Part 8 (1/2)

But I must conclude. I may seem in this present lecture a little to have outrun your needs, and to have sometimes moved in a sphere too remote from that in which your future work will lie. And yet it is in truth very difficult to affirm of any words, that they do not touch us, do not in some way bear upon our studies, on what we shall hereafter have to teach, or shall desire to learn; that there are any conquests which language makes that concern only a select few, and may be regarded indifferently by all others. For it is here as with many inventions in the arts and luxuries of life; which, being at the first the exclusive privilege and possession of the wealthy and refined, gradually descend into lower strata of society, until at length what were once the elegancies and luxuries of a few, have become the decencies, well-nigh the necessities, of all. Not otherwise there are words, once only on the lips of philosophers or theologians, of the deeper thinkers of their time, or of those directly interested in their speculations, which step by step have come down, not debasing themselves in this act of becoming popular, but training and elevating an ever-increasing number of persons to enter into their meaning, till at length they have become truly a part of the nation's common stock, 'household words,' used easily and intelligently by nearly all.

I cannot better conclude this lecture than by quoting a pa.s.sage, one among many, which expresses with a rare eloquence all I have been labouring to utter; for this truth, which many have noticed, hardly any has set forth with the same fulness of ill.u.s.tration, or the same sense of its importance, as the author of _The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_. 'Language,' he observes, 'is often called an instrument of thought, but it is also the nutriment of thought; or rather, it is the atmosphere in which thought lives; a medium essential to the activity of our speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation; and an element modifying, by its qualities and changes, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds. In this way the influence of preceding discoveries upon subsequent ones, of the past upon the present, is most penetrating and universal, although most subtle and difficult to trace. The most familiar words and phrases are connected by imperceptible ties with the reasonings and discoveries of former men and distant times. Their knowledge is an inseparable part of ours: the present generation inherits and uses the scientific wealth of all the past. And this is the fortune, not only of the great and rich in the intellectual world, of those who have the key to the ancient storehouses, and who have acc.u.mulated treasures of their own, but the humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words, benefits by the labours of the greatest. When he counts his little wealth, he finds he has in his hands coins which bear the image and superscription of ancient and modern intellectual dynasties, and that in virtue of this possession acquisitions are in his power, solid knowledge within his reach, which none could ever have attained to, if it were not that the gold of truth once dug out of the mine circulates more and more widely among mankind.'

LECTURE VI.

ON THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.

Synonyms, and the study of synonyms, with the advantages to be derived from a careful noting of the distinction between them, const.i.tute the subject with which in my present Lecture I shall deal. But what, you may ask, is meant when, comparing certain words with one another, we affirm of them that they are synonyms? We imply that, with great and essential resemblances of meaning, they have at the same time small, subordinate, and partial differences--these differences being such as either originally, and on the strength of their etymology, were born with them; or differences which they have by usage acquired; or such as, though nearly or altogether latent now, they are capable of receiving at the hands of wise and discreet masters of language. Synonyms are thus words of like significance in the main; with a large extent of ground which they occupy in common, but also with something of their own, private and peculiar, which they do not share with one another.

[Footnote: The word 'synonym' only found its way into the English language about the middle of the seventeenth century. Its recent incoming is marked by the Greek or Latin termination which for a while it bore; Jeremy Taylor writing 'synonymon,' Hacket 'synonymum,' and Milton (in the plural) 'synonyma.' Butler has 'synonymas.' On the subject of this chapter see Marsh, _Lectures on the English Language_, New York, 1860, p. 571, sqq.]

