I. Inner Experience of Language I

Wherein lies the cause? You realise that it lies not in the dead but in ourselves, in those, that is, who speak with the dead. And this is because since the middle of the fifteenth century, at any rate for all mid- and west-European languages—and the more is the farther west one goes—the living feeling for the picture expressed by the noun has been so lost that, when nouns are used, they sound nebulous, echoing only in the mind; indeed few people think of anything actual and real when using nouns. When obliged to turn nouns into verbs they are forced by an inner compulsion to think more concretely. To speak of a germ does not generally mean that a concrete conception of the germ of a plant, say a germinating bean, exists as an image in the mind, especially if the talk is abstract. A picture arises of something vague and nebulous, as it might in the case of some principle. When you say “what germinates” or “that which germinates,” because you have used the verbal form you are at least found to think of something growing, that is, something that moves; which means that you go from the abstract to the concrete. Then because you yourself go from the abstract to the concrete the dead begin to understand you. But, for reasons I have often explained here, because the living connection between those alive on the earth and those who have passed through the gate of death, the discarnate souls, must become increasingly closer, because impulses coming from the dead must work more and more effectively into the earth, then will of necessity take gradually into their language, into their speaking into their thinking something written over from the abstract to the concrete. It must again become an aim of mankind to think imaginatively, pictorially, when they speak.