'These little things are great to little man.'

A very interesting example of the mutability of language, and therefore of thought, is the word egregious. It is taken nowadays to mean something extremely bad but it originally meant something extremely good; meaning is often illusory. All concepts are associations of thoughts, all words are associations of concepts; from thoughts spring words, from words spring thoughts, it is a reciprocal arrangement. That there is a raw language to the brain, which is only represented by the symbolism of cultures, may be supposed; therefore a dog and a pigeon think the same as a person when they consider the sun. I think I disagree therefore with Wittgenstein, if a lion could speak I fancy we would understand him. If his raw thoughts were translated the word sun would be some such jumble as: light, heat, circle, yellow, and of such crude perceptions we can reach the most inscrutable concepts: from light the nature of sight, from sight the nature of experience, from heat the nature of matter, from circle the nature of shape, from  yellow the notion of colour. The human mind may abstract to infinity from the same percepts as prompt the actions of the fly, the cat, or the fish.

   This is why I consider the title of that great Christian work The Cloud of Unknowing to be the most insightful ever conceived. For the associative nature of the human mind makes clouds of all thought. Thus to make the greatest cloud of all out of unknowing, to mint understanding out of ignorance, not in certitudes but through a sympathy, to acknowledge the mystery of existence, is to reach the most complete enlightenment. Exactitude is a channel dug in the mind out of thoughts and probabilities, a trench of presumptions, it instils a sense of confidence. Yet the coastline paradox makes light work of the actual validity of so specious a brand of truth.

 

For in and out, above, about, below,

'T is nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,

   Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,

Round which we Phantom Figures come and go. KHAYYAM/FITZGERALD. 

   For this reason above all I trust to mysticism more than I trust to any other philosophy, and the most beautifully cloudy styles of writing are to me the most elucidating. To read Proust is to be encompassed in clouds, but it is also to see much in life more vividly and truly. The many cold and blunt statements which pass for to-day's particle truths, the endless succession of 'terms for a doctrine', which pretend to an exactitude they do not really possess, frustrate me. I feel cramped and narrowed by such a standardised and manufactured understanding. Do not talk of stars as stars, look at them! All knowledge is mingled with perception, not a system is divested of romance, a night's sky is a sea of diamonds. It is representative of an immensity which must be suggestive of infinity, and what is infinity but the statistician's analysis of God: the summit of all things, that which everything else describes, the divinity of existence. Such is the wisdom of worship, and such therefore is the folly of a presumptive brevity in discourse.

   Not to relate all things with reference to this holy and universal frame is to render the earth a sterile promontory. Indeed all such affectations of exact thinking are in reality a mood, a mood of satisfaction that all to be known is known, not by worship or engagement with the arts, but by the coining of catch-words and the constricting of a divine infinity into parcels of mortal conceit. Therefore verbosity is truly a kind of modesty, for it grants that there is no one thing which can be properly expressed by its word, but only by several joined like gemstones on a golden chain of mystic thought. Let there be less commerce in intercourse of dross, let more deal in emeralds and rubies, sapphires and amethysts, English is a most fertile language, why then are we so arid?