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LECTURE IV.
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home in this strange world. Before this vague yearning could assume any definite shape it wanted a name: it could not be fully grasped or clearly conceived except by naming it. But where to look for a name? No doubt the storehouse of language was there, but from every name that was tried the mind of man shrank back because it did not fit, because it seemed to fetter rather than to wing the thought that fluttered within and called for light and freedom.
But when at last a name or even many names were tried and chosen, let us see what took place, as far as the mind of man was concerned. A certain satisfaction, no doubt, was gained by having a name or several names, however imperfect; but these names, like all other names, were but signs-poor, imperfect signs; they were predicates, and very partial predicates, of various small portions only of that vague and vast something which slumbered in the mind. When the name of the brilliant sky had been chosen, as it has been chosen at one time or other by nearly every nation upon earth, was sky the full expression of that within the mind which wanted expression? Was the mind satisfied ? Had the sky been recognised as its god ? Far from it. People knew perfectly well what they meant by the visible sky; the first man who, after looking everywhere for what he wanted, and who at last in sheer exhaustion grasped at the name of sky as better than nothing, knew but too well that his success was after all a miserable failure. The brilliant sky was, no doubt, the most exalted, it was the only unchanging and infinite being that had received a name, and that could lend its name to that as yet unborn idea of the Infinite which
