Volume Iii Part 7 (1/2)
[36] It was published in 1616: the writer only catches at some verbal expressions--as, for instance:--
The vulgar proverb runs, ”The more the merrier.”
The cross,--”Not so! one hand is enough in a purse.”
The proverb, ”It is a great way to the bottom of the sea.”
The cross,--”Not so! it is but a stone's cast.”
The proverb, ”The pride of the rich makes the labours of the poor.”
The cross,--”Not so! the labours of the poor make the pride of the rich.”
The proverb, ”He runs far who never turns.”
The cross,--”Not so! he may break his neck in a short course.”
[37] It has been suggested that this whimsical amus.e.m.e.nt has been lately revived, to a certain degree, in the _acting of charades_ among juvenile parties.
[38] Now the punning motto of a n.o.ble family.
[39] At the ROYAL INSt.i.tUTION there is a fine copy of Polydore Vergil's ”Adagia,” with his other work, curious in its day, _De Inventoribus Rerum_, printed by Frobenius, in 1521. The _wood-cuts_ of this edition seem to me to be executed with inimitable delicacy, resembling a pencilling which Raphael might have envied.
[40] Since the appearance of the present article, several collections of PROVERBS have been attempted. A little unpretending volume, ent.i.tled ”Select Proverbs of all Nations, with _Notes_ and _Comments_, by Thomas Fielding, 1824,” is not ill arranged; an excellent book for popular reading. The editor of a recent miscellaneous compilation, ”The Treasury of Knowledge,” has whimsically bordered the four sides of the pages of a Dictionary with as many proverbs. The plan was ingenious, but the proverbs are not. Triteness and triviality are fatal to a proverb.
[41] A new edition of Ray's book, with large additions, was published by Bohn, in 1855, under the t.i.tle of ”A Handbook of Proverbs.” It is a vast collection of ”wise saws” of all ages and countries.
CONFUSION OF WORDS.
”There is nothing more common,” says the lively Voltaire, ”than to read and to converse to no purpose. In history, in morals, in law, in physic, and in divinity, be careful of equivocal terms.” One of the ancients wrote a book to prove that there was no word which did not convey an ambiguous and uncertain meaning. If we possessed this lost book, our ingenious dictionaries of ”synonyms” would not probably prove its uselessness. Whenever _the same word_ is a.s.sociated by the parties with _different ideas_, they may converse, or controverse, till ”the crack of doom!” This with a little obstinacy and some agility in s.h.i.+fting his ground, makes the fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in disentangling a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned, carelessly or perversely slipped into an argument, may prolong it for a century or two--as it has happened! Vaugelas, who pa.s.sed his whole life in the study of words, would not allow that the _sense_ was to determine the meaning of _words_; for, says he, it is the business of _words_ to explain the _sense_. Kant for a long while discovered in this way a facility of arguing without end, as at this moment do our political economists. ”I beseech you,” exclaims a poetical critic, in the agony of a confusion of words, on the Pope controversy, ”not to ask whether I mean _this_ or _that_!” Our critic, positive that he has made himself understood, has shown how a few vague terms may admit of volumes of vindication. Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses, and you raise fifty parties! Should some friend of peace enable the fifty to repose on one sense, that innocent word, no longer ringing the _tocsin_ of a party, would lie in forgetfulness in the Dictionary. Still more provoking when an ident.i.ty of meaning is only disguised by different modes of expression, and when the term has been closely sifted, to their mutual astonishment both parties discover the same thing lying under the bran and chaff after this heated operation. Plato and Aristotle probably agreed much better than the opposite parties they raised up imagined; their difference was in the manner of expression, rather than in the points discussed. The Nominalists and the Realists, who once filled the world with their brawls, and who from irregular words came to regular blows, could never comprehend their alternate nonsense; ”whether in employing general terms we use _words_ or _names_ only, or whether there is _in nature anything_ corresponding to what we mean by a _general idea_?” The Nominalists only denied what no one in his senses would affirm; and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses would deny; a hair's breadth might have joined what the spirit of party had sundered!
