e without any
reference to its meaning; here speech is still a sort of music. At the
other extreme lies that ultimate form of prose which we see in
mathematical reasoning or in a telegraphic style, where absolutely
nothing is rhetorical and speech is denuded of every feature not
indispensable to its symbolic role. Between these two extremes lies the
broad field of poetry, or rather of imaginative or playful expression,
where the verbal medium is a medium indeed, having a certain
transparency, a certain reference to independent facts, but at the same
time elaborates the fact in expressing it, and endows it with affinities
alien to its proper nature. A pun is a grotesque example of such
diremption, where ambiguities belonging only to speech are used to
suggest impossible substitutions in ideas. Less frankly, language
habitually wrests its subject-matter in some measure from its real
context and transfers it to a represented and secondary world, the world
of logic and reflection. Concretions in existence are subsumed, when
named, under concretions in discourse. Grammar lays violent hands upon
experience, and everything becomes a prey to wit and fancy, a material
for fiction and eloquence. Man's intellectual progress has a poetic
phase, in which he imagines the world; and then a scientific phase, in
which he sifts and tests what he has imagined.

[Sidenote: Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have
affinity.]

In what measure do inflection and syntax represent anything in the
subject-matter of discourse? In what measure are they an independent
play of expression, a quasi-musical, quasi-mathematical veil interposed
between reflection and existence? One who knows only languages of a
single family can give but a biassed answer to this question. There are
doubtless many approaches to correct symbolism in language, which
grammar may have followed up at different times in strangely different
ways. That the medium in every art has a character of its own, a
character limiting its representative value, may perhaps be safely
asserted, and this intrinsic character in the medium antedates and
permeates all representation. Phonetic possibilities and phonetic habits
belong, in language, to this indispensable vehicle; what the throat and
lips can emit easily and distinguishably, and what sequences can appeal
to the ear and be retained, depend alike on physiological conditions;
and no matter how convenient or inconvenient th