So soon as the term 'synonym' is defined thus, it will be at once perceived by any acquainted with its etymology, that, strictly speaking, it is a misnomer, and is given, with a certain inaccuracy and impropriety, to words which stand in such relations as I have just traced to one another; since in strictness of speech the terms, 'synonyms' and 'synonymous' applied to words, affirm of them that they cover not merely almost, but altogether, the same extent of meaning, that they are in their signification perfectly identical and coincident; circles, so to speak, with the same centre and the same circ.u.mference. The term, however, is not ordinarily so used; it evidently is not so by such as undertake to trace out the distinction between synonyms; for, without venturing to deny that there may be such perfect synonyms, words, that is, with this absolute coincidence of the one with the other, yet these could not be the objects of any such discrimination; since, where no real difference exists, it would be lost labour and the exercise of a perverse ingenuity to attempt to draw one out.

There are, indeed, those who a.s.sert that words in one language are never exactly synonymous, or in all respects commensurate, with words in another; that, when they are compared with one another, there is always something more, or something less, or something different, in one as compared with the other, which hinders this complete equivalence.

And, those words being excepted which designate objects in their nature absolutely incapable of a more or less and of every qualitative difference, I should be disposed to consider other exceptions to this a.s.sertion exceedingly rare. 'In all languages whatever,' to quote Bentley's words, 'a word of a moral or of a political significance, containing several complex ideas arbitrarily joined together, has seldom any correspondent word in any other language which extends to all these ideas.' Nor is it hard to trace reasons sufficient why this should be so. For what, after all, is a word, but the enclosure for human use of a certain district, larger or smaller, from the vast outfield of thought or feeling or fact, and in this way a bringing of it under human cultivation, a rescuing of it for human uses? But how extremely unlikely it is that nations, drawing quite independently of one another these lines of enclosure, should draw them in all or most cases exactly in the same direction, neither narrower nor wider; how almost inevitable, on the contrary, that very often the lines should not coincide--and this, even supposing no moral forces at work to disturb the falling of the lines.

How immense and instructive a field of comparison between languages does this fact lay open to us; while it is sufficient to drive a translator with a high ideal of the task which he has undertaken well- nigh to despair. For indeed in the transferring of any matter of high worth from one language to another there are losses involved, which no labour, no skill, no genius, no mastery of one language or of both can prevent. The translator may have worthily done his part, may have 'turned' and not 'overturned' his original (St. Jerome complains that in his time many _versiones_ deserved to be called _eversiones_ rather); he may have given the lie to the Italian proverb, 'Traduttori Traditori,' or 'Translators Traitors,' men, that is, who do not 'render' but' surrender' their author's meaning, and yet for all this the losses of which I speak will not have been avoided. Translations, let them have been carried through with what skill they may, are, as one has said, _belles infideles_ at the best.

How often in the translation of Holy Scripture from the language wherein it was first delivered into some other which offers more words than one whereby some all-important word in the original record may be rendered, the perplexity has been great which of these should be preferred. Not, indeed, that there was here an embarra.s.sment of riches, but rather an embarra.s.sment of poverty. Each, it may be, has advantages of its own, but each also its own drawbacks and shortcomings. There is nothing but a choice of difficulties anyhow, and whichever is selected, it will be found that the treasure of G.o.d's thought has been committed to an earthen vessel, and one whose earthiness will not fail at this point or at that to appear; while yet, with all this, of what far- reaching importance it is that the best, that is, the least inadequate, word should be chosen. Thus the missionary translator, if he be at all aware of the awful implement which he is wielding, of the tremendous crisis in a people's spiritual life which has arrived, when their language is first made the vehicle of the truths of Revelation, will often tremble at the work he has in hand; he will tremble lest he should permanently lower or confuse the whole spiritual life of a people, by choosing a meaner and letting go a n.o.bler word for the setting forth of some leading truth of redemption; and yet the choice how difficult, the n.o.bler itself falling how infinitely below his desires, and below the truth of which he would make it the bearer.

