FOOTNOTES:
[30] “Lectures on the Science of Language,” Second Series, pp. 592-6.
[31] Whately’s Logic.
[32] Bowen’s “Logic,” p. 432.
[33] “Logic,” Book IV., Chap. 5.
[34] Max Müller’s “Science of Language,” Vol. II, p. 600.
[CHAPTER XII.]
THE FALLACIES IN WORDS—(continued).
I never learned rhetorike certain;
Things that I speke, it mote be bare and plain.—Chaucer.
Here is our great infelicity, that, when single words signify complex ideas, one word can never distinctly manifest all the parts of a complex idea.—Isaac Watts.
If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness and niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so employed should perplex and subtilize the signification of sounds.—Locke.
It has been remarked by Archbishop Whately that the words whose ambiguity is the most frequently overlooked, and produces the greatest amount of confusion of thought and fallacy, are the commonest,—the very ones whose meaning is supposed to be best understood. “Familiar acquaintance is perpetually mistaken for accurate knowledge.” Such a word is “luxury.”
A favorite theme for newspaper declamations in these days is the luxury and extravagance of the American people, especially of the nouveaux riches whose fortunes have been of mushroom growth. It is easy to declaim thus against luxury,—that is, against the use of things which, at any particular period, are not deemed indispensable to life, health, and comfort; but what do those who indulge in this cheap denunciation mean by the term? Is not luxury a purely relative term? Is there a single article of dress, food or furniture which can be pronounced an absolute luxury, without regard to the wealth or poverty of him who enjoys it? Are not the luxuries of one generation or country the necessaries of another? Persons who are familiar with history know that Alfred the Great had not a chair to sit down upon, nor a chimney to carry off his smoke; that William the Conquerer was unacquainted with the luxury of a feather bed, if it can be called one; that the early aristocracy of England lived on the ground floor, without drainage; that in the Middle Ages shirts were deemed a useless superfluity, and men were even put in the pillory for wearing them; that night-shirts were esteemed a still more needless luxury, and persons of all ranks and classes slept in the first costume of Adam; that travelling carriages are an ingenious invention of modern effeminacy; that the men who first carried umbrellas in the streets, even in the severest rain-storms, were hooted at as dandies and coxcombs; that the nobles and dames of the most brilliant epochs of England’s annals ate with their fingers, generally in couples, out of one trencher on a bare table; and that when forks were introduced, they were long hotly opposed as an extravagance, and even denounced by many as a device of Satan, to offer an affront to Providence, who had provided man with fingers to convey his food to his mouth. In the introduction to Hollinshed’s “Chronicles,” published in 1577, there is a bitter complaint of the multitude of chimneys lately erected, of the exchange of straw pallets for mattresses or flock beds, and of wooden platters for earthenware and pewter. In another place, the writer laments that oak only is used for building, instead of willow as heretofore; adding, that “formerly our houses indeed were of willow, but our men were of oak; but now that our houses are of oak, our men are not only of willow, but some altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration.”
Erasmus tells us that salt beef and strong ale constituted the chief part of Queen Elizabeth’s breakfast, and that similar refreshments were served to her in bed for supper. There is not a single able-bodied workingman in the United States who does not enjoy fare which would have been deemed luxurious by men of high station in the iron reign of the Tudors; hardly a thriving shopkeeper who does not occupy a house which English nobles in 1650 would have envied; hardly a domestic servant or factory girl who does not on Sundays adorn herself with apparel which would have excited the admiration of the duchesses in Queen Elizabeth’s ante-rooms. Xenophon accounts for the degeneracy of the Persians by their luxury, which, he says, was carried to such a pitch that they used gloves to protect their hands. Tea and coffee were once denounced as idle and injurious luxuries; and throughout the larger part of the world tooth-brushes, napkins, suspenders, bathing-tubs, and a hundred other things now deemed indispensable to the health or comfort of civilized man, would be regarded as proofs of effeminacy and extravagance.
Luxury has been a favorite theme of satire and denunciation by poets and moralists from time immemorial. But it may be doubted whether in nations or individuals its effects, even when it rages most fiercely, are half so pernicious as those springing from that indifference to comforts and luxuries which is sometimes dignified with the name of contentment, but which is only another name for sheer laziness. While thousands are ruined by prodigality and extravagance, tens of thousands are kept in poverty by indifference to the comforts and ornaments of life,—by a too feeble development of those desires to gratify which the mass of men are striving. It is a bad sign when a man is content with the bare necessities of life, and aspires to nothing higher; and equally ominous is it when a nation, however rich or powerful, is satisfied with the capital and glories it has already accumulated. Cry up as we may the virtues of simplicity and frugality, it is yet quite certain that a people content to live upon garlic, macaroni, or rice, are at the very lowest point in the scale both of intellect and morality. A civilized man differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity of his wants. The truth is, man is a constitutionally lazy being, and requires some stimulus to prick him into industry. He must have many difficulties to contend with, many clamorous appetites and tastes to gratify, if you would bring out his energies and virtues; and it is because they are always grumbling,—because, dissatisfied amid the most enviable enjoyments, they clamor and strive for more and more of what Voltaire calls les superflues choses, si nécessaires,—that the English people have reached their present pinnacle of prosperity, and accumulated a wealth which almost enables them to defy a hostile world.
