Preface
become in a sense the thought of the race and a law of the mind. We are born under its dominion. We can not escape its requirements and remain either social or thinking beings. And it is not improbable that if human beings have spirits capable of surviving bodily death, these spirits will be found only in the personality that each gives to his own combination of words. No two persons ever speak alike. No man ever hides himself under his words, though he pile them mountain-high. We all are bound by the fatalism of our words.
Language, as we are accustomed to regard it, was put forth by the will; but when it reaches a certain stage, the will becomes powerless to alter its course, or at least to shape its destiny. In everything but pure science, language runs away with us, and there it balks. No one ever mastered his mother-tongue—but his mother-tongue always masters him. The mystery of words is inextricably associated with the mystery of higher
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