Even those who are wholly ignorant of Chinese can yet perceive how vast the spiritual interests which are at stake in China, how much will be won or how much lost for the whole spiritual life of its people, it may be for ages to come, according as the right or the wrong word is selected by our missionaries there for designating the true and the living G.o.d. As many of us indeed as are ignorant of the language can be no judges in the controversy which on this matter is, or was lately, carried on; but we can all feel how vital the question, how enormous the interests at stake; while, not less, having heard the allegations on the one side and on the other, we must own that there is only an alternative of difficulties here. Nearer home there have been difficulties of the same kind. At the Reformation, for example, when Latin was still more or less the language of theology, how earnest a controversy raged round the word in the Greek Testament which we have rendered 'repentance'; whether 'poenitentia' should be allowed to stand, hallowed by long usage as it was, or 'resipiscentia,' as many of the Reformers preferred, should be subst.i.tuted in its room; and how much on either side could be urged. Not otherwise, at an earlier date, 'Sermo'

and 'Verb.u.m' contended for the honour of rendering the 'Logos' of St.

John; though here there can be no serious doubt on which side the advantage lay, and that in 'Verb.u.m' the right word was chosen.

But this of the relation of words in one language to words in another, and of all the questions which may thus be raised, is a sea too large for me to launch upon now; and with thus much said to invite you to have open eyes and ears for such questions, seeing that they are often full of teaching, [Footnote: Pott in his _Etymol. Forschungen_, vol. v.

p. lxix, and elsewhere, has much interesting instruction on the subject.

There were four attempts to render [Greek: eironeia], itself, it is true, a very subtle word. They are these: 'dissimulatio' (Cicero); 'illusio' (Quintilian); 'simulatio' and 'irrisio.'] I must leave this subject, and limit myself in this Lecture to a comparison between words, not in different languages, but in the same.

Synonyms then, as the term is generally understood, and as I shall use it, are words in the same language with slight differences either already established between them, or potentially subsisting in them.

They are not on the one side words absolutely identical, for such, as has been said already, afford no room for discrimination; but neither on the other side are they words only remotely similar to one another; for the differences between these last will be self-evident, will so lie on the surface and proclaim themselves to all, that it would be as superfluous an office as holding a candle to the sun to attempt to make this clearer than it already is. It may be desirable to trace and fix the difference between scarlet and crimson, for these might easily be confounded; but who would think of so doing between scarlet and green?

or between covetousness and avarice; while it would be idle and superfluous to do the same for covetousness and pride. They must be words more or less liable to confusion, but which yet ought not to be confounded, as one has said; in which there originally inhered a difference, or between which, though once absolutely identical, such has gradually grown up, and so established itself in the use of the best writers, and in the instinct of the best speakers of the tongue, that it claims to be openly recognized by all.

But here an interesting question presents itself to us: How do languages come to possess synonyms of this latter cla.s.s, which are differenced not by etymology, nor by any other deep-lying cause, but only by usage? Now if languages had been made by agreement, of course no such synonyms as these could exist; for when once a word had been found which was the adequate representative of a thought, feeling, or fact, no second one would have been sought. But languages are the result of processes very different from this, and far less formal and regular. Various tribes, each with its own dialect, kindred indeed, but in many respects distinct, coalesce into one people, and cast their contributions of language into a common stock. Thus the French possess many synonyms from the _langue d'Oc_ and _langue d'Oil_, each having contributed its word for one and the same thing; thus 'atre' and 'foyer,' both for hearth. Sometimes different tribes of the same people have the same word, yet in forms sufficiently different to cause that both remain, but as words distinct from one another; thus in Latin 'serpo' and 'repo' are dialectic variations of the same word; just as in German, 'odem' and 'athem' were no more than dialectic differences at the first. Or again, a conquering people have fixed themselves in the midst of a conquered; they impose their dominion, but do not succeed in imposing their language; nay, being few in number, they find themselves at last compelled to adopt the language of the conquered; yet not so but that a certain compromise between the two languages finds place. One carries the day, but on the condition that it shall admit as naturalized denizens a number of the words of the other; which in some instances expel, but in many others subsist as synonyms side by side with, the native words.