Among the familiar words that we employ, few have been more frequently made the instrument of sophistry than “nature” and “art.” There are many persons who oppose the teaching of elocution, because they like a “natural” and “artless” eloquence, to which, they think, all elaborate training is opposed. Yet nothing is more certain than that nature and art, between which there is supposed to be an irreconcilable antagonism, are often the very same thing. What is more natural than that a man who lacks vocal power should cultivate and develop his voice by vocal exercises; or that, if he is conscious of faults in his manner of speaking,—his articulation, gestures, etc.,—he should try, by the help of a good teacher, to overcome them? So with the style of a writer; what is more natural than for one who feels that he has not adequately expressed his thought, to blot the words first suggested and try others, and yet others, till he despairs of further improvement? There are subjects so deep and complex, ideas so novel and abstruse, that the most practised writer cannot do justice to them without great labor. A conscientious author is, therefore, continually transposing clauses, reconstructing sentences, substituting words, polishing and repolishing paragraphs; and this, unquestionably, is “art,” or the application of means to an end. But is this art inconsistent with nature?
Similar to the fallacy which lurks in the words “nature” and “natural,” as thus employed, is that which lurks in a popular use of the word “simplicity.” It has been happily said that while some men talk as if to speak naturally were to speak like a natural, others talk as if to speak with simplicity meant to speak like a simpleton. But what is true “simplicity,” as applied to literary composition? Is it old, worn-out commonplace,—“straw that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat,” as Carlyle says,—the shallowest ideas expressed in tame and insipid language? Or is it not rather
“Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”—
in other words, a just and striking thought expressed in the aptest and most impressive language? Those persons who declaim against the employment of art in speaking and writing, forget that we are all exceedingly artificial, conventional beings. Without training, a speaker is almost sure to be awkward in gesture and unnatural in utterance. The very preacher who in the street forgets himself and uses the most natural gesticulation and tones, will become self-conscious the moment he ascends the pulpit, and speak in a falsetto key. It is to get rid of these artificial habits that “art” (which is the employment of proper means) is needed.
How many controversies about the “transmutation of Species,” and the “fixity of Species,” would have been avoided, had the scientists who use these phrases fully pondered their meaning, or rather no-meaning! Some writers have tried to explain the law of constancy in transmission, and its independence of the law of variation, by maintaining that it is the Species only, not the individual, which is reproduced. “Species,” says Buffon, “are the only beings in nature.” A sheep, it is said, is always and everywhere a sheep, and a man a man, reproducing the specific type, but not necessarily reproducing any individual peculiarities. This hypothesis is a striking example of the confusion which results from the introduction of old metaphysical ideas into science. It is evident, as a late writer has clearly shown, that Species cannot reproduce itself, for Species does not exist. It is an entity, an abstract idea, not a concrete fact.
The thing Species no more exists than the thing Goodness or the thing Whiteness. “Nature only knows individuals. A collection of individuals so closely resembling each other as all sheep resemble each other, are conveniently classed under one general term, Species; but this general term has no objective existence; the abstract or typical sheep, apart from all concrete individuals, has no existence out of our systems. Whenever an individual sheep is born, it is the offspring of two individual sheep, whose structures and dispositions it reproduces; it is not the offspring of an abstract idea; it does not come into being at the bidding of a type, which as a Species sits apart, regulating ovine phenomena.... If, therefore, ‘transmutation of Species’ is absurd, ‘fixity of Species’ is not a whit less so. That which does not exist can neither be transmuted nor maintained in fixity. Only individuals exist; they resemble their parents, and they differ from their parents. Out of these resemblances we create Species; out of these differences we create Varieties; we do so as conveniences of classification, and then believe in the reality of our own figments.”[35]
A popular fallacy, which is partly verbal, is the notion, so tenaciously held by many, that exposure to hardship, and even want, in youth, is the cause of the bodily vigor of those men who have lived to a good age in countries with a rocky soil and a bleak climate. What is more natural, it is argued, than that hardships should harden the constitution? Look at the Indians; how many of them live till eighty or ninety! Yet no person who reasons thus would think, if engaged in cattle-breeding, of neglecting to feed and shelter his animals in their youth; nor if a dozen men, out of a hundred who had faced a battery, should survive and live to a good age, would he think of regarding the facing of batteries as conducive to longevity. The truth is, that early hardships, by destroying all the weak, merely prove the hardiness of the survivors,—which latter is the cause, not the effect, of their having lived through such a training. So “loading a gun-barrel to the muzzle, and firing it off, does not give it strength; though it proves, if it escape, that it was strong.”
