The Lapps, the Negroes, as well as the
Greeks, needed to express the past, the present and the future; and they
did it: but as there has never been an assembly of logicians who formed
a language, no language has been able to attain a perfectly regular
plan.
All words, in all possible languages, are necessarily the images of
sensations. Men have never been able to express anything but what they
felt. Thus everything has become metaphor; everywhere the soul is
enlightened, the heart burns, the mind wanders. Among all peoples the
infinite has been the negation of the finite; immensity the negation of
measure. It is evident that our five senses have produced all languages,
as well as all our ideas. The least imperfect are like the laws: those
in which there is the least that is arbitrary are the best. The most
complete are necessarily those of the peoples who have cultivated the
arts and society. Thus the Hebraic language should be one of the
poorest languages, like the people who used to speak it. How should the
Hebrews have had maritime terms, they who before Solomon had not a boat?
how the terms of philosophy, they who were plunged in such profound
ignorance up to the time when they started to learn something in their
migration to Babylon? The language of the Phoenicians, from which the
Hebrews drew their jargon, should be very superior, because it was the
idiom of an industrious, commercial, rich people, distributed all over
the earth.
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