Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/428

tor than the organic necessity of self-expression, out of which these primitive movements were born. And, on the other hand, the theory of a revelation in aid of the natural faculties breaks down on the fact that there can be no revelation except the manifestation of these faculties themselves, by whose stable processes alone we can know or act. Edkins, a zealous Orientalist, thinks that " the Biblical account of man's naming the animals proves the divine origin of language." But nomenclature belongs to the sphere of scientific research, not of theological dogma. The truth folded in that Hebrew legend is the natural sovereignty of man as mind. Human intelligence does, in fact, give names to all creatures and forms by its own necessary and sovereign laws of expression. And then science analyzes the process, thus poetically signified as a whole, into its natural stages. In the same way we may allow the theory that speech is an "invention," if we divest it of individdal meaning; since humanity everywhere reaches the use of its own powers by a continuous discovery, which is of the nature of creation. This theory, therefore, like the other, attains an imperfect sense of the spontaneity of spiritual forces as affirming themselves in natural law. The progress of knowledge consists in the degrees of perception that the highest of these forces are essential to the evolution of all beneath them, the whole to every part. Behind the various schemes of invention, inspiration, its psycho- revelation, evolution, thus pointing to a common truth, lies the fact that language is ultimately referable to the necessary unity of essence with manifestation, and the consequent law that every mental act is also a bodily movement. The highest law of the uni- verse works in the lowest stages of growth. What has been calle$ an invention, or a revelation, is in fact given