We must not separate religion from philosophy; the subjects touching on religion have always been those which have given birth to philosophy; even if religion existed only on sentiment, as some people maintain, it would be for philosophy to determine if this sentiment were an illusion, or if it had a rational base; to separate them is to lessen both.
CHAPTER XII
OF WORDS
“Nomina si nescis, perit et cognitio rerum.”—Linné.
If language is the true autobiography of the human mind, our present language may also be called a perfect photograph of our mind in its present state of fog. Whether ignorant or learned we still talk and discuss, and we seldom arrive at an understanding of the subject, owing to our want of knowledge of the precise meaning of the terms. The most advanced sciences are those about whose terms we no longer dispute, mathematics, for instance. When we are quite convinced of the identity of thought and speech, we shall introduce into our ideas, and consequently into all our discourses, whether familiar or philosophical, a clearness impossible to obtain in any other manner.
It would be a great help to know the etymology of words, but that would not suffice. “L’étymologie,” said Voltaire, “est une science où les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de choses.” This sally bears on its face the date of the century of which this could be said in all truth. At the time of Voltaire the science of etymology was confined to ascribing the derivation of a word to another word to which it bore a close resemblance in sound; and the clever writer was not the only one to rally the few learned men who considered it possible to trace words to a source which one can hardly suspect of being related to them. If Voltaire had known that his sarcasm was nothing more than a simple scientific truth, he would perhaps have found less pleasure in expressing it. The science of etymology—a growth of our day—has discovered that words, which in appearance have nothing in common, neither sound nor meaning, yet have a common origin.
That would be a curious chapter of the history of thought, in which were demonstrated the errors that had been introduced and embedded in our minds by the use of certain words, which in the course of time gradually developed a meaning the exact opposite of that which they had at the first.
For instance, matter is generally represented as something tangible, that is to say, all are agreed in finding it devoid of mind, and it is a sign of condemnation to say of a century it is materialistic. Yet we who daily touch tangible objects, such as stone, metal, wood, never succeed in putting our hands on matter as such; we should not know where to find it. Does this arise from the fact that matter is not tangible? The Latin word materia had originally the meaning of the wood of a tree, then of wood or timber for building. This meaning was generalised so as to include solid bodies capable of taking various shapes. When idols were fashioned a distinction was made between the wood and the shape which emerged; and afterwards, when sculptors carved statues of marble or of metal, the marble and metal again received the name of matter or material; and when it was asked of what all tangible objects were made, even the world on which we live, the answer was that all were made of matter whilst they differ in form. In this way have we become possessed of our word matter, to which nothing tangible quite corresponds; and no doubt, owing to its complexity of meaning, it has not ceased to exercise the minds of learned men.
If philosophers have not been able to explain accurately the meaning of matter, physicists have not been more successful, since what we call matter does not come under our senses. The word might have escaped this ill fate had it always been used only by philosophers “who try only to use words that have been clearly defined, but names are used by the wise and the foolish, and the foolish, as we know, are in such an immense majority that the wonder is that words have any definite sense left at all.”[132]
Max Müller says: “I am quite willing to admit that matter may be called the objective cause of all that we perceive. For the very reason, however, that it is a cause, matter can never fall under the cognisance of our senses. All that we can predicate of matter is that it causes our sensations, that it exists in space and time, that it is one, but appears under an endless variety of phenomenal forms, that it remains unchanged in the change of outward appearances.”[133]
The history of the word matter teaches us then that speech, whose sole duty it is to introduce light into our minds, admits error also as long as we are ignorant of the original meaning of words: matter, whilst it was the solid wood of a tree and wood for building, became for those who had coined the word a fit object for perception and conception; later, others, differently constituted, saw in it a word “which contains to every man exactly what he has found in it or added to it.”[134]