The fattest hog in Epicurus’ sty!
Such are the facts which illustrate that principle in “the abuse of words,” which Locke calls “an affected obscurity arising from applying old words to new, or unusual significations.”
It was the same “confusion of words” which gave rise to the famous sect of the Sadducees. The master of its founder Sadoc, in his moral purity, was desirous of a disinterested worship of the Deity; he would not have men like slaves, obedient from the hope of reward or the fear of punishment. Sadoc drew a quite contrary inference from the intention of his master, concluding that there were neither rewards nor punishments in a future state. The result is a parallel to the fate of Epicurus. The morality of the master of Sadoc was of the most pure and elevated kind, but in the “confusion of words,” the libertines adopted them for their own purposes—and having once assumed that neither rewards nor punishments existed in the after-state, they proceeded to the erroneous consequence that man perished with his own dust!
The plainest words, by accidental associations, may suggest the most erroneous conceptions, and have been productive of the grossest errors. In the famous Bangorian controversy, one of the writers excites a smile by a complaint, arising from his views of the signification of a plain word, whose meaning he thinks had been changed by the contending parties. He says, “the word country, like a great many others, such as church and kingdom, is, by the Bishop of Bangor’s leave, become to signify a collection of ideas very different from its original meaning; with some it implies party, with others private opinion, and with most interest, and perhaps, in time, may signify some other country. When this good innocent word has been tossed backwards and forwards a little longer, some new reformer of language may arise to reduce it to its primitive signification—the real interest of Great Britain!” The antagonist of this controversialist probably retorted on him his own term of the real interest, which might be a very opposite one, according to their notions! It has been said, with what truth I know not, that it was by a mere confusion of words that Burke was enabled to alarm the great Whig families, by showing them their fate in that of the French noblesse; they were misled by the similitude of names. The French noblesse had as little resemblance to our nobility as they have to the Mandarins of China. However it may be in this case, certain it is that the same terms misapplied have often raised those delusive notions termed false analogies. It was long imagined in this country, that the parliaments of France were somewhat akin to our own; but these assemblies were very differently constituted, consisting only of lawyers in courts of law. A misnomer confuses all argument. There is a trick which consists in bestowing good names on bad things. Vices, thus veiled, are introduced to us as virtues, according to an old poet,
As drunkenness, good-fellowship we call?
Sir Thomas Wiat.
Or the reverse, when loyalty may be ridiculed, as
The right divine of kings—to govern wrong!
The most innocent recreations, such as the drama, dancing, dress, have been anathematised by puritans, while philosophers have written elaborate treatises in their defence—the enigma is solved, when we discover that these words suggested a set of opposite notions to each.
But the nominalists and the realists, and the doctores fundatissimi, resolutissimi, refulgentes, profundi, and extatici, have left this heirloom of logomachy to a race as subtle and irrefragable! An extraordinary scene has recently been performed by a new company of actors, in the modern comedy of Political Economy; and the whole dialogue has been carried on in an inimitable “confusion of words!” This reasoning and unreasoning fraternity never use a term as a term, but for an explanation, and which employed by them all, signifies opposite things, but never the plainest! Is it not, therefore, strange that they cannot yet tell us what are riches? what is rent? what is value? Monsieur Say, the most sparkling of them all, assures us that the English writers are obscure, by their confounding, like Smith, the denomination of labour. The vivacious Gaul cries out to the grave Briton, Mr. Malthus, “If I consent to employ your word labour, you must understand me,” so and so! Mr. Malthus says, “Commodities are not exchanged for commodities only; they are also exchanged for labour;” and when the hypochondriac Englishman, with dismay, foresees “the glut of markets,” and concludes that we may produce more than we can consume, the paradoxical Monsieur Say discovers that “commodities” is a wrong word, for it gives a wrong idea; it should be “productions;” for his axiom is, that “productions can only be purchased with productions.” Money, it seems, according to dictionary ideas, has no existence in his vocabulary; for Monsieur Say has formed a sort of Berkleian conception of wealth being immaterial, while we confine our views to its materiality. Hence ensues from this “confusion of words,” this most brilliant paradox,—that “a glutted market is not a proof that we produce too much but that we produce too little! for in that case there is not enough produced to exchange with what is produced!” As Frenchmen excel in politeness and impudence, Monsieur Say adds, “I revere Adam Smith; he is my master; but this first of political economists did not understand all the phenomena of production and consumption.” We, who remain uninitiated in this mystery of explaining the operations of trade by metaphysical ideas, and raising up theories to conduct those who never theorise, can only start at the “confusion of words,” and leave this blessed inheritance to our sons, if ever the science survive the logomachy.