The revelations of travellers have dissipated the illusions which once prevailed concerning the hardiness and health of the Indians and other savages. The savage, it is now known, lives in a condition but one degree above starvation. If he sink below it, he disappears instantaneously, as if he had never been. A certain amount of hardship he can endure; but it has limits, which if he passes, he sinks unnoticed and unknown. There is no registrar or newspaper to record that a unit has been subtracted from the amount of human existence. It is true that severe diseases are rarely seen by casual visitors of savage tribes,—and why? Because death is their doctor, and the grave their hospital. When patients are left wholly to nature, nature presses very hard for an immediate payment of her debt.
An ambiguous word, which has been a source of not a little error, is the adjective “light,” which is used sometimes in a literal, sometimes in a figurative sense. When writers on Agricultural Chemistry declare that what are called heavy soils are always specifically the lightest, the statement looks like a paradox. By “heavy” soils are meant, of course, not those which are the weightiest, but those which are ploughed with difficulty,—the effect being like that of dragging a heavy weight. So some articles of food are supposed to be light of digestion because they are specifically light. Again, there is a popular notion that strong drink must make men strong; which is a double fallacy, since the word “strong” is applied to alcoholic liquors and to the human body in entirely different senses, and it is assumed that an effect must be like its cause, which is not true.
Another ambiguous term, at least as popularly used, is “murder.” There are persons who assert that the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, in 1851, was murder in the strictest sense of the term. To send out into the streets of a peaceful town a party of men dressed in uniform, with muskets and bayonets in their hands, and with orders to kill and plunder, is just as essentially murder and robbery, it is said, as to break into a house with half-a-dozen companions out of uniform, and do the same things. Was not Orsini’s crime, they ask, as truly a murder as when a burglar kills a man with a revolver in order to rob him? So, again, there are Christian moralists, who, when asked for proof that suicide is sinful, adduce the Scriptural injunction, “Thou shalt do no murder,” assuming that suicide, because it is called self-murder, is a species of “murder” in the primary sense of the word. It is evident, however, that most, if not all, of these assertions are founded on palpable fallacies. “Murder” is a technical term, and means the wilful, deliberate killing, without just cause, and without certain specified excuses, of a man who belongs to a settled state of society, in which security is afforded to life and property. In all that is said about the atrocity of murder, there is a latent reference to this state of things. Were the “Vigilance Committee” of San Francisco murderers, when they executed criminals illegally? Are the men who “lynch” horse-thieves on our western frontiers, murderers? Were the rebels who, in our late Civil War, shot down Union soldiers, murderers?
The common sentiment of the civilized world recognizes a vast difference between the rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects, and the relations of nations to each other, on the one hand, and the rights and duties of private individuals on the other; and hence the rules of public and those of private morality must be essentially different. According to legal authority, it is not murder to kill an alien enemy in time of war; nor is it murder to take away a man’s life by perjury. Revolutions and coups d’état most persons will admit to be sometimes justifiable; and both, when justifiable, justify a certain degree of violence to person, to property, or to previous engagements. The difficulty is to tell just when, and how far, violence may justify and be justified. It has been well said by an acute and original writer that “it is by no means the same thing whether a man is plundered and wounded by burglars, or by the soldiers of an absolute king who is trying to maintain his authority. The sack of Perugia shocked the sensibilities of a great part of Europe; but if the Pope had privately poisoned one of his friends or servants from any purely personal motive, even the blindest religious zeal would have denounced him as a criminal unfit to live. A man must be a very bitter Liberal indeed, who really maintains that the violation by a sovereign of his promissory oath of office stands on precisely the same footing as deliberate perjury in an ordinary court of justice.” Suicide, it is evident, lacks the most essential characteristic of murder, namely, its inhumanity,—the injury done to one’s neighbor and to others by the insecurity they are made to feel. Can a man rob himself? If not, how can he, in the proper sense of the word, murder himself?
