These are causes of the existence of synonyms which reach far back into the history of a nation and a language; but other causes at a later period are also at work. When a written literature springs up, authors familiar with various foreign tongues import from one and another words which are not absolutely required, which are oftentimes rather luxuries than necessities. Sometimes, having a very sufficient word of their own, they must needs go and look for a finer one, as they esteem it, from abroad; as, for instance, the Latin having its own expressive 'succinum' (from 'succus'), for amber, some must import from the Greek the ambiguous 'electrum.' Of these thus proposed as candidates for admission, some fail to obtain the rights of citizenship, and after longer or shorter probation are rejected; it may be, never advance beyond their first proposer. Enough, however, receive the stamp of popular allowance to create embarrassment for a while; until, that is, their relations with the already existing words are adjusted. As a single illustration of the various quarters from which the English has thus been augmented and enriched, I would instance the words 'wile,' 'trick,' device,' finesse,' 'artifice,' and 'stratagem.' and remind you of the various sources from which we have drawn them. Here 'wile,' is Old-English, 'trick' is Dutch, 'devise' is Old-French, 'finesse' is French, 'artificium' is Latin, and '[Greek: stratagema]' Greek.
By and by, however, as a language becomes itself an object of closer attention, at the same time that society, advancing from a simpler to a more complex condition, has more things to designate, more thoughts to utter, and more distinctions to draw, it is felt as a waste of resources to employ two or more words for the designating of one and the same thing. Men feel, and rightly, that with a boundless world lying around them and demanding to be catalogued and named, and which they only make truly their own in the measure and to the extent that they do name it, with infinite shades and varieties of thought and feeling subsisting in their own minds, and claiming to find utterance in words, it is a wanton extravagance to expend two or more signs on that which could adequately be set forth by one—an extravagance in one part of their expenditure, which will be almost sure to issue in, and to be punished by, a corresponding scantness and straitness in another. Some thought or feeling or fact will wholly want one adequate sign, because another has two. [Footnote: We have a memorable example of this in the history of the great controversy of the Church with the Arians, In the earlier stages of this, the upholders of the orthodox faith used [Greek: ousia] and [Greek: hypostasis] as identical in force and meaning with one another, Athanasius, in as many words, affirming them to be such. As, however, the controversy went forward, it was perceived that doctrinal results of the highest importance might be fixed and secured for the Church through the assigning severally to these words distinct modifications of meaning. This, accordingly, in the Greek Church, was done; while the Latin, desiring to move pari passu did yet find itself most seriously embarrassed and hindered in so doing by the fact that it had, or assumed that it had, but the one word, 'substantia,' to correspond to the two Greek.] Hereupon that which has been well called the process of 'desynonymizing' begins—that is, of gradually discriminating in use between words which have hitherto been accounted perfectly equivalent, and, as such, indifferently employed. It is a positive enriching of a language when this process is at any point felt to be accomplished; when two or more words, once promiscuously used, have had each its own peculiar domain assigned to it, which it shall not itself overstep, upon which others shall not encroach. This may seem at first sight only as a better regulation of old territory; for all practical purposes it is the acquisition of new.
This desynonymizing process is not carried out according to any prearranged purpose or plan. The working genius of the language accomplishes its own objects, causes these synonymous words insensibly to fall off from one another, and to acquire separate and peculiar meanings. The most that any single writer can do, save indeed in the terminology of science, is to assist an already existing inclination, to bring to the clear consciousness of all that which already has been obscurely felt by many, and thus to hasten the process of this disengagement, or, as it has been well expressed, 'to regulate and ordinate the evident nisus and tendency of the popular usage into a severe definition'; and establish on a firm basis the distinction, so that it shall not be lost sight of or brought into question again. Thus long before Wordsworth wrote, it was obscurely felt by many that in 'imagination' there was more of the earnest, in 'fancy' of the play, of the spirit, that the first was a loftier faculty and power than the second. The tendency of the language was all in this direction. None would for some time back have employed 'fancy' as Milton employs it, [Footnote: Paradise Lost, v. 102-105 5 so too Longinus, De Subl. 15.] ascribing to it operations which we have learned to reserve for 