History in English words

by Owen Barfield

But perhaps their total lack of historical imagination is brought home to us most forcibly by the prevalent belief that—apart from the Chosen People—all the inhabitants of the pre-Christian world were doomed to eternal exclusion from paradise. When we recollect that for some time the doctors of medieval universities were obliged to swear upon oath that they would teach nothing contrary to the doctrines of a Greek philosopher who must already have been in this situation for three hundred years at the birth of the Redeemer, and when we further reflect that it was the acute brains of these very doctors which were engaged in building up our present thinking apparatus, we may well feel inclined to give up as hopeless the task of sympathetically recreating the medieval cosmos in our imaginations—unless we realize, as indeed the history of meanings clearly shows, that it is not merely ideas and theories and feelings which have changed, but the very method of forming ideas and of combining them, the very channels, apparently eternal, by which one thought or feeling is connected with another. Possibly the Middle Ages would have been equally bewildered at the facility with which twentieth-century minds are brought to believe that, intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century.

There is another difference between the past and the present which it is hard for us to realize; and perhaps this is the hardest of all. For with the seventeenth century we reach the point at which we must at last try to pick up and inspect that discarded garment of the human soul, intimate and close-fitting as it was, into which this book has been trying from the [fifth chapter] onwards to induce the reader to re-insert his modern limbs. The consciousness of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different kind of consciousness. Yet we can see from the history of our words that this form of experience, so far from being eternal, is quite a recent achievement of the human spirit. It was absent from the old mythological outlook; absent, in its fullness, from Plato and the Greek philosophers; and, though it was beginning to light up in the Middle Ages, as we see in the development of Scholastic words like individual and person, yet the medieval soul was still felt to be joined by all sorts of occult ties both to the physical body and to the world. Self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation, and it was not till the seventeenth century that the new light really began to spread and brighten. One of the surest signs that an idea or feeling is coming to the surface of consciousness—surer than the appearance of one or two new words—is the tendency of an old one to form compounds and derivatives. After the Reformation we notice growing up in our language a whole crop of words hyphened with self; such are self-conceit, self-liking, self-love, and others at the end of the sixteenth century, and self-confidence, self-command, self-contempt, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-pity, ... in the next.

From a full list of such words as the above the historical student of words and their meanings could almost predict, apart from any other source of knowledge, the appearance at about this time of some philosopher who should do intellectually to the cosmos what Copernicus and Kepler had already done astronomically—that is, turn it inside out. And in Descartes, with his doctrine of “Cogito, ergo sum”, we do, in fact, find just such a philosopher. His influence was immense. Practically all philosophy since his day has worked outwards from the thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos to the soul. In England, not long afterwards, we find the brand-new expressions, ‘the ego’ and egoism, coming into the language from French philosophy, while the English thinker, Locke, adopts the new (1632) word consciousness, defining it as ‘perception of what passes in a man’s own mind’, and at the same time impresses on the still newer self-consciousness[49] its distinctive modern meaning.

Though these two developments—the birth of an historical sense and the birth of our modern self-consciousness—may seem at first sight to have little connection with one another, yet it is not difficult, on further consideration, to perceive that they are both connected with that other and larger process which has already been pointed to as the story told by the history of the Aryan languages as a whole. If we wish to find a name for it, we should have to coin some such ugly word as “internalization”. It is the shifting of the centre of gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal human being himself. The results are twofold: on the one hand the peculiar freedom of mankind, the spontaneous[50] impulses which control human behaviour and destiny, are felt to arise more and more from within the individual, as we saw in the semantic change of such words as conscience, disposition, spirit, temper, ... in the application to inner processes of words like dissent, gentle, perceive, religion, and in the Protestant Reformation; on the other the spiritual life and activity felt to be immanent in the world outside—in star and planet, in herb and animal, in the juices and “humours” of the body, and in the outward ritual of the Church—these grow feebler. The conception of “laws” governing this world arises and grows steadily more impersonal; words like consistency, pressure, tension, ... are found to describe matter “objectively” and disinterestedly, and at the same time the earth ceases to be the centre round which the cosmos revolves. All this time the European ‘ego’ appears to be engaged, unawares, in disentangling itself from its environment—becoming less and less of the actor, more and more of both the author and the spectator. In the eighteenth century the word outlook is used for the first time in the sense in which it has been used here; in the nineteenth environment is introduced by Carlyle. And so it goes on; and as, on the one hand, it is only when that detachment has progressed to a certain point that man becomes able to observe the changes which constitute history, so it is only as he begins to observe them that he becomes fully conscious of himself—the observer.