Take another case. When Napoleon Bonaparte was at the climax of his power, and the entire continent lay at his feet, he aimed a blow at the naval supremacy of England, which, had it taken effect, would have fatally crippled her resources. By a secret article in the Treaty of Tilsit, it was stipulated that he and Alexander, the czar of Russia, should take possession of the fleets of the Neutral Powers. Mr. Canning, the British Prime Minister, saw the peril, and instantly, upon learning of the intrigue, dispatched a naval force under Nelson to Copenhagen, which captured the Danish fleet, the object of the confederates, and conveyed it to Portsmouth. The violation of the law of nations involved in this act was vehemently denounced in the pulpit, in parliament, and on the hustings; and to-day there are many persons who regard the audacious measure as little better than piracy. The world, however, has not sustained the charge. Problems arise in the life of both men and nations, for the solution of which the ordinary rules of ethics are insufficient. It is possible to kill without being guilty of murder, to rob without being a thief, and to break the law of nations without being a buccaneer. The justification of the British Minister lay in the fact that Denmark was powerless to resist the Continental powers, and that her coveted fleet, if not seized by England, would have been used against her.
There is hardly any word which is oftener turned into an instrument of the fallacy of ambiguity than “theory.” There is a class of men in every community, of limited education and narrow observation, who, because they have mingled in the world and dealt with affairs, claim to be preëminently practical men, and ridicule the opinions of thinkers in their closets as the speculations of “mere theorists.” Not discriminating carefully between the word “general” and the word “abstract,” and regarding as abstract principles what are in nearly all cases general principles, they regard all theorizing as synonymous with visionary speculation; while that which they call “practical knowledge,” and which they fancy to be wholly devoid of supposition or guesswork, but which is nothing else than a heap of hasty deductions from scanty and inaccurately observed phenomena, they deem more trustworthy than the discoveries of science and the conclusions of reason. Yet, when correctly defined, this very practical knowledge, so boastfully opposed to theory, in reality presupposes it. True practical knowledge is simply a ready discernment of the proper modes and seasons of applying to the common affairs of life those general truths and principles which are deduced from an extensive and accurate observation of facts, by minds stored with various knowledge, accustomed to investigation, and trained to the art of reasoning; or, in other words, by theorists. Every man who attempts to trace the causes or effects of an occurrence that falls under his personal observation, theorizes. The only essential distinction, in most cases, between “practical” men and those whom they denounce as visionary, is, not that the latter alone indulge in speculation, but that the theories of the former are based on the facts of their own experience,—those that happen within a narrow sphere, and in a single age; while the conclusions of the latter are deduced from the facts of all ages and countries, minutely analyzed and compared.
Thus the “practical” farmer does not hesitate to consult the neighboring farmers, and to make use of the results of their experience concerning the best soils for certain crops, the best manures for those soils, etc.; yet if another farmer, instead of availing himself of his neighbors’ experiences only, consults a book or books containing the digested and classified results of a thousand farmers’ experiences touching the same points, he is called, by a strange inconsistency, “a book-farmer,” “a mere theorist.” The truth is, the “practical” man, so called, extends his views no farther than the fact before him. Even when he is so fortunate as to learn its cause, the discovery is comparatively useless, since it affords no light in new and more complex cases. The scientific man, unsatisfied with the observation of one fact, collects many, and by tracing the points of resemblance, deduces a comprehensive truth of universal application. “Practical” men conduct the details of ordinary business with a masterly hand. As Burke said of George Grenville, they do admirably well so long as things move on in the accustomed channel, and a new and troubled scene is not opened; but they are not fitted to contend successfully with the difficulties of an untried and hazardous situation. When “the high roads are broken up, and the waters are out,” when a new state of things is presented, and “the line affords no precedent,” then it is that they show a mind trained in a subordinate sphere, formed for servile imitation, and destined to borrow its lights of another. “Expert men,” says Bacon, “can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.”
Among the current phrases of the day, by which men are led into error, one of the commonest is the expression “doing good.” Properly understood, “to do good” is to do right; but the phrase has acquired a technical sense which is much narrower. It means, not discharging faithfully the duties of one’s calling, but stepping aside from its routine to relieve the poor, the distressed, and the ignorant; or to reform the sinful. The lawyer who, for a fee, conscientiously gives advice, or pleads in the courts, is not thought to be doing good; but he is so regarded if he gratuitously defends a poor man or a widow. A merchant who sells good articles at fair prices, and pays his notes punctually, is not doing good; but he is doing good, if he carries broth and blankets to beggars, teaches in a Sunday School, supports a Young Men’s Christian Association, or distributes tracts to the irreligious. Charitable and philanthropic societies of every kind are all recognized as organs for doing good; but the common pursuits of life,—law, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, trading, etc.,—are not.