'imagination' alone, and indeed subordinating 'imaginations' to fancy, as a part of the materials with which it deals. Yet for all this the words were continually, and not without injury, confounded. Wordsworth first, in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads, rendered it impossible for any, who had read and mastered what he had written on the matter, to remain unconscious any longer of the essential difference between them. [Footnote: Thus De Quincey (Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected): 'All languages tend to clear themselves of synonyms, as intellectual culture advances; the superfluous words being taken up and appropriated by new shades and combinations of thought evolved in the progress of society. And long before this appropriation is fixed and petrified, as it were, into the acknowledged vocabulary of the language, an insensible clinamen (to borrow a Lucretian word) prepares the way for it. Thus, for instance, before Mr. Wordsworth had unveiled the great philosophic distinction between the powers of fancy and imagination, the two words had begun to diverge from each other, the first being used to express a faculty somewhat capricious and exempted from law, the other to express a faculty more self-determined. When, therefore, it was at length perceived, that under an apparent unity of meaning there lurked a real dualism, and for philosophic purposes it was necessary that this distinction should have its appropriate expression, this necessity was met half way by the clinamen which had already affected the popular usage of the words.' Compare what Coleridge had before said on the same matter, Biogr. Lit. vol. i. p. 90; and what Ruskin, Modern Painters part 3, Section 2, ch. 3, has said since. It is to Coleridge that we owe the word 'to desynonymize' (Biogr. Lit. p. 87)—which is certainly preferable to Professor Grote's 'despecificate.' Purists indeed will object that it is of hybrid formation, the prefix Latin, the body of the word Greek; but for all this it may very well stand till a better is offered. Coleridge's own contributions, direct and indirect, in this province are perhaps more in number and in value than those of any other English writer; thus to him we owe the disentanglement of 'fanaticism' and 'enthusiasm' (Lit. Rem. vol. ii. p. 365); of 'keenness' and 'subtlety' (Table-Talk, p. 140); of 'poetry' and 'poesy' (Lit. Rem. vol. i. p. 219); of 'analogy' and 'metaphor' (Aids to Reflection, 1825, p. 198); and that on which he himself laid so great a stress, of 'reason' and 'understanding.'] This is but one example, an illustrious one indeed, of what has been going forward in innumerable pairs of words. Thus in Wiclif's time and long after, there seems to have been no difference recognized between a 'famine' and a 'hunger'; they both expressed the outward fact of a scarcity of food. It was a genuine gain when, leaving to 'famine' this meaning, by 'hunger' was expressed no longer the outward fact, but the inward sense of the fact. Other pairs of words between which a distinction is recognized now which was not recognized some centuries ago, are the following: 'to clarify' and 'to glorify'; 'to admire' and 'to wonder'; 'to convince' and 'to convict'; 'reign' and 'kingdom'; 'ghost' and 'spirit'; 'merit' and 'demerit'; 'mutton' and 'sheep'; 'feminine' and 'effeminate'; 'mortal' and 'deadly'; 'ingenious' and 'ingenuous'; 'needful' and 'needy'; 'voluntary' and 'wilful.' [footnote: For the exact difference between these, and other pairs or larger groups of words, see my Select Glossary.]
A multitude of words in English are still waiting for a similar discrimination. Many in due time will obtain it, and the language prove so much the richer thereby; for certainly if Coleridge had right when he affirmed that 'every new term expressing a fact or a difference not precisely or adequately expressed by any other word in the same language, is a new organ of thought for the mind that has learned it.' [footnote: Church and State, p. 200.] we are justified in regarding these distinctions which are still waiting to be made as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. Thus how real an ethical gain would it be, how much clearness would it bring into men's thoughts and actions, if the distinction which exists in Latin between 'vindicta' and 'ultio,' that the first is a moral act, the just punishment of the sinner by his God, of the criminal by the judge, the other an act in which the self-gratification of one who counts himself injured or offended is sought, could in like manner be fully established (vaguely felt it already is) between our 'vengeance' and 'revenge'; so that 'vengeance' (with the verb 'to avenge') should never be ascribed except to God, or to men acting as the executors of his righteous doom; while all retaliation to which not zeal for his righteousness, but men's own sinful passions have given the impulse and the motive, should be termed 'revenge.' As it now is, the moral disapprobation which cleaves, and cleaves justly, to 'revenge,' is oftentimes transferred almost unconsciously to 'vengeance'; while yet without vengeance it is impossible to conceive in a world so full of evil-doing any effectual assertion of righteousness, any moral government whatever.
