Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    words. We shall be soon saying scientific, instead of scien- tifical, and scientificly, instead of scientifically. Progress in the English language and in the English civilization have gone on step by step, ever united and ever interacting, since English history began. Traces of the banal teutonic throatiness of vocalization, of a noncom¬ prehension of I, still stick in the untutored Scotchman’s pharynx, but as the Englisman’s virility and selfconscious¬ ness strengthened, he rid himself of all of them. As the national consciousness grew, the national language also freed itself from tyranny, and the vowelization became more free. The whole history of England is epitomized in the history of those most important and significant of all words, the pronouns, and is focalized in the story of the commander of them all, the grandest word of English, or of any language, the freed, dignified, splendid I. Magna Charta could never have been forced from kings or aristo¬ crats by people who swallowed their ego, hissed their ich, or choked or hiccoughed with their ik; it came only to men conscious of their own nobility and valor and who expressed these qualities by the glorious English I, rolled forth with purity, self-control, and self-consciousness. That word is the revelation of the ideal of all history, the promise too of civilizing evolution. The animal or the savage man moved by pain, desire, joy, or any one of hundreds of emotions, expresses these by sounds which are recognized as more or less appropriate or indicative ; they objectify the soul, as it were. The sounds of inanimate nature are anthropomorphicly con¬ strued by the poetic imagination as suggestive of similar psychic movements and conditions. How far we judge correctly of them, or how much, for example, we read into the songs and calls of birds our own moods and phonologic habits, are questions as doubtful as they are interesting. But more or less accurately interpreted we have gone on until there is in the mind of every sensitive and cultivated person a considerable unity of result as to the significance
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