"What is the real and legitimate use of words, when applied to moral subjects? for we cannot dispense with them, and it is uncomfortable to hold them in universal scepticism, as being only instruments of error."
And this question follows a long disquisition, whose object is to show that "physical terms are never exact, being only names of genera."—"Much less have we any terms in the spiritual department of language that are exact representatives of thought." He answers his own question, therefore, with this remark, of which he does not seem to follow out the whole value:—
"Words are used as signs of thoughts to be expressed. They do not literally convey, or pass over, a thought out of one mind into another, as we commonly speak of doing. They are only hints or images held up before the mind of another, to put him upon generating or reproducing the same thought, which he can do only as he has the same personal contents, or the generative power out of which to bring the thought required." Nay, we would add, he must also have the generative power of making the words so, and not otherwise; that, whatever superficial difference they may have, yet, taken in some point of view, there is a certain identity of all words applied to the same thought.
But Dr. Bushnell does not see this. He says: "Yet, in the languages radically distinct, we shall find that the sounds or names which stand for the same objects have generally no similarity whatever; whence it follows irresistibly, that nothing in the laws of voice or sound has determined the names adopted."
This conclusion is drawn so irresistibly by means of the mistake that Dr. Bushnell, with many famous etymologists, has made, of conceiving "no similarity whatever" in words, except in their sound, i.e. their similarity of effect on the ear. It is very true, as he says, "No theory of sound, as connected with sense, in the names of things, will be found to hold extensively enough to give it any moment;" although, "when sounds are the objects named, they will very naturally be imitated, as in hoarse and hiss."
But words should be considered not merely as sounds, but as articulations of sound.
