[33] Forgave.
[34] Stands.
[35] Birds.
[36] More direct products of the Crusades may be found in our language in the words azure, cotton, orange, saffron, scarlet, sugar and damask (from the town of Damascus), all of which come to us either from Arabic or, through Arabic, from some Oriental language. Miscreant (misbeliever) was applied to the Mohammedans by the French Crusaders. Assassin (hashish-eaters) was used by the Christians to describe the secret murderers sent out by the Old Man of the Mountains against their leaders, because they used to intoxicate themselves with hashish before the interview. Hazard—originally a game played with dice—has been traced to Asart, the name of a castle in Palestine, during the siege of which it is said to have been invented; and termagant was first used in medieval romances as the name of one of the idols which the Saracens were supposed to worship.
[37] In many cases, such as “the premises,” predicament, non-entity, ... these austere old words have acquired colloquial meanings a long way removed from the exact philosophical thoughts which they were originally coined to express.
[38] Hence animal spirits. It is interesting to observe how this word, and the phrase, practically reversed their meanings in the seventeenth century.
[39] “Heaviness or weight is not here considered, as being such a naturall quality, whereby condensed bodies do of themselves tend downwards; but rather as being an affection whereby they may be measured. And in this sense Aristotle himself referres it amongst the other species of quantity, as having the same proper essence, which is to be compounded of integrall parts. So a pound doth consist of ounces....” (Bishop Wilkins: Mathematicall Magick, 1648.)
[40] Probably cognate with a Greek verb ‘massein’, meaning ‘to knead’.
[41] “With this kinde of Ballance, it is usuall ... to measure sundry different gravities.” (Mathematicall Magick.)
[42] To the ordinary, untrained imagination. Philosophers and scientists, however, have continued to boggle at this notion of action at a distance. Thus Leibnitz, shortly after Newton published his discovery: “’Tis also a supernatural thing that bodies should attract one another at a distance without any intermediate means.” And Huxley in 1886, on the terms atom and force: “As real entities, having an objective existence, an indivisible particle which nevertheless occupies space is surely inconceivable; And with respect to the operation of that atom, where it is not, by the aid of a ‘force’ resident in nothingness, I am as little able to imagine it as I fancy anyone else is.” Hence the invention of a hypothetical ether, in order that space might be supposed filled with a continuum of infinitely attenuated matter ([p. 148]). In the world of scientific theory the question of action at a distance is still, so it seems, an appetizing bone of contention.