tion
eternally disparate from the relation of propinquity or derivation
between existences. Yet when sounds were attached to an event or
emotion, the sounds became symbols for that disparate fact. The net of
vocal relations caught that natural object as a cobweb might catch a
fly, without destroying or changing it. The object's quality passed to
the word at the same time that the word's relations enveloped the
object; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound,
previously nothing but a dull music. A conflict at once established
itself between the drift proper to the verbal medium and that proper to
the designated things; a conflict which the whole history of language
and thought has embodied and which continues to this day.

[Sidenote: Words remaining identical, serve to identify things that
change.]

Suppose an animal going down to a frozen river which he had previously
visited in summer. Marks of all sorts would awaken in him an old train
of reactions; he would doubtless feel premonitions of satisfied thirst
and the splash of water. On finding, however, instead of the fancied
liquid, a mass of something like cold stone, he would be disconcerted.
His active attitude would be pulled up short and contradicted. In his
fairyland of faith and magic the old river would have been simply
annihilated, the dreamt-of water would have become a vanished ghost, and
this ice for the moment the hard reality. He would turn away and live
for a while on other illusions. When this shock was overgrown by time
and it was summer again, the original habit might, however, reassert
itself once more. If he revisited the stream, some god would seem to
bring back something from an old familiar world; and the chill of that
temporary estrangement, the cloud that for a while had made the good
invisible, would soon be gone and forgotten.

If we imagine, on the contrary, that this animal could speak and had
from the first called his haunt _the river_, he would have repeated its
name on seeing it even when it was frozen, for he had not failed to
recognise it in that guise. The variation afterwards noticed, upon
finding it hard, would seem no total substitution, but a _change_; for
it would be the same river, once flowing, that was now congealed. An
identical word, covering all the identical qualities in the phenomena
and serving to abstract them, would force the inconsistent qualities in
those phenomena to pass for accidents; and the u