These are causes of the existence of synonyms which reach far back into the history of a nation and a language; but other causes at a later period are also at work. When a written literature springs up, authors familiar with various foreign tongues import from one and another words which are not absolutely required, which are oftentimes rather luxuries than necessities. Sometimes, having a very sufficient word of their own, they must needs go and look for a finer one, as they esteem it, from abroad; as, for instance, the Latin having its own expressive 'succinum' (from 'succus'), for amber, some must import from the Greek the ambiguous 'electrum.' Of these thus proposed as candidates for admission, some fail to obtain the rights of citizens.h.i.+p, and after longer or shorter probation are rejected; it may be, never advance beyond their first proposer. Enough, however, receive the stamp of popular allowance to create embarra.s.sment for a while; until, that is, their relations with the already existing words are adjusted. As a single ill.u.s.tration of the various quarters from which the English has thus been augmented and enriched, I would instance the words 'wile,'

'trick,' device,' finesse,' 'artifice,' and 'stratagem.' and remind you of the various sources from which we have drawn them. Here 'wile,' is Old-English, 'trick' is Dutch, 'devise' is Old-French, 'finesse' is French, 'artificium' is Latin, and '[Greek: stratagema]' Greek.

By and by, however, as a language becomes itself an object of closer attention, at the same time that society, advancing from a simpler to a more complex condition, has more things to designate, more thoughts to utter, and more distinctions to draw, it is felt as a waste of resources to employ two or more words for the designating of one and the same thing. Men feel, and rightly, that with a boundless world lying around them and demanding to be catalogued and named, and which they only make truly their own in the measure and to the extent that they do name it, with infinite shades and varieties of thought and feeling subsisting in their own minds, and claiming to find utterance in words, it is a wanton extravagance to expend two or more signs on that which could adequately be set forth by one--an extravagance in one part of their expenditure, which will be almost sure to issue in, and to be punished by, a corresponding scantness and straitness in another.

Some thought or feeling or fact will wholly want one adequate sign, because another has two. [Footnote: We have a memorable example of this in the history of the great controversy of the Church with the Arians, In the earlier stages of this, the upholders of the orthodox faith used [Greek: ousia] and [Greek: hypostasis] as identical in force and meaning with one another, Athanasius, in as many words, affirming them to be such. As, however, the controversy went forward, it was perceived that doctrinal results of the highest importance might be fixed and secured for the Church through the a.s.signing severally to these words distinct modifications of meaning. This, accordingly, in the Greek Church, was done; while the Latin, desiring to move _pari pa.s.su_ did yet find itself most seriously embarra.s.sed and hindered in so doing by the fact that it had, or a.s.sumed that it had, but the one word, 'substantia,' to correspond to the two Greek.] Hereupon that which has been well called the process of 'desynonymizing' begins--that is, of gradually discriminating in use between words which have hitherto been accounted perfectly equivalent, and, as such, indifferently employed.

It is a positive enriching of a language when this process is at any point felt to be accomplished; when two or more words, once promiscuously used, have had each its own peculiar domain a.s.signed to it, which it shall not itself overstep, upon which others shall not encroach. This may seem at first sight only as a better regulation of old territory; for all practical purposes it is the acquisition of new.

This desynonymizing process is not carried out according to any prearranged purpose or plan. The working genius of the language accomplishes its own objects, causes these synonymous words insensibly to fall off from one another, and to acquire separate and peculiar meanings. The most that any single writer can do, save indeed in the terminology of science, is to a.s.sist an already existing inclination, to bring to the clear consciousness of all that which already has been obscurely felt by many, and thus to hasten the process of this disengagement, or, as it has been well expressed, 'to regulate and ordinate the evident nisus and tendency of the popular usage into a severe definition'; and establish on a firm basis the distinction, so that it shall not be lost sight of or brought into question again. Thus long before Wordsworth wrote, it was obscurely felt by many that in 'imagination' there was more of the earnest, in 'fancy' of the play, of the spirit, that the first was a loftier faculty and power than the second. The tendency of the language was all in this direction. None would for some time back have employed 'fancy' as Milton employs it, [Footnote: _Paradise Lost_, v. 102-105 5 so too Longinus, _De Subl._ 15.] ascribing to it operations which we have learned to reserve for 'imagination' alone, and indeed subordinating 'imaginations' to fancy, as a part of the materials with which it deals. Yet for all this the words were continually, and not without injury, confounded.