The incorrectness of this view will be seen if we for a moment reflect what would become of society, including its charitable institutions and philanthropists, should its different members refuse to perform their respective functions. Society is a body corporate, which can exist,—at least, in a healthy state,—only on condition that each man performs the specific work which Providence, or his own sense of his fitness for it, has assigned to him. Thus one man tills the ground; another engages in manufacturing; a third gathers and distributes the produce of labor in its various forms; a fourth loans or exchanges money; a fifth makes or executes laws; and each of these persons, as he is contributing to the general good, is doing good as truly as the most devoted clergyman who labors in the cure of souls, or philanthropist who carries loaves of bread to hovels. To deny this, it has been well said, is to say that a commissariat or transport corps has nothing to do with carrying on a war, and that this business is discharged entirely by the men who stand in line of battle or mount the breach.
The popular theory proceeds upon two assumptions, both of which are false; first, that the motives which urge men to diligence in their callings are mean and paltry,—that selfishness is the mainspring which causes all the wheels in the great machine of society to revolve; and, secondly, that pursuits which benefit those who prosecute them are necessarily selfish. The truth is, the best work, and a very large part of the work, done in every calling, is done not from a mean and sordid hunger for its emoluments, whether of money, rank, or fame, but from a sincere love for it, and pride in performing its duties well and creditably. The moment a man begins to lose this esprit de corps, this high-minded professional pride, and to find his reward in his pay and not in his work, that moment his work begins to deteriorate, and he ceases to meet with the highest success. If pursuits which benefit those who follow them are necessarily selfish, then philanthropy itself is selfish, for its rewards, in popular estimation, are of the noblest kind. No sane man will depreciate the blessings that result from the labors of the Howards, the Frys, and the Nightingales; but they bear the same relation to the ordinary pursuits of life that medicine bears to food. Doctors and surgeons are useful members of society; but their services are less needed than those of butchers and bakers. Let the farmer cease to sow and reap, let the loom and the anvil be forsaken, and the courts of justice be closed, and not only will the philanthropist starve, but society will speedily become a den of robbers, if it does not utterly cease to exist.
Mr. Mill notices an ambiguity in the word “right,” which has been made the occasion of an ingenious sophism. A man asserts that he has a right to publish his opinions, which may be true in one sense, namely, that it would be wrong in any other person to hinder or prevent their publication; but it does not follow that, in publishing his opinions, he is doing right, for this is an entirely distinct proposition from the other. Its truth depends upon two things; first, whether he has taken due pains to ascertain that the opinions are true, and second, whether their publication in this manner, and at this time, will probably be beneficial to the interests of truth on the whole. Another sophism, based on the ambiguity of the same word, is that of confounding a right of any kind with a right to enforce that right by resisting or punishing any violation of it, as in the case of a people whose right to good government is ignored by tyrannical rulers. The right or liberty of the people to turn out their rulers is so far from being the same thing as the other, that “it depends upon an immense number of varying circumstances, and is altogether one of the knottiest questions in practical ethics.”
Montaigne complains with good reason that too many definitions, explanations, and replies to difficult questions, are purely verbal. “I demand what ‘nature’ is, what ‘pleasure,’ ‘circle,’ and ‘substitution’ are? The question is about words, and is answer’d accordingly. A stone is a body; but if a man should further urge, and ‘what is body?’ ‘Substance;’ ‘and what is substance?’ and so on, he would drive the respondent to the end of his calepin. We exchange one word for another, and ofttimes for one less understood. I better know what man is, than I know what animal is, or mortal, or rational. To satisfie one doubt, they pop me in the mouth with three; ’tis the Hydra’s head.”[36] There was a time when it was said that the essence of gold and its substantial form consisted in its aureity, and this explanation was supposed to answer all questions, and solve all doubts.
From all this it will be seen that our words are, to a large extent, carelessly employed,—the signs of crude and indefinite generalizations. But even when the greatest care is taken in the employment of words, it is nearly impossible to choose and put them together so exquisitely that a sophist may not wrest and pervert their meaning. Those persons who have ever had a lawsuit need not be told how much ingenious argument may hang on a shade of meaning, to be determined objectively without reference to the fancied intentions of the legislator or the writer. Hardly a week passes, but a valuable bequest is successfully contested through some loophole of ambiguous phraseology. If, in ordinary life, words represent impressions and ideas, in legal instruments they are things; they dispose of property, liberty, and life; they express the will of the lawgiver, and become the masters of our social being. Yet so carelessly are they used by lawyers and legislators, that half the money spent in litigation goes to determine the meanings of words and phrases. O’Connell used to assert that he could drive a coach-and-six through an Act of Parliament. Many of our American enactments yawn with chasms wide enough for a whole railway train. But even when laws have been framed with the most consummate skill, the subtlety of a Choate or a Follett may twist what appears to be the clearest and most unmistakable language into a meaning the very opposite to that which the common sense of mankind would give it.
