[40] Since the appearance of the present article, several collections of Proverbs have been attempted. A little unpretending volume, entitled “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 title 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 associated 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 shifting 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 passed 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 identity 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 Traité 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 asserted 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 God. 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 God,” 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 shifts and stratagems by which nonsense may be dignified. “Whether all men received from God 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 Homoousion and the Homoiousion! 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 augmenté Remplit tous les esprits d’aigreurs si meurtrières— Tu fis, dans une guerre et si triste et si longue, Périr tant de Chrétiens, 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 passions, 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!