to use
his lingual gamut to designate the whole range of his perceptions and
passions.

Here we touch upon one of the great crises in creation. As nutrition at
first established itself in the face of waste, and reproduction in the
face of death, so representation was able, by help of vocal symbols, to
confront that dispersion inherent in experience, which is something in
itself ephemeral. Merely to associate one thing with another brings
little gain; and merely to have added a vocal designation to fleeting
things--a designation which of course would have been taken for a part
of their essence--would in itself have encumbered phenomena without
rendering them in any way more docile to the will. But the encumbrance
in this instance proved to be a wonderful preservative and means of
comparison. It actually gave each moving thing its niche and cenotaph in
the eternal. For the universe of vocal sounds was a field, like that of
colour or number, in which the elements showed relations and transitions
easy to dominate. It was a key-board over which attention could run back
and forth, eliciting many implicit harmonies. Henceforth when various
sounds had been idly associated with various things, and identified with
them, the things could, by virtue of their names, be carried over
mentally into the linguistic system; they could be manipulated there
ideally, and vicariously preserved in representation. Needless to say
that the things themselves remained unchanged all the while in their
efficacy and mechanical succession, just as they remain unchanged in
those respects when they pass for the mathematical observer into their
measure or symbol; but as this reduction to mathematical form makes them
calculable, so their earlier reduction to words rendered them comparable
and memorable, first enabling them to figure in discourse at all.

[Sidenote: Language has a structure independent of things.]

Language had originally no obligation to subserve an end which we may
sometimes measure it by now, and depute to be its proper function,
namely, to stand for things and adapt itself perfectly to their
structure. In language as in every other existence idealism precedes
realism, since it must be a part of nature living its own life before it
can become a symbol for the rest and bend to external control. The vocal
and musical medium is, and must always remain, alien, to the spatial.
What makes terms correspond and refer to one another is a rela