, all its branches in every part of speech, were legitimated by
giving them their appropriate terminations:

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And this should be the law of every language. Thus, having adopted the
adjective fraternal, it is a root which should legitimate fraternity,
fraternation, fraternization, fraternism, to fratenate, fraternize,
fraternally. And give the word neologism to our language, as a root,
and it should give us its fellow substantives, neology, neologist,
neologization; its adjectives, neologous, neological, neologistical;
its verb, neologize; and adverb neologically. Dictionaries are but
the depositories of words already legitimated by usage. Society is the
work-shop in which new ones are elaborated. When an individual uses
a new word, if ill formed, it is rejected in society, if well formed,
adopted, and after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries.
And if, in this process of sound neologization, our trans-Atlantic
brethren shall not choose to accompany us, we may furnish, after
the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on its
primitive.

But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the
12th, on matter, spirit, motion, &c. Its crowd of scepticisms kept me
from sleep. I read it, and laid it down: read it, and laid it down,
again and again: and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur
ultimately to my habitual anodyne, 'I feel, therefore I exist.' I feel
bodies which are not myself: there are other existences then. I call
them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where
there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial
space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect
the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive
thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed
for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction is an action
of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator
the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking,
shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called
attraction, which reins the planets in the track of their orbits, or how
an absence of matter can have a will, and by that will put matter into
motion, then the Materialist may be lawfully required to explain the
process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we
quit the ba