The Word and the Spirit 289of his own spell; even the part taken by the consciously critical
or constructive mind is less intellectual than intuitive; he creates
by an afflatus of spiritual power of which his mind is the channel
and instrument and the appreciation of it in himself and others
comes not by an intellectual judgment but by a spiritual feeling.
It is that which must tell him whether the word that comes is
the true body of his vision or whether he has to seek or to wait
for another that shall be felt as its adequate, its effective, its illu-
minative, its inspired or its inevitable utterance. The distinction
that I am trying to draw here between the various powers of
the always intuitive speech of poetry can therefore better be felt
than critically stated, but at the same time certain indications
may serve to make it more clearly sensed in its spirit with the
sympathetic aid of the critical intelligence.
The words which we use in our speech seem to be, if we look
only at their external formation, mere physical sounds which a
device of the mind has made to represent certain objects and
ideas and perceptions, — a machinery nervous perhaps in origin,
but developed for a constantly finer and more intricate use by
the growing intelligence; but if we look at them in their inmost
psychological and not solely at their more external aspect, we
shall see that what constitutes speech and gives it its life and
appeal and significance is a subtle conscious force which in-
forms and is the soul of the body of sound: it is a superconscient
Nature-Force raising its material out of our subconscience but
growingly conscious in its operations in the human mind that
develops itself in one fundamental way and yet variously in lan-
guage. It is this Force, this Shakti to which the old Vedic thinkers
gave the name of Vak, the goddess of creative Speech, and the
Tantric psychists supposed that this Power acts in us through
different subtle nervous centres on higher and higher levels of
its force and that thus the word has a graduation of its expressive
powers of truth and vision. One may accept as a clue of great
utility this idea of different degrees of the force of speech, each
separately characteristic and distinguishable, and recognise one
of the grades of the Tantric classification, Pashyanti the seeing
word, as the description of that degree of power to which the