Yet it is not only when new truth, moral or spiritual, has thus to fit
itself to the lips of men, that such enlargements of speech become
necessary: but in each further unfolding of those seminal truths
implanted in man at the first, in each new enlargement of his sphere of
knowledge, outward or inward, the same necessities make themselves felt.
The beginnings and progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece,
[Footnote: See Lobeck, _Phrynichus_, p. 350.] the transplantation of
the same to Rome, the rise of the scholastic, and then of the mystic,
theology in the Middle Ages, the discoveries of modern science and
natural philosophy, these each and all have been accompanied with
corresponding extensions in the domain of language. Of the words to
which each of these has in turn given birth, many, it is true, have
never travelled beyond their own peculiar sphere, having remained
purely technical, or scientific, or theological to the last; but many,
too, have passed over from the laboratory and the school, from the
cloister and the pulpit, into everyday use, and have, with the ideas
which they incorporate, become the common heritage of all. For however
hard and repulsive a front any study or science may present to the
great body of those who are as laymen in regard of it, there is yet
inevitably such a detrition as this continually going forward, and one
which it would be well worth while to trace in detail.
Where the movement is a popular one, stirring the heart and mind of a
people to its depths, there these new words will for the most part
spring out of their bosom, a free spontaneous birth, seldom or never
capable of being referred to one man more than another, because in a
manner they belong to all.
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