bility to such a feeling, on differences of character and habit which would make it lead to different action. Hence the impossibility that one should ever apprehend with absolute truth what another, even with the nicest use of language, endeavours to communicate to him. This incapacity of speech to reveal all that the mind contains meets us at every point. The soul of each man is a mystery which no other man can fathom: the most perfect system of signs, the most richly developed language, leads only to a partial comprehension, a mutual intelligence whose degree of completeness depends upon the nature of the subject treated, and the acquaintance of the hearer with the mental and moral character of the speaker.
It not infrequently happens that a variation of phonetic form comes in to aid the variation of significant content of a word. That minúte portion of time of which sixty make an hour we call mínute (mín-it). Of and off are but different English forms of the same Anglo-Saxon word, the latter retaining the full significance of the ancient preposition, the former having acquired a greatly attenuated and extended sense. Can is a variety of ken, 'to know,' and means etymologically 'to know how;' the language-makers had observed that "knowledge is power" long before it occurred to Lord Bacon to make the remark. Worked and wrought, owned, owed, and ought, are identical in all their constituent elements, however differently understood and employed by us. A yet more notable diversity, both of form and meaning, has been established between also and as. Gentle, genteel, and gentile all go back to the Latin gentilis, which means simply 'pertaining to a gens or race.' So with legal, loyal, and leal, so with fragile and frail, with secure and sure—of which the former come more directly from the Latin, the other from the corrupted French forms. So, too, with manœuvre and manure, corps and corpse, think and thank, and a host of other words which might readily be adduced.
Among the examples already given, not a few have illustrated the transfer of a word from a physical to a spiritual significance. This method of change is one of such prominent importance in the development of language that it