The causes mentioned above, namely that our modern English, Teutonic in its main structure, yet draws so large a portion of its verbal wealth from the Latin, and has further welcomed, and found place for, many later accessions, these causes have together effected that we possess a great many duplicates, not to speak of triplicates, or of such a quintuplicate as that which I adduced just now, where the Teutonic, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek had each yielded us a word. Let me mention a few duplicate substantives, Old-English and Latin: thus we have 'shepherd' and 'pastor'; 'feeling' and 'sentiment'; 'handbook' and 'manual'; 'ship' and 'nave'; 'anger' and 'ire'; 'grief' and 'sorrow'; 'kingdom,' 'reign,' and 'realm'; 'love' and 'charity'; 'feather' and 'plume'; 'forerunner' and 'precursor'; 'foresight' and 'providence'; 'freedom' and 'liberty'; 'bitterness' and 'acerbity'; 'murder' and 'homicide'; 'moons' and 'lunes.' Sometimes, in theology and science especially, we have gone both to the Latin and to the Greek, and drawn the same word from them both: thus 'deist' and 'theist'; 'numeration' and 'arithmetic'; 'revelation' and 'apocalypse'; 'temporal' and 'chronic'; 'compassion' and 'sympathy'; 'supposition' and 'hypothesis'; 'transparent' and 'diaphanous'; 'digit' and 'dactyle.' But to return to the Old-English and Latin, the main factors of our tongue. Besides duplicate substantives, we have duplicate verbs, such as 'to whiten' and 'to blanch'; 'to soften' and 'to mollify'; 'to unload' and 'to exonerate'; 'to hide' and 'to conceal'; with many more. Duplicate adjectives also are numerous, as 'shady' and 'umbrageous'; 'unreadable' and 'illegible'; 'unfriendly' and 'inimical'; 'almighty' and 'omnipotent'; 'wholesome' and 'salubrious'; 'unshunnable' and 'inevitable.' Occasionally our modern English, not adopting the Latin substantive, has admitted duplicate adjectives; thus 'burden' has not merely 'burdensome' but also 'onerous,' while yet 'onus' has found no place with us; 'priest' has 'priestly' and 'sacerdotal'; 'king' has 'kingly,' 'regal,' which is purely Latin, and 'royal,' which is Latin distilled through the French. 'Bodily' and 'corporal,' 'boyish' and 'puerile,' 'fiery' and 'igneous,' 'wooden' and 'ligneous,' 'worldly' and 'mundane,' 'bloody' and 'sanguine,' 'watery' and 'aqueous,' 'fearful' and 'timid,' 'manly' and 'virile,' 'womanly' and 'feminine,' 'sunny' and 'solar,' 'starry' and 'stellar,' 'yearly' and 'annual,' 'weighty' and 'ponderous,' may all be placed in the same list. Nor are these more than a handful of words out of the number which might be adduced. You would find both pleasure and profit in enlarging these lists, and, as far as you are able, making them gradually complete.
If we look closely at words which have succeeded in thus maintaining their ground side by side, and one no less than the other, we shall note that in almost every instance they have little by little asserted for themselves separate spheres of meaning, have in usage become more or less distinct. Thus we use 'shepherd' almost always in its primary meaning, keeper of sheep; while 'pastor' is exclusively used in the tropical sense, one that feeds the flock of God; at the same time the language having only the one adjective, 'pastoral,' that is of necessity common to both. 'Love' and 'charity' are used in our Authorized Version of Scripture promiscuously, and out of the sense of their equivalence are made to represent one and the same Greek word; but in modern use 'charity' has come predominantly to signify one particular manifestation of love, the ministry to the bodily needs of others, 'love' continuing to express the affection of the soul. 'Ship' remains in its literal meaning, while 'nave' has become a symbolic term used in sacred architecture alone. 'Kingdom' is concrete, as the 'kingdom' of Great Britain; 'reign' is abstract, the 'reign' of Queen Victoria. An 'auditor' and a 'hearer' are now, though they were not once, altogether different from one another. 'Illegible' is applied to the handwriting, 'unreadable' to the subject-matter written; a man writes an 'illegible' hand; he has published an 'unreadable' book. 'Foresight' is ascribed to men, but' providence' for the most part designates, as pronoia also came to do, the far-looking wisdom of God, by which He governs and graciously cares for his people. It becomes boys to be 'boyish,' but not men to be 'puerile.' 'To blanch' is to withdraw colouring matter: we 'blanch' almonds or linen; or the cheek by the withdrawing of the blood is 'blanched' with fear; but we 'whiten' a wall, not by withdrawing some other colour, but by the superinducing of white; thus 'whited sepulchres.' When we 'palliate' our own or other people's faults, we do not seek 'to cloke' them altogether, but only to extenuate the guilt of them in part.
