History in English words

by Owen Barfield

Environment, evolution, development, instinct, species, spontaneous, variation are some of the more important words, whose modern meanings, if we look at their semantic history, are found to bear the unmistakable stamp of Darwinism, and we ought perhaps to add ooze[59] and slime.[59] To Darwin we should have to attribute the tendency of evolution to lose its etymological suggestion of a vegetable growth, an unfolding from the centre outwards. Species (Latin ‘species’, ‘form’ or ‘appearance’) was used by Cicero to translate Plato’s “Idea” ([Chapter VI]). It held an important place in the logic of the Middle Ages as one of the five “predicables” by which an object could be defined, and for centuries its biological meaning was only one among many. This particular interpretation did not begin to come into prominence until the eighteenth century, when Addison, for instance, used the phrase “the species” of the human race; but since Darwin published his Origin of Species (in which the word is, of course, given an exclusively biological sense) it has, for the ordinary man, had practically no other. It is interesting to observe that here again, as the words are commonly employed, the Latin form has grown more concrete and the Greek more abstract and intellectual.

But the change did not confine itself to such technical words as these. One has only to pick up a journalistic article on almost any subject and read it, endeavouring to let the words mean only what they did a hundred years ago, to see how the whole scheme of Natural Selection can lurk unseen, but not unfelt, behind some colourless little word like adapt, competition, gregarious, modification, protective, selection, and even animal, facts, law, life, man, Nature,... Or we can see it in the curious, absolute use of the word fit, in the sense of ‘physically healthy’, which, appearing first in the seventies, is obviously due to the famous phrase, the “survival of the fittest” (i.e. the fittest to survive in a struggle for existence). How modern the new meanings are may be gauged by the fact that the word heredity, the basic principle of modern natural scientific theory, is recorded by Francis Galton as having been considered “fanciful and unusual” in 1859, while atavism first appears in 1833.

But when a little more time has elapsed and the nineteenth century can be properly studied from the semantic point of view, there is little reason to doubt that the interfusion of mechanical and biological conceptions and the penetration of both into meaning will present one of its most striking features. One of the greatest triumphs of mechanism—greater than the Forth Bridge or the St. Gothard Tunnel—is the fact that it has wormed itself into the meaning of the word cause. This is, of course, a word which tends to alter its meaning a little every time it is used, and there is evidence that in former times, while there were separate words to express such separate ideas as “bringing to birth”, “making to grow”, “being guilty of”, ... there was no general term into which the one single essence common to all these relations had been distilled. The Greek and Latin words for cause, for example, were both closely connected from the earliest times with their legal procedure (cf. ac-cuse, etc., and the modern use of cause in the same sense). At some period, however—perhaps in the last two centuries before our era—such a concept must have been precipitated, and we find Cicero defining the Latin ‘causa’, with mathematical precision, simply as ‘that which effects the thing of which it is the cause’. The fascination which this abstraction exerted on the medieval imagination may be judged from the fact that the writer of a fifteenth-century treatise on Love introduced into it the sentence: “Every cause of a cause is cause of thing caused”; and we soon find the philosophers seeking through a “chain” of causes for that First Cause, which they identified with the Almighty. By the nineteenth century this thought-system of an abstract causality, brought about by means of abstract “laws”, lay, like an empty house, ready to be taken over by a new owner. The new owner was mechanism.

“The great abstract law of mechanical causality” (mechanischen kausalität), wrote Haeckel in 1899, “now rules the entire universe, as it does the mind of man. It is the steady, immutable pole-star, whose clear light falls on our path through the dark labyrinth of the countless separate phenomena.”

Under its influence even consciousness itself was, and still is, often conceived of as being caused by mechanical movements taking place within the body. We also find thought described as a function of the brain. This curious word had become extremely popular; and somewhere about the sixties the noun began to be used as a verb. We hear of nerves, brain, heart, ... functioning or refusing to function, an expression in which the mechanical flavour is especially strong.

