We must now inquire what is meant by “confusion.” What should be our method? The following in my opinion. We often obtain a knowledge of persons whom we have not known before from their kinsfolk or those who bear some resemblance to them. And so in the same way things which in themselves are not easy to apprehend may reveal their nature through their likeness to their congeners. What things then resemble confusion? “Mechanical mixture,” to use the old philosophical term, and “chemical mixture.” The first presents itself for examination in dry substances, the latter in liquid. Mechanical mixture of different bodies occurs when they are juxtaposed in no regular order, as when we collect barley and wheat and pulse or any other kind of grain and pile them together. Chemical mixture is not juxtaposition, but the mutual coextension and complete interpenetration of dissimilar parts, though their various qualities can still be distinguished by artificial means, as is said to be the case with water and wine. These substances if united do produce, we are told, a chemical mixture, but all the same that mixture can be resolved into the different qualities out of which it was composed. A sponge dipped in oil will absorb the water and leave the wine. Probably the explanation is that since the sponge is produced out of water, it tends to absorb out of the mixture the substance which is akin to it, the water, and leave the foreign substance, the wine. But confusion is the annihilation of the original varieties or qualities, which become coextensive through all the parts and thus produce a single and quite different quality. An example of this is the quadruple drug used in medicine. This is produced, I believe, by the combination of wax, tallow, pitch and resin, but, when the compound has been formed, it is impossible to analyse or separate the properties which went to form it. Each of them has been annihilated, and from this loss of identity in each has sprung another single something with properties peculiar to itself. But when God threatens impious thoughts with confusion He does not order merely the annihilation of the specific nature and properties of each separate vice. The order applies also to the aggregate to which they have contributed. He means that neither their separate parts, nor yet their united body and voice, shall be invested with strength to destroy the better element. And therefore he says, “Let us confound their tongue there, that each of them may not understand the voice of his neighbour” (Gen. 11:7), and this is equivalent to “let us make each part of vice mute that it may not by its separate utterance nor yet in unison with the others be the cause of mischief.”
On the Confusion of Tongues 37
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.