Thus, the general process which we have called “internalization” can be traced working itself out into all kinds of details; not only in that intimate, metaphysical change of outlook which it is so hard for us to realize now that the change has taken place—in the appearance of words betokening a sharper self-consciousness—but also in the moral and personal sphere. We could, for instance, take such a common word as duty and mark its expansion of meaning at about the time of Shakespeare. By its derivation it carries the sense of ‘owing’ and it meant in Chaucer’s time an act of obedience which was owed to some other person—usually to a feudal superior.[51] It is not till the close of the sixteenth century that it begins to take on its modern sense of a more or less abstract moral obligation—an obligation owed, if to any being, to oneself or to a sort of ideal of manhood—such an ideal, for instance, as is expressed in the word gentleman. Later on, as with conscience, there is a tendency to personify it. At the beginning of the seventeenth century we first find the word Nature employed in contexts where medieval writers would certainly have used the single word God. Spontaneous has already been mentioned, and it is interesting to note a certain tendency, which seems to have been inherent, before Shakespeare’s time, in the adjective voluntary, to connote disapproval when it was applied to human actions or feelings. Later in the century the word character[52] was first used in its modern personal sense by the historian Clarendon.

Students of the period know well the sudden, extraordinary craze for “character-drawing” which swept over France and England at this time. In France literary “portraits” of oneself and one’s friends were produced in hundreds, the first as a hobby, the second actually as a round game; and Clarendon, whose History of the Great Rebellion is a string of such character-studies, was only doing systematically what men like Hall, Overbury, Earle, and others had already done in a more disjointed and dilettante way. To the medieval observer a person or a soul had been interesting chiefly in its relation to Society, to the Church, to the Cosmos. “All the personality of man,” said Wyclif, “standeth in the spirit of him.” But these new writers and their readers were interested in characters and characteristics for their own sakes. We begin to hear of people’s autographs, of their foibles and their fortes; eccentric is taken from astronomy and mathematics; the Greek word idiosyncrasy—signifying an ‘individual mixture’ (of ‘humours’)—is borrowed from Galen; but with the new point of view the astrological and physical meanings of this and other words, like disposition, humour, spirits, temperament, ...[53] gradually fade away, and their modern meanings arise instead. One relic of these ancient physics, however—the vapours which were supposed to rise into the head from the region of the stomach—lingered well on into the eighteenth century; and from the way in which Boswell and Johnson write of their fits of melancholy, it seems that they had just reached a point at which they could not be sure, from their feelings at any rate, whether their common malady was physical in its origin or purely mental.

The same difference is observable in the names for feelings and passions. The nomenclature of the Middle Ages generally views them from without, hinting always at their results or their moral significance—envy, greedy, happy (i.e. ‘lucky’), malice, mercy, mildheartness, peace, pity[54], remorse, repentance, rue, sin,... Even the old word sad had not long lost its original sense of ‘sated’, ‘heavy’ (which it still retains in sad bread), and fear continued for a long time to mean, not the emotion, but a ‘sudden and unexpected event’. Hardly before the beginning of the seventeenth century do we find expressed that sympathetic or “introspective” attitude to the feelings which is conveyed by such labels as aversion, dissatisfaction, discomposure, ... while depression and emotion—further lenient names for human weaknesses—were used till then of material objects.

In the eighteenth century we notice, as we should expect, a considerable increase in the number of these words which attempt to portray character or feeling from within; such are apathy, chagrin, diffidence, ennui, homesickness, together with the expression ‘the feelings‘, while agitation, constraint, disappointment, embarrassment, excitement are transferred from the outer to the inner world. Outlook, which meant ‘a place from which a good view is obtained’, was first employed figuratively by Dr. Young in 1742.