, in so far as they have done
the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or,
which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and
in all daughter languages which have descended from the Latin, in most
of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully
established to this day. The practical, business-like character of the
English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, which in
a vast proportion of words, that is, in all which are the signs of
_inanimate_ objects, and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a
fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It is only by
an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be
attributed to a table, a ship, or a tree; and there are aspects, this
being one, in which the English is among the least imaginative of all
languages even while it has been employed in some of the mightiest works
of imagination which the world has ever seen{197}.

What, it may be asked, is the meaning and explanation of all this? It is
that at certain earlier periods of a nation's life its genius is
synthetic, and at later becomes analytic. At earlier periods all is by
synthesis; and men love to contemplate the thing, and the mode of the
thing, together, as a single idea, bound up in one. But a time arrives
when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of the imaginative, when
the tendency of those that speak the language is to analyse, to
distinguish between these two, and not only to distinguish but to
divide, to have one word for the thing itself, and another for the
quality of the thing; and this, as it would appear, is true not of some
languages only, but of all.

{FOOTNOTES}

{128} [Apparently a slip for 'ebb']

{129} It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry VIII; see
the _State Papers_, vol. viii. p. 247. It was the latest survivor
of a whole group or family of words which continued much longer in
Scotland than with us; of which some perhaps continue there still;
these are but a few of them; 'wanthrift' for extravagance;
'wanluck', misfortune; 'wanlust', languor; 'wanwit', folly;
'wangrace', wickedness; 'wantrust' (Chaucer), distrust, [Also
'wan-ton', devoid of breeding (_towen_). Compare German
_wahn-sinn_, insanity, and _wahn-witz_.]

{130} We must not suppose that this still survives in '_gir_falcon';
which wholly be