Wordsworth first, in the _Preface_ to his _Lyrical Ballads_, rendered it impossible for any, who had read and mastered what he had written on the matter, to remain unconscious any longer of the essential difference between them. [Footnote: Thus De Quincey (_Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected_): 'All languages tend to clear themselves of synonyms, as intellectual culture advances; the superfluous words being taken up and appropriated by new shades and combinations of thought evolved in the progress of society. And long before this appropriation is fixed and petrified, as it were, into the acknowledged vocabulary of the language, an insensible _clinamen_ (to borrow a Lucretian word) prepares the way for it. Thus, for instance, before Mr. Wordsworth had unveiled the great philosophic distinction between the powers of _fancy_ and _imagination_, the two words had begun to diverge from each other, the first being used to express a faculty somewhat capricious and exempted from law, the other to express a faculty more self-determined. When, therefore, it was at length perceived, that under an apparent unity of meaning there lurked a real dualism, and for philosophic purposes it was necessary that this distinction should have its appropriate expression, this necessity was met half way by the _clinamen_ which had already affected the popular usage of the words.' Compare what Coleridge had before said on the same matter, _Biogr. Lit_. vol. i. p. 90; and what Ruskin, _Modern Painters_ part 3, Section 2, ch. 3, has said since. It is to Coleridge that we owe the word 'to desynonymize' (_Biogr. Lit_. p. 87)--which is certainly preferable to Professor Grote's 'despecificate.' Purists indeed will object that it is of hybrid formation, the prefix Latin, the body of the word Greek; but for all this it may very well stand till a better is offered. Coleridge's own contributions, direct and indirect, in this province are perhaps more in number and in value than those of any other English writer; thus to him we owe the disentanglement of 'fanaticism' and 'enthusiasm' (_Lit. Rem_. vol. ii.

p. 365); of 'keenness' and 'subtlety' (_Table-Talk_, p. 140); of 'poetry' and 'poesy' (_Lit. Rem_. vol. i. p. 219); of 'a.n.a.logy' and 'metaphor' (_Aids to Reflection_, 1825, p. 198); and that on which he himself laid so great a stress, of 'reason' and 'understanding.'] This is but one example, an ill.u.s.trious one indeed, of what has been going forward in innumerable pairs of words. Thus in Wiclif's time and long after, there seems to have been no difference recognized between a 'famine' and a 'hunger'; they both expressed the outward fact of a scarcity of food. It was a genuine gain when, leaving to 'famine' this meaning, by 'hunger' was expressed no longer the outward fact, but the inward sense of the fact. Other pairs of words between which a distinction is recognized now which was not recognized some centuries ago, are the following: 'to clarify' and 'to glorify'; 'to admire' and 'to wonder'; 'to convince' and 'to convict'; 'reign' and 'kingdom'; 'ghost' and 'spirit'; 'merit' and 'demerit'; 'mutton' and 'sheep'; 'feminine' and 'effeminate'; 'mortal' and 'deadly'; 'ingenious' and 'ingenuous'; 'needful' and 'needy'; 'voluntary' and 'wilful.'

[footnote: For the exact difference between these, and other pairs or larger groups of words, see my _Select Glossary_.]

