ds and locutions
preserve in a speaker's mind at various times, or in the minds of
various persons. This constancy is never absolute. Therefore language is
never wholly significant, never exhaustively intelligible. There is
always mud in the well, if we have drawn up enough water. Yet in
peaceful rivers, though they flow, there is an appreciable degree of
translucency. So, from moment to moment, and from man to man, there is
an appreciable element of unanimity, of constancy and congruity of
intent. On this abstract and perfectly identical function science rests
together with every rational formation.

[Sidenote: and his immortality.]

The same function is the seat of human immortality. Reason lifts a
larger or smaller element in each man to the plane of ideality according
as reason more or less thoroughly leavens and permeates the lump. No man
is wholly immortal, as no philosophy is wholly true and no language
wholly intelligible; but only in so far as intelligible is a language a
language rather than a noise, only in so far as true is a philosophy
more than a vent for cerebral humours, and only in so far as a man is
rational and immortal is he a man and not a sensorium.

It is hard to convince people that they have such a gift as
intelligence. If they perceive its animal basis they cannot conceive its
ideal affinities or understand what is meant by calling it divine; if
they perceive its ideality and see the immortal essences that swim into
its ken, they hotly deny that it is an animal faculty, and invent
ultramundane places and bodiless persons in which it is to reside; as if
those celestial substances could be, in respect to thought, any less
material than matter or, in respect to vision and life, any less
instrumental than bodily organs. It never occurs to them that if nature
has added intelligence to animal life it is because they belong
together. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality. If eternity
could exist otherwise than as a vision in time, eternity would have no
meaning for men in the world, while the world, men, and time would have
no vocation or status in eternity. The travail of existence would be
without excuse, without issue or consummation, while the conceptions of
truth and of perfection would be without application to experience, pure
dreams about things preternatural and unreal, vacantly conceived, and
illogically supposed to have something to do with living issues. But
truth and perfecti