I have heard Judge Story make the following statement to show the extreme difficulty of framing a statute so as to avoid all ambiguity in its language. Being once employed by Congress to draft an important law, he spent six months in trying to perfect its phraseology, so that its sense would be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, leaving not the smallest loophole for a lawyer to creep through. Yet, in less than a year, after having heard the arguments of two able attorneys, in a suit which came before him as a Judge of the United States Supreme Court, he was utterly at a loss to decide upon the statute’s meaning!
A signal illustration of the ambiguity that lurks in the most familiar words, is furnished by a legal question that was fruitful of controversy and “costs” not long ago in England. An English nobleman, Lord Henry Seymour, who lived in Paris many years, executed a will in 1856, wherein he made a bequest of property worth seventy thousand pounds to the hospitals of London and Paris. No sooner was it known that he was dead, than the question was raised, “What does ‘London’ mean? Where are its limits, and what is its area? What does it contain, and what does it exclude?” Four groups of claimants appeared, each to some extent opposed by the other three. Group the first said, “The gift is obviously confined to the City proper of London,”—that is, “London within the walls,” comprising little more than half of a square mile. “Not so,” protested group the second; “it extends to all the hospitals within the old bills of mortality,”—that is, London, Westminster, Southwark, and about thirty out-parishes, but excluding Marylebone, St. Pancras, Paddington, Chelsea, and everything beyond. Group the third insisted that “London” included “all the area within the metropolitan boroughs”; while group the fourth, for cogent reasons of their own, were positive that the testator meant, and the true construction was, nothing less than the whole area included within the Registrar-General’s and the Census Commissioner’s interpretation of the word “Metropolis.” The Master of the Rolls decided that the testator meant to use the word “London” in its full, complete, popular sense, as including all the busily occupied districts of what is usually called the Metropolis, as it existed in the year when the will was made. No sooner, however, was this vexed question settled, than another, hardly less puzzling, arose,—namely, What is a “Hospital”? Nearly every kind of charitable institution put in its claim; but it was finally decided that only such charities should share in the bequest as fell within the definition of the French word hospice used in the will.
Another perplexing question which came before the English courts some years ago, and which not less vividly shows the importance of attention to the words we use, related to the meaning of the word “team,” as used by writers generally, and used in a written agreement. A certain noble duke made an agreement with one of his tenants in Oxfordshire concerning the occupancy of a farm, and a portion of the agreement was couched in the following terms: “The tenant to perform each year for the Duke of ——, at the rate of one day’s team-work, with two horses and one proper person, for every fifty pounds of rent, when required (except at hay or corn harvest), without being paid for the same.” In other words, the rent of the farm was made up of two portions, the larger being a money payment, and the former a certain amount of farm service. All went on quietly and smoothly in reference to this agreement, until one particular day, when the duke’s agent or bailiff desired the farmer to send a cart to fetch coals from a railway station to the ducal mansion. “Certainly not,” said the farmer. “I’ll send the horses and a man, but you must find the cart.” “Pooh, pooh! what do you mean? Does not your agreement bind you to do team-work occasionally for his Grace?” “Yes, and here’s the team; two horses and a careful man to drive them.” “But there can’t be a team without a cart or wagon.” “O yes, there can, the horses are the team.” “No, the horses and cart together are the team.”
The question which the court was called on to decide in the lawsuit which followed, was,—What is a “team”? The case was at first tried at Oxford, before a common jury, who gave a verdict substantially for the duke. A rule was afterward obtained, with a view to bring the question of definition before the judges at the Court of Queen’s Bench. The counsel for the duke contended that as team-work cannot be done by horses without a cart or wagon, it is obvious that a team must include a vehicle as well as the horses by which it was to be drawn. Mr. Justice A. said that, in the course of his reading, he had met with some lines which tend to show that the team is separate from the cart,—
“Giles Jelt was sleeping, in his cart he lay;
Some waggish pilf’rers stole his team away.
Giles wakes and cries, ‘Ods Bodikins, what’s here?
Why, how now; am I Giles or not?
If he, I’ve lost six geldings to my smart;
If not, Ods Bodikins, I’ve found a cart.’”
Mr. Justice B. quoted a line from Wordsworth,—
“My jolly team will work alone for me,”
as proving the farmer’s interpretation, seeing that, though horses might possibly be jolly, a cart cannot. The counsel for His Grace urged that the dictionaries of Johnson and Walker both speak of a team as “a number of horses drawing the same carriage.” “True,” said Justice A. “do not these citations prove that the team and the carriage are distinct things?” “No,” replied the counsel on the duke’s side; “because a team without a cart would be of no use.” He cited the description given by Cæsar of the mode of fighting in chariots adopted by the ancient Britons, and of the particular use and meaning of the word temanem. From Cæsar he came down to Gray, the English poet, and cited the lines,—
“Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe hath broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield,
How bowed the wood beneath their sturdy stroke;”
and from Gray he came down to the far-famed “Bull Run” affair in the recent American civil war, a graphic account of which told that “the teamsters cut the traces of the horses.”
