seful proposition could
at once be framed that the same river may be sometimes free and
sometimes frozen.

[Sidenote: Language the dialectical garment of facts.]

This proposition is true, yet it contains much that is calculated to
offend a scrupulous dialectician. Its language and categories are not
purely logical, but largely physical and representative. The notion that
what changes nevertheless endures is a remarkable hybrid. It arises when
rigid ideal terms are imposed on evanescent existence. Feelings, taken
alone, would show no identities; they would be lost in changing, or be
woven into the infinite feeling of change. Notions, taken alone, would
allow no lapse, but would merely lead attention about from point to
point over an eternal system of relations. Power to understand the
world, logical or scientific mastery of existence, arises only by the
forced and conventional marriage of these two essences, when the actual
flux is ideally suspended and an ideal harness is loosely flung upon
things. For this purpose words are an admirable instrument. They have
dialectical relations based on an ideal import, or tendency to
definition, which makes their essence their signification; yet they can
be freely bandied about and applied for a moment to the ambiguous things
that pass through existence.

[Sidenote: Words are wise men's counters.]

Had men been dumb, an exchange and circulation of images need not have
been wanting, and associations might have arisen between ideals in the
mind and corresponding reactive habits in the body. What words add is
not power of discernment or action, but a medium of intellectual
exchange. Language is like money, without which specific relative values
may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common
denominator. And as money must have a certain intrinsic value of its own
in order that its relation to other values may be stable, so a word, by
which a thing is represented in discourse, must be a part of that
thing's context, an ingredient in the total apparition it is destined to
recall. Words, in their existence, are no more universal than gold by
nature is a worthless standard of value in other things. Words are a
material accompaniment of phenomena, at first an idle accompaniment, but
one which happens to subserve easily a universal function. Some other
element in objects might conceivably have served for a common
denominator between them; but words, just by virtue of their