others the unlimited variety of objects of thought which are presented to us in the world of actuality, or which we may frame to ourselves out of our own imagination. That is to say, we have a noëtic alphabet for the soul, or inner component, of language, which may be compared to the phonetic alphabet we have for the outer, or material, component, as analogous thereto, and as helpful to us in a somewhat similar way.

The languages we have in ordinary use are not, indeed, founded on an analysis of the objects of thought to their ultimate elements. This is a peculiarity of the language which science is able to employ when it becomes sufficiently perfected. The achievement of a universal language formed on this principle, not however for common use, but rather for the general purposes of science, and applicable to all sciences alike, has been the dream of philosophers. The capacious and far-reaching mind of Leibnitz brooded over his scheme of a Lingua Characterica Universalis, from his boyhood till his latest years, a scheme for a system of characters that should be, or should answer to, as he said, "a sort of alphabet of human thought," and which should serve as an unerring organon of reasoning and discovery, -described by him, in a letter to Seckendorff, as "genus scripturæ vere philosophicæ, qua notiones revocarentur ad Alphabethum quoddam cogitationum humanarum," and elsewhere as "organi genus novum plus multo mentis potentiam aucturum, quam vitra optica oculos juverunt, tantoque superius Microscopiis aut Telescopiis, quanto præstantior est ratio visu." The learned Bishop Wilkins worked out by the labor of years his Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, founded on a systematic classification of all the objects of human thought, and furnished with a set of arbitrary characters corresponding.* The Ars Signorum of George Dalgarno was a scheme not unlike that of Wilkins, and published a few years. earlier, but worked out with less fullness in detail. For many reasons, all such schemes must fail. They are, at any rate, impracticable under the existing imperfection of human knowledge.

The languages we have for ordinary use are not made after

* A sketch of this scheme of Bishop Wilkins is given in Professor Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series.

and cannot be reduced to any such method. The greater part of our words signify some complex combination of elements; and the notions we thus employ are analogous to characters of a syllabic alphabet, instead of one of vowels and consonants. The words-under the term word we include meaning as well as sound-are such as have come into being, or have shaped themselves from time to time, to answer to the needs of the advancing mind of man. They are thus, for all practical purposes, immensely superior to any supposable perfectly analytic language; and so it would be, even were the construction of such a language a possible thing or an actual achievement. The practical sense of mankind gives birth to language adapted to their needs in their actual circumstances and their actual condition of mental development.

For any use for which words are wanted denoting the ultimate elements of things as determined by thorough analysis, suitable words or other symbols can be found and employed, just as far and as fast as these elements can be ascertained and determined. In the symbols of mathematics we have such a language carried to a high degree of perfection; and, as extended and adapted so as to apply to physical facts of various kinds, we are indebted to it for the wonderful advances made by modern science and the consequent extension of man's power over nature. In the symbolic notation of chemistry, we have a signal example of the advantage, for both scientific and practical purposes, of a thoroughly analytic language adapted to a particular department of knowledge. The notes of written music are an example of an analytic language for another class of things.

In a perfect language of the analytic kind, each expression indicates all the elements which compose the object signified; indicates also relations to other objects within the domain to which the language applies; at least, furnishes the means of ascertaining them by the use of this instrument alone. This feature is the essential of the Leibnitzian idea,*—the realization

*It appears from a letter of Leibnitz, quoted by Dugald Stewart, that he was acquainted with the schemes of Dalgarno and of Wilkins, and regarded them as falling altogether short of his own idea of the principles on which a Philosophical Language should be constructed.

of which is possible, however, only so far as it can be accomplished by employing different methods adapted respectively to different departments of knowledge. Science is doubtless. to be increasingly indebted, in the future, to the invention and the employment of such methods, both in the way of symbolic notation and of analytic nomenclature. Pretensions to the character and the name of science, as well as the degree of perfection attained, may to some extent be tested by the capability to be worked by such an instrument.