The counsel for the farmer, on the other hand, referred to Richardson’s English dictionary, and to Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary, for support to the assertion that a team implies only the horses, not the vehicle also; and he then gave the following citations to the same effect: From Spenser,—
“Thee a ploughman all unmeeting found,
As he his toilsome team that way did guide.
And brought thee up a ploughman’s state to bide.”
From Shakespeare,—
“We fairies that do run,
By the triple Hecat’s team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream.”
Again from Shakespeare,—
“I am in love, but a team of horse shall
Not pluck that from me, nor who ’tis I love.”
From Dryden,—
“He heaved with more than human force to move
A weighty straw, the labor of a team.”
Again from Dryden,—
“Any number, passing in a line;
Like a long team of snowy swans on high,
Which clap their wings and cleave the liquid sky.”
Spenser, Roscommon, Martineau, and other authorities, were also cited to the same purport, and all the light which English literature could throw upon the point was converged upon it. The learned judges were divided in their opinions, one deciding that the word “team” clearly implied the cart as well as the horses, two other judges deciding that it was enough if the farmer sent the horse and the driver to be put to such service as the duke’s agent might please. The arguments by which each supported his conclusion were so acute, cogent, and weighty, that their disagreement seems to have been inevitable.
The English historian, Hallam, says of the language of Hobbes that it is so lucid and concise that it would be almost as improper to put an algebraical process in different terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs. Having illustrated his precept by his practice, Hobbes speaks with peculiar authority on the importance of discrimination in the use of words. In a memorable passage of the “Leviathan,” from which we have already quoted, he says: “Seeing that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he useth stands for, and to place it accordingly; or else he will find himself entangled in words as a bird in limetwigs,—the more he struggles, the more belimed. Words are wise men’s counters,—they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever.” Fuller quaintly suggests that the reason why the Schoolmen wrote in so bald a style was, “that the vermin of equivocation might not hide themselves in the nap of their words.” The definition of words has been often regarded as a mere pedagogue’s exercise; but when we call to mind the persecutions, proscriptions, tortures, and even massacres, which have resulted from mistakes about the meaning of certain words, the office of the lexicographer assumes a grave and dignified aspect. It is not enough, however, in guarding against error, to discriminate our words, so as to understand their exact force. We must also keep constantly in mind the fact that language, when used with the utmost precision, is at best but an imperfect representation of thought. Words are properly neither the “names of things,” as modern writers have defined them, nor, as the ancients viewed them, the “pictures of ideas.” The most they can do is to express the relations of things; they are, as Hobbes said, “the signs of our conceptions,” serving as a mark to recall to ourselves the likeness of a former thought, and as a sign to make it known to others.
Even as the signs of our conceptions, they are at best imperfect and unsatisfactory, representing only approximately what we think, and never coordinating with the conceptions they are used to represent. “Seizing on some characteristic mark of the conception, they always express too little or too much. They are sometimes distinctly metaphorical, sometimes indefinitely assertive; sometimes too concrete, sometimes too abstract.” Our sentences are not images of thought, reflected in a perfect mirror, nor photographs which lack coloring only; they are but the merest skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, tentative signs, which can put another only into a partial possession of our consciousness. To apprehend perfectly the thought of another man, even one who uses language with the utmost nicety and accuracy, we need to know his individuality, his entire past history; we must interpret and supplement his meaning by all that we know of his intellectual and moral constitution, his ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking; we must be en rapport with him; and even then we may fail to penetrate to the central meaning of his words, the very core of his thought.
The soul of every man is a mystery which no other man can fathom; we are, as one has said, spirits in prison, able only to make signals to each other, but with a world of things to think and say which our signals cannot describe at all. There is hardly an abstract term in any language which conveys precisely the same meaning to two different minds; every word is sure to awaken in one mind more or less different associations from those it awakens in another. Words mean the same thing only to persons who are psychologically the same, and who have had the same experiences. It is obvious that no word can explain any sensation, pleasant or painful, to one who has never felt the sensation. When Saunderson, who was born blind, tried to define “red,” he compared that color to the blowing of a trumpet, or the crowing of a cock. In like manner Massieu, the deaf-mute, in trying to describe the sound of a trumpet, said that it was “red.” The statement that words have to two persons a common meaning only when they suggest ideas of a common experience, is true even of the terms we stop to ponder; how much more true, then, of words whose full and exact meaning we no more pause to consider, than we reflect that the gold eagle which passes through our hands is a thousand cents. Try to ascertain the meaning of the most familiar words which are dropping from men’s lips, and you find that each has its history, and that many are an epitome of the thoughts and observations of ages.
