Words for Mountains and Hills are almost universally identical with words for “The Head, The Back, The Breast,” &c. Thus even in the English, in which the first meanings of words are often lost, we have “Ridge” (A Back and A Hill), “Head-land,” “_Saddle-back_” (the name of a mountain.) In the Principality of Wales, in which a less changed and a less conventional language prevails, the common names for hills, “Cevn, Pen, Vron,” &c., are words for “The Back, The Head, The Breast,” &c., appropriated according to the particular _shapes_ of the hills. The same words, as will appear hereafter, were used as names of mountains in ancient Gaul and Spain, &c.
Jugum, “_A Yoke_ and A Hill,” (_Latin_,) Cadair Idris, “The chair of Idris,” A Fabulous Giant and Astronomer, (_Welsh_,) are instances of metaphors of a different kind. But generally names of hills are traceable as above described, and are therefore mere forms of terms belonging to the first class.
4. That terms of this Class, viz.: Words descriptive of the Operations and Emotions of the Mind, consist of metaphors derived from words originally appropriated to physical objects and agencies, has been indisputably proved by the celebrated French writer, Court Ghebelin, and by Horne Tooke, whose researches were applied to the analysis of the English language only. Words appropriated to the members of the Human Frame and their Functions, and other terms of the First CIass, are the chief sources of these metaphorical terms.
This philological maxim was supposed by some of the most eminent of those writers by whom it was established, to furnish an argument in favour of the doctrines of Materialism, as when, for example, the English word “Spirit” was derived from the Latin word for “Breath,” Spiritus. But the premises do not appear to furnish any solid support to the inferences they were thought to favour. The same Consciousness which in this case, and in other similar instances, perceives an analogy, perceives also that the connexion is one of analogy only. The true explanation of the relations which exist between these two classes of words may, I conceive, be derived from the consideration, that though Man is endowed with moral and intellectual, as well as with perceptive, faculties,—inasmuch as the perceptive powers are earliest exercised,—the language of his higher sentiments consists of metaphors thence borrowed. “The Hand,” in like manner, as may be inferred from several examples which occur in the course of this work, has, in many instances, metaphorically given names to some of the less conspicuous bodily organs of perception. At the same time, the soundness of the philological principle developed by Ghebelin and Horne Tooke can not reasonably be disputed. In these pages will be found numerous illustrations of its truth. Moreover it will appear that this principle forms the basis of some of the most convincing proofs—that languages afford—of the common origin of nations very remotely situated from each other, as of the Welsh and English, for example, with the Hebrew, and other ancient Syro-Phœnician nations.