Do we flatter ourselves that the Logomachies of the Nominalists and the Realists terminated with these scolding schoolmen? Modern nonsense, weighed against the obsolete, may make the scales tremble for awhile, but it will lose its agreeable quality of freshness, and subside into an equipoise. We find their spirit still lurking among our own metaphysicians! ”Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again!” exclaimed my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on _abstract ideas_, on which there is still a doubt whether they are anything more than _generalising terms_.[42] Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term _sufficient reason_: for every existence, for every event, and for every truth there must be a _sufficient reason_.
This vagueness of language produced a perpetual misconception, and Leibnitz was proud of his equivocal triumphs in always affording a new interpretation! It is conjectured that he only employed his term of _sufficient reason_ for the plain simple word of _cause_. Even Locke, who has himself so admirably noticed the ”abuse of words,” has been charged with using vague and indefinite ones; he has sometimes employed the words _reflection_, _mind_, and _spirit_ in so indefinite a way, that they have confused his philosophy: thus by some ambiguous expressions, our great metaphysician has been made to establish doctrines fatal to the immutability of moral distinctions. Even the eagle-eye of the intellectual Newton grew dim in the obscurity of the language of Locke. We are astonished to discover that two such intellects should not comprehend the same ideas; for Newton wrote to Locke, ”I beg your pardon for representing that you struck at the root of morality in a principle laid down in your book of Ideas--and that I took you for a Hobbist!”[43] The difference of opinion between Locke and Reid is in consequence of an ambiguity in the word _principle_, as employed by Reid. The removal of a solitary word may cast a luminous ray over a whole body of philosophy: ”If we had called the _infinite_ the _indefinite_,” says Condillac, in his _Traite des Sensations_, ”by this small change of a word we should have avoided the error of imagining that we have a positive idea of _infinity_, from whence so many false reasonings have been carried on, not only by metaphysicians, but even by geometricians.” The word _reason_ has been used with different meanings by different writers; _reasoning_ and _reason_ have been often confounded; a man may have an endless capacity for _reasoning_, without being much influenced by _reason_, and to be _reasonable_, perhaps differs from both! So Moliere tells us,
Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison; Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison!
In this research on ”confusion of words,” might enter the voluminous history of the founders of sects, who have usually employed terms which had no meaning attached to them, or were so ambiguous that their real notions have never been comprehended; hence the most chimerical opinions have been imputed to founders of sects. We may instance that of the _Antinomians_, whose remarkable denomination explains their doctrine, expressing that they were ”against law!” Their founder was John Agricola, a follower of Luther, who, while he lived, had kept Agricola's follies from exploding, which they did when he a.s.serted that there was no such thing as sin, our salvation depending on faith, and not on works; and when he declaimed against the _Law of G.o.d_. To what length some of his sect pushed this verbal doctrine is known; but the real notions of this Agricola probably never will be! Bayle considered him as a harmless dreamer in theology, who had confused his head by Paul's controversies with the Jews; but Mosheim, who bestows on this early reformer the epithets of _ventosus_ and _versipellis_, windy and crafty!
or, as his translator has it, charges him with ”vanity, presumption, and artifice,” tells us by the term ”law,” Agricola only meant the ten commandments of Moses, which he considered were abrogated by the Gospel, being designed for the Jews and not for the Christians. Agricola then, by the words the ”Law of G.o.d,” and ”that there was no such thing as sin,” must have said one thing and meant another! This appears to have been the case with most of the divines of the sixteenth century; for even Mosheim complains of ”their want of precision and consistency in expressing _their sentiments_, hence their real sentiments have been misunderstood.” There evidently prevailed a great ”confusion of words”
among them! The _grace suffisante_ and the _grace efficace_ of the Jansenists and the Jesuits show the s.h.i.+fts and stratagems by which nonsense may be dignified. ”Whether all men received from G.o.d _sufficient grace_ for their conversion!” was an inquiry some unhappy metaphysical theologist set afloat: the Jesuits, according to their worldly system of making men's consciences easy, affirmed it; but the Jansenists insisted, that this _sufficient grace_ would never be _efficacious_, unless accompanied by _special grace_. ”Then the _sufficient grace_, which is not _efficacious_, is a contradiction in terms, and worse, a heresy!” triumphantly cried the Jesuits, exulting over their adversaries. This ”confusion of words” thickened, till the Jesuits introduced in this logomachy with the Jansenists papal bulls, royal edicts, and a regiment of dragoons! The Jansenists, in despair, appealed to miracles and prodigies, which they got up for public representation; but, above all, to their Pascal, whose immortal satire the Jesuits really felt was at once ”sufficient and efficacious,”
though the dragoons, in settling a ”confusion of words,” did not boast of inferior success to Pascal's. Former ages had, indeed, witnessed even a more melancholy logomachy, in the _h.o.m.oousion_ and the _h.o.m.oiousion_!