What two persons, for example, attach the same meaning to the words “democracy,” “conservatism,” “radicalism,” “education”? What is the meaning of “gentleman,” “comfortable,” “competence”? De Quincey says that he knew several persons in England with annual incomes bordering on twenty thousand pounds, who spoke of themselves, and seemed seriously to think themselves, “unhappy paupers.” Lady Hester Stanhope, with an income of two thousand seven hundred pounds a year, thought herself an absolute pauper in London, and went to live in the mountains of Syria; “for how, you know,” she would say pathetically, “could the humblest of spinsters live decently on that pittance?” Do the chaste and the licentious, the amiable and the revengeful, mean the same thing when they speak of “love” or “hate”? With what precious meaning are the words “home” and “heaven” flooded to some persons, and with what icy indifference are they heard by others!
So imperfect is language that it is doubtful whether such a thing as a self-evident verbal proposition, the absolute truth of which can never be contested, is possible; for it can never be absolutely certain what is the meaning of the words in which the proposition is expressed, and the assertion that it is founded on partial observation, or that the words imperfectly express the observation on which it is founded, or are incomplete metaphors, or are defective in some other respect, must always be open to proof.
Even words that designate outward, material objects, cognizable by the senses, do not always call up similar thoughts in different minds. The meaning they convey depends often upon the mental qualities of the hearer. Thus the word “sun” uttered to an unlettered man of feeble mental powers, conveys simply the idea of a ball of light and heat, which rises in the sky in the morning, and goes down at evening; but to the man of vivid imagination, who is familiar with modern scientific discoveries, it suggests, more or less distinctly, all that science has revealed concerning that luminary. If we estimate words according to their etymological meaning, we shall still more clearly see how inadequate they are in themselves to involve the mass of facts which they connote,—as inadequate as is a thin and worthless bit of paper, which yet may represent a thousand pounds. In no case is the whole of an object expressed or characterized by its appellation, but only some salient feature or phenomenon is suggested, which is sometimes real, at others only apparent. Take the name of an animal, and it may probably express some trivial fact about its nose or its tail, as in “rhinoceros” we express nothing but the horn in its nose, and in “squirrel” we note only its shady tail; but each of these animals has other important characteristics, and other animals may have the very characteristics which these names import. The Latin word Homo means, etymologically, a creature made of earth, which is but metaphorically true; but for what an infinity, almost, of complex conceptions and relations does it stand! The Sanskrit has four names for “elephant,” from different petty characteristics of the animal, and yet how few of its qualities do they describe! “Take a word expressive of the smallest possible modification of matter,—a word invented in the most expressive language in the world, and invented by no less eminent a philosopher than Democritus, and that, too, with great applause,—the word ‘atom,’ meaning that which cannot be cut. Yet simple as is the notion to be expressed, and great as were the resources at command, what a failure the mere word is! It expresses too much and too little, too much as being applicable to other things, and consequently ambiguous; too little, because it does not express all the properties even of an atom. Its inadequacy cannot be more forcibly illustrated than by the fact that its precise Latin equivalent is by us confined to the single acceptation ‘insect’!”[37]
But if words are but imperfect symbols for designating material objects, how much more unequal must they be to the task of expressing that which lies above and behind matter and sensation, especially as all abstract terms are metaphors taken from sensible objects! How many feelings do we have, in the course of our lives, which beggar description! How many apprehensions, limitations, distinctions, opinions are clearly present, at times, to our consciousness, which elude every attempt to give them verbal expression! Even the profoundest thinkers and the most accurate, hair-splitting writers, who weigh and test to the bottom every term they use, are baffled in the effort so to convey their conclusions as to defy all misapprehension or successful refutation. Beginning with definitions, they find that the definitions themselves need defining; and just at the triumphant moment when the structure of argument seems complete and logic-proof, some lynx-eyed adversary detects an inaccuracy or a contradiction in the use of some keystone term, and the whole magnificent pile, so painfully reared, tumbles into ruins.
The history of controversy, in short, in all ages and nations, is a history of disputes about words. The hardest problems, the keenest negotiations, the most momentous decisions, have turned on the meaning of a phrase, a term, or even a particle. A misapplied or sophistical expression has provoked the fiercest and most interminable quarrels. Misnomers have turned the tide of public opinion; verbal fallacies have filled men’s souls with prejudice, rage, and hate; and “the sparks of artful watchwords, thrown among combustible materials, have kindled the flames of deadly war and changed the destiny of empires.”