A mult.i.tude of words in English are still waiting for a similar discrimination. Many in due time will obtain it, and the language prove so much the richer thereby; for certainly if Coleridge had right when he affirmed that 'every new term expressing a fact or a difference not precisely or adequately expressed by any other word in the same language, is a new organ of thought for the mind that has learned it.' [footnote: _Church and State_, p. 200.] we are justified in regarding these distinctions which are still waiting to be made as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. Thus how real an ethical gain would it be, how much clearness would it bring into men's thoughts and actions, if the distinction which exists in Latin between 'vindicta' and 'ultio,' that the first is a moral act, the just punishment of the sinner by his G.o.d, of the criminal by the judge, the other an act in which the self-gratification of one who counts himself injured or offended is sought, could in like manner be fully established (vaguely felt it already is) between our 'vengeance' and 'revenge'; so that 'vengeance' (with the verb 'to avenge') should never be ascribed except to G.o.d, or to men acting as the executors of his righteous doom; while all retaliation to which not zeal for his righteousness, but men's own sinful pa.s.sions have given the impulse and the motive, should be termed 'revenge.' As it now is, the moral disapprobation which cleaves, and cleaves justly, to 'revenge,' is oftentimes transferred almost unconsciously to 'vengeance'; while yet without vengeance it is impossible to conceive in a world so full of evil-doing any effectual a.s.sertion of righteousness, any moral government whatever.

The causes mentioned above, namely that our modern English, Teutonic in its main structure, yet draws so large a portion of its verbal wealth from the Latin, and has further welcomed, and found place for, many later accessions, these causes have together effected that we possess a great many duplicates, not to speak of triplicates, or of such a quintuplicate as that which I adduced just now, where the Teutonic, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek had each yielded us a word. Let me mention a few duplicate substantives, Old-English and Latin: thus we have 'shepherd' and 'pastor'; 'feeling' and 'sentiment'; 'handbook' and 'manual'; 's.h.i.+p' and 'nave'; 'anger' and 'ire'; 'grief' and 'sorrow'; 'kingdom,' 'reign,' and 'realm'; 'love' and 'charity'; 'feather' and 'plume'; 'forerunner' and 'precursor'; 'foresight' and 'providence'; 'freedom' and 'liberty'; 'bitterness' and 'acerbity'; 'murder' and 'homicide'; 'moons' and 'lunes.' Sometimes, in theology and science especially, we have gone both to the Latin and to the Greek, and drawn the same word from them both: thus 'deist' and 'theist'; 'numeration'

and 'arithmetic'; 'revelation' and 'apocalypse'; 'temporal' and 'chronic'; 'compa.s.sion' and 'sympathy'; 'supposition' and 'hypothesis'; 'transparent' and 'diaphanous'; 'digit' and 'dactyle.' But to return to the Old-English and Latin, the main factors of our tongue. Besides duplicate substantives, we have duplicate verbs, such as 'to whiten'

and 'to blanch'; 'to soften' and 'to mollify'; 'to unload' and 'to exonerate'; 'to hide' and 'to conceal'; with many more. Duplicate adjectives also are numerous, as 'shady' and 'umbrageous'; 'unreadable'

and 'illegible'; 'unfriendly' and 'inimical'; 'almighty' and 'omnipotent'; 'wholesome' and 'salubrious'; 'unshunnable' and 'inevitable.' Occasionally our modern English, not adopting the Latin substantive, has admitted duplicate adjectives; thus 'burden' has not merely 'burdensome' but also 'onerous,' while yet 'onus' has found no place with us; 'priest' has 'priestly' and 'sacerdotal'; 'king' has 'kingly,' 'regal,' which is purely Latin, and 'royal,' which is Latin distilled through the French. 'Bodily' and 'corporal,' 'boyish' and 'puerile,' 'fiery' and 'igneous,' 'wooden' and 'ligneous,' 'worldly'

and 'mundane,' 'b.l.o.o.d.y' and 'sanguine,' 'watery' and 'aqueous,'