An event which Boileau has immortalised by some fine verses, which, in his famous satire on _L'Equivoque_, for reasons best known to the Sorbonne, were struck out of the text.
D'une _syllabe_ impie un saint _mot_ augmente Remplit tous les esprits d'aigreurs si meurtrieres-- Tu fis, dans une guerre et si triste et si longue, Perir tant de Chretiens, _martyrs d'une diphthongue_!
Whether the Son was similar to the substance of the Father, or of the same substance, depended on the diphthong _oi_, which was alternately rejected and received. Had they earlier discovered, what at length they agreed on, that the words denoted what was incomprehensible, it would have saved thousands, as a witness describes, ”from tearing one another to pieces.” The great controversy between Abelard and St. Bernard, when the saint accused the scholastic of maintaining heretical notions of the Trinity, long agitated the world; yet, now that these confusers of words can no longer inflame our pa.s.sions, we wonder how these parties could themselves differ about words to which we can attach no meaning whatever. There have been few councils or synods where the omission or addition of a word or a phrase might not have terminated an interminable logomachy! At the council of Basle, for the convenience of the disputants, John de Secubia drew up a treatise of _undeclined words_, chiefly to determine the signification of the particles _from_, _by_, _but_, and _except_, which it seems were perpetually occasioning fresh disputes among the Hussites and the Bohemians. Had Jerome of Prague known, like our Shakspeare, the virtue of an IF, or agreed with Hobbes, that he should not have been so positive in the use of the verb IS, he might have been spared from the flames. The philosopher of Malmsbury has declared that ”Perhaps _Judgment_ was nothing else but the composition or joining of _two names of things, or modes_, by the verb IS.” In modern times the popes have more skilfully freed the church from this ”confusion of words.” His holiness, on one occasion, standing in equal terror of the court of France, who protected the Jesuits, and of the court of Spain, who maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a phrase, where a comma or a full stop, placed at the beginning or the end, purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions which he condemned; and when the rival parties despatched deputations to the court of Rome to plead for the period, or advocate the comma, his holiness, in this ”confusion of words,” flung an unpunctuated copy to the parties; nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if the rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that of the other close by a full period!
In jurisprudence much confusion has occurred in the uses of the term _rights_; yet the social union and human happiness are involved in the precision of the expression. When Montesquieu laid down, as the active principle of a republic, _virtue_, it seemed to infer that a republic was the best of governments. In the defence of his great work he was obliged to define the term; and it seems that by _virtue_ he only meant _political virtue_, the love of the country.
In politics, what evils have resulted from abstract terms to which no ideas are affixed,--such as, ”The Equality of Man--the Sovereignty or the Majesty of the People--Loyalty--Reform--even Liberty herself!--Public Opinion--Public Interest;” and other abstract notions, which have excited the hatred or the ridicule of the vulgar. Abstract ideas, as _sounds_, have been used as watchwords. The combatants will usually be found willing to fight for words to which, perhaps, not one of them has attached any settled signification. This is admirably touched on by Locke, in his chapter of ”Abuse of Words.” ”Wisdom, Glory, Grace, &c., are words frequent enough in every man's mouth; but if a great many of those who use them should be asked what they mean by them, they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer--a plain proof that though they have learned those _sounds_, and have them ready at their tongue's end, yet there are no determined _ideas_ laid up in their minds which are to be expressed to others by them.”