Were not the world of nature a veritable cosmos, a system of things with unity of plan, a fabric of which the warp and the woof are the uniform modes of operation which we call the laws of nature, with whatever else in nature goes to constitute the similarities it presents,-a fabric simple in its materials and methods of formation, yet by the blendings and interlacings of its threads presenting a manifold variety,-a fabric upon which as a ground are made to come out those everywhere recurring types, the forms of organized existence, with the combined simplicity, unity, and variety they exhibit,were it not for conditions such as these, it is obvious that no science, and consequently no language of science, could have ever had a being. But it is equally true, though seldom considered, that no language of common life, no means whatever of communication from mind to mind, or to say the least, none resembling in any respect what we now employ,-could have been realized in any way except under the like prerequisite conditions. In short, a logos, not only as reason but as word, is inconceivable without the cosmos.

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Besides this general constitution of things, we observe also an adaptation to language with reference to the progressive development of the human faculties. The beginning of language has to be made with what is obvious to sense and with what we may call the concrete and thus readily apprehensible phases of the general. Nature accordingly presents obtrusive similarities of this description to the opening mind of the child, as likewise to the adult in a rude or primitive stage of culture; and provision is made for linguistic growth and enlargement by successive steps, as the mental powers gradually unfold themselves and as they extend their reach to wider and higher

spheres of thought. It is as a consequence of this that the general structure, or what, to distinguish it as including far more than mere grammatical structure, we may call the frame-work of thought and of expression that pervades a language, takes its character from the lower spheres of objects of thought and is carried up into the higher, somewhat as, in the vertebrates of the animal kingdom, the same general form appears in the higher classes as in the lower, though serving widely different purposes and more or less modified accordingly.

Much has been said by many concerning the imperfections of language; and wisely, if to put us on our guard against them, or to incite us to remedy them. We may truly regard them, however, as due not so much to the inadequacy of the provision made by the Author of Nature, as to the imperfect development to which the mind of man has hitherto attained, and, primarily, to the feeble and inefficient and perverted use which man has made of the opportunities furnished to his hand. As the mind of man makes real advances, intellectual and moral, we must look for corresponding improvement in language as an instrument both of thought and of expression. How near an approach the language of man-all its departments comprehended-shall ever make to what would answer after any sort to the ideal conception of Leibnitz, and to perfection in all respects, in other words, how nearly the logos, as the embodiment and manifestation of the human reason, shall become the reflex of the cosmos, through which the divine reason manifests and bodies forth itself as the eternal Word,-will depend upon how near the character and the mind of man shall ever come to the complete and perfect development of the capacities by virtue of which he stands eminent above the surrounding creation, and how clearly he shall thus prove himself to have been indeed made in the image of God.

ART. VII.-NECESSARY TRUTHS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF IDENTITY.

ONE of the vexations awaiting anybody who meddles with the controversy on Necessary Truth, is the double meaning of the phrase itself. What is Truth-subjective or objective? What is Necessity—a determination of the mind, or a determination of things with which the mind converses? We have seen Sir William Hamilton actually calling Descartes into court to testify to the Kantian criterion of innate knowledge; a naïveté only to be capped by calling Kant to prove Reid's doctrine of the immediate perception of extension and motion. Hamilton abounds in these simplicities, but what shall we say of Mr. Lewes, who informs us that Descartes and Leibnitz, as also Kant and his followers insist, "that the mind brings with it at birth a structure which renders certain conclusions necessary. As also we may as well say that Spinoza and Malebranche, as also Locke and his followers insist, that all ideas flow from experience. Mr. Lewes has contrived to embroil all modern metaphysics in a single sentence. Nothing can be said to any purpose by any one upon this question of Necessary Truth, until the historical meanings of the phrase have been discriminated, and the one we intend to stand by has been exactly defined.

By necessity Descartes means objective necessity in ideals or reals, the constraint or determination things are under of being as they are, and not otherwise: by necessary truths he means the intuitions we have of these determinations. The first necessity, that is, the first which presents itself to the mind, is the necessity that where thinking goes on there must be a something which thinks (une chose pensante); or specifically (since this is a universal not to be admitted at the beginning of our search for truth), the necessity that my thinking must be the action of a thinking me. The second is the necessity that to the idea I find within myself of an infinite and infinitely

* Prob. Life and Mind, i, 247.