d appear almost like the dreams of
hasheesh. But while they are like the fairyland of speculation, they are
not more wild and incoherent than are many of the dogmas of
metaphysics. And at this point I shall digress from my text so far as to
say that I have followed the motives of language through the higher
planes of life and thence downward to the very sunrise to the vegetable
kingdom, and on through the dim twilight across the mineral world to
that point where elemental matter is first delivered from the hands of
force. Standing upon the elevated plane of human development, it is
difficult for man to stoop to the level of those inferior forms from
which he is so far removed in all his faculties; but if his senses could
be made so delicate as to discern the facts, he would find perhaps that
in the polity of life all horizons are equidistant from each other. But
looking back from where he stands, his powers fail to reach the real
point of vital force at which all life began, and his contracted senses
bring the vanishing point of this perspective far into the foreground of
the facts.

From the highest type of human speech to the feeblest hint of
expression there is a gradual descent, and at no point between these two
extremes can there be drawn a line at which it may be said "here one
begins, and here another ends." The same is true of other faculties; and
from the vital centre at which matter first receives the touch of life
to the circumference of the vital sphere, all powers radiate alike, and
there is no point that I can find between that centre and infinity at
which some new endowment intercepts the line.

Descending the scale of life by long strides, from man to the lowest
form of zooids, we cannot designate the point at which a faculty is
first imparted to the form which has it, and this truth extends
throughout the vital cosmos.

[Sidenote: LANGUAGE IN THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM]

The line of demarcation which separates the animal and vegetable is but
a wavering, blended mezzotint, and the highest forms of vegetable life
seem to overlap the lowest forms of animal, so far that no dividing line
is positively fixed. The highest types of vegetable seem to have the
faculty of expression in a degree corresponding to, and in harmony with,
the rest of their organism. I do not mean to say that the impulse under
which a plant acts is synonymously with that which prompts the animal,
but both appear to be the effect of the sa