dreamed in the childhood of the world, and took for truth; and to congratulate ourselves that we, with our modern lights of Science, have long outgrown those mythic fables; but with the exacter knowledge of the world’s mechanism which Science has taught us, is there not something we have lost? Whither has gone that fine wonder with which the first men gazed on the earth and the heavens from the plains of Iran and Chaldea? It lies buried beneath the mass of second-handthought and information which Science has heaped upon us. Would it not be well if we could win back the truth, of which a dull mechanical or merely logical way of thinking has long robbed us, that the outward world, with all its movements, is not a mere dead machine, going by ropes and pulleys and cog-wheels, but an organism full of a mysterious life, which defies our most subtle analysis, and escapes us when placed in the crucible? This feeling, that things are alive and not dead, rests at the bottom of all mythology, the one root of truth underlying the huge mass of fable. How to regain this perception of something divine in Nature, more than eye and ear discover, and to do this in harmony with all the facts and laws which Science has ascertained, this is a problem reserved for thoughtful men in the future time.