Thus, in the light of words, the historical relation between mechanics and physiology looks not unlike that relation between mathematics and astronomy which was suggested in a previous chapter. We drew from out our own bodies, it would seem, the sense-experiences of force and pressure and the like,[60] on which mechanics are based; then we externalized them in tools and machines, and turned them into abstract “laws”; finally, we proceeded to re-apply the “laws” to the familiar objects from which we had first extracted them, and the result was that we turned our previous notions of these inside out. For the typical intellectual position towards the end of the nineteenth century was exactly the reverse of the typical Academic position. Plato had deduced the sense-world from what we have called the inner world, and, while he had worked out an elaborate and wise knowledge of this inner world, with its moral impulses and aspirations, his philosophy had remained admittedly bankrupt as far as detailed knowledge of the mechanism of the outer world was concerned. Nineteenth-century science, on the other hand, deduced the inner from the outer; it had mapped and charted the mechanical part of Nature to a tenth of a millimetre,[61] but it was well-nigh bankrupt as far as the inner world was concerned. Huxley invented the word agnostic (not-knowing) to express his own attitude, and that of many millions since his day, to the nature and origin of all this part of the cosmos. One of the few things about which practically all “men of science”, as the phrase now went, besides all those laymen who took the trouble to follow out the various scientific discoveries and to listen to their metaphysical reverberations, were agreed upon was that his senses and his reason had succeeded in placing man in a material environment which appeared to bear no relation whatever to his inner feelings and moral impulses.

For the expression of these, his proper humanity, he continued, irrespective of his conscious belief, to live on what had been developed through Plato and the Gospels, the Church and the poets. For it was these, as we have seen, which had built up the meanings of those old words in terms of which he learnt to think and feel about his fellow-men. Whenever the biologico-mechanical meanings did creep into human relationships—as, for example, into the economic relationship through the word competition and otherwise—the result was, almost without exception, disastrous. The famous Encyclical Letter and Syllabus of 1864, in which modern movements of thought were condemned and anathematized wholesale from the Vatican, was thus in some sense an attempt to express in dogmatic form a principle which was, in fact, already active throughout Europe. And the pathetic impotence of this papal gesture probably marks the maximum point of that divergence between science and religion, as modes of experience, which first became noticeable in the Alexandrian world, and of which nineteenth-century philosophy had become sufficiently conscious to create the word Dualism.

The rapid conquest of intellectual Europe, which was achieved, not only by the general idea of evolution, but by the particular Darwinian theory of mechanical natural selection, is a matter of some surprise when we consider that a full acceptance of it necessitated a reversal of practically every metaphysical idea and feeling likely to be present in a nineteenth-century soul. No doubt one could point to a variety of causes. There is evidence, for instance, in a certain class of word which had recently begun to multiply that even in Protestant countries the custodians of the ancient outlook were not always fortresses of wisdom and enlightenment. Religionism appears towards the close of the eighteenth century, and then religiosity (in a bad sense),[62] and in the next century the now obsolete religiose. The word pious, which had long been degenerating towards an imputation of feeble-mindedness, formed an unpleasant derivative, pietism, which in turn produced its adjective pietistic; and in 1864—an appropriate year—we first come up against clericalism. Unction—the name of one of the deepest mysteries of the Catholic Church—is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary with an offensive meaning in 1870, when Lowell writes of “that clerical unction which in a vulgar nature so easily degenerates into greasiness”. Unctuous was not long in following suit, and instances could no doubt be multiplied. The extension towards the priesthood of this particular shade of disapproval seems to have been the product of the age. Possibly the single earlier example is the old word cant, which dates back to the Middle Ages, and is said to have been born of exasperation at the whining tone adopted by the mendicant friars in their “chants” (cantare). In the same way may we not suppose that the words quoted above grew up out of that extraordinary atmosphere of partly bovine, partly hypocritical, acquiescence in obsolete dogma which Stuart Mill hit off in his famous phrase[63]?

Nevertheless, we should have to look deeper than all this for the true causes of a change of outlook as rapid and emphatic as that which swept through the last century. If we did so, we should probably discern, as one of the most efficient, that vivid sense of orderliness and arrangement which had grown up during the eighteenth century, the reverence for Reason, and especially for Reason reflected[64] in the impartial laws which govern the working of Nature. To minds thus attuned direct intervention by the divine at any one point in the natural process could only seem like an intolerable liberty; and feeling as well as thought began to revolt at the conjuring-tricks apparently reported in the Gospels. Perhaps there is a faint indication of the new point of view in the nineteenth-century use of the word freak to describe a lusus naturae, instead of the old monster, which is derived from the Latin ‘moneo’, and implies that the oddity is sent as a divine warning or portent.