It might be urged that there was a certain preparedness in these words to separate off in their meaning from one another, inasmuch as they originally belonged to different stocks; and this may very well have assisted; but we find the same process at work where original difference of stock can have supplied no such assistance. 'Astronomy' and 'astrology' are both words drawn from the Greek, nor is there any reason beforehand why the second should not be in as honourable use as the first; for it is the reason, as 'astronomy' the law, of the stars. [footnote: So entirely was any determining reason wanting, that for some while it was a question which word should obtain the honourable employment, and it seemed as if 'astrology' and 'astrologer' would have done so, as this extract from Bishop Hooper makes abundantly plain (Early Writings, Parker Society, p. 331): 'The astrologer is he that knoweth the course and motions of the heavens and teacheth the same; which is a virtue if it pass not its bounds, and become of an astrologer an astronomer, who taketh upon him to give judgment and censure of these motions and courses of the heavens, what they prognosticate and destiny unto the creature.'] But seeing there is a true and a false science of the stars, both needing words to utter them, it has come to pass that in our later use, 'astrology' designates always that pretended science of imposture, which affecting to submit the moral freedom of men to the influences of the heavenly bodies, prognosticates future events from the position of these, as contrasted with 'astronomy' that true science which investigates the laws of the heavenly bodies in their relations to one another and to the planet upon which we dwell.
As these are both from the Greek, so 'despair' and 'diffidence' are both, though the second more directly than the first, from the Latin. At a period not very long past the difference between them was hardly appreciable; one was hardly stronger than the other. If in one the absence of all hope, in the other that of all faith, was implied. In The Pilgrim's Progress, a book with which every English schoolmaster should be familiar, 'Mistress Diffidence' is 'Giant Despair's' wife, and not a whit behind him in deadly enmity to the pilgrims; even as Jeremy Taylor speaks of the impenitent sinner's 'diffidence in the hour of death,' meaning, as the context plainly shows, his despair. But to what end two words for one and the same thing? And thus 'diffidence' did not retain that energy of meaning which it had at the first, but little by little assumed a more mitigated sense, (Hobbes speaks of 'men's diffidence,' meaning their distrust 'of one another,') till it has come now to signify a becoming distrust of ourselves, a humble estimate of our own powers, with only a slight intimation, as in the later use of the Latin 'verecundia,' that perhaps this distrust is carried too far.
Again, 'interference' and 'interposition' are both from the Latin; and here too there is no anterior necessity that they should possess those different shades of meaning which actually they have obtained among us;—the Latin verbs which form their latter halves being about as strong one as the other. [Footnote: The word interference is a derivative from the verb ferire to strike, which is certainly stronger in meaning than ponere, to place.] And yet in our practical use, 'interference' is something offensive; it is the pushing in of himself between two parties on the part of a third, who was not asked, and is not thanked for his pains, and who, as the feeling of the word implies, had no business there; while 'interposition' is employed to express the friendly peace-making mediation of one whom the act well became, and who even if he was not specially invited thereunto, is still thanked for what he has done. How real an increase is it in the wealth and efficiency of a language thus to have discriminated such words as these; and to be able to express acts outwardly the same by different words, according as we would praise or blame the temper and spirit out of which they sprung. [Footnote: If in the course of time distinctions are thus created, and if this is the tendency of language, yet they are also sometimes, though far less often, obliterated. Thus the fine distinction between 'yea' and 'yes,' 'nay' and 'no,' once existing in English, has quite disappeared. 'Yea' and 'Nay,' in Wiclif s time, and a good deal later, were the answers to questions framed in the affirmative. 'Will he come?' To this it would have been replied, 'Yea' or 'Nay,' as the case might be. But 'Will he not come?'—to this the answer would have been, 'Yes,' or 'No.' Sir Thomas More finds fault with Tyndale, that in his translation of the Bible he had not observed this distinction, which was evidently therefore going out even then, that is in the reign of Henry VIII., and shortly after it was quite forgotten.]
Take now some words not thus desynonymized by usage only, but having a fundamental etymological distinction,—one, however, which it would be easy to overlook, and which, so long as we dwell on the surface of the word, we shall overlook; and try whether we shall not be gainers by bringing out the distinction into clear consciousness. Here are 'arrogant,' 'presumptuous,' and 'insolent'; we often use them promiscuously; yet let us examine them a little more closely, and ask ourselves, as soon as we have traced the lines of demarcation between them, whether we are not now in possession of three distinct thoughts, instead of a single confused one. He is 'arrogant' who claims the observance and homage of others as his due (ad rogo); who does not wait for them to offer, but himself demands all this; or who, having right to one sort of observance, claims another to which he has no right. Thus, it was 'arrogance' in Nebuchadnezzar, when he required that all men should fall down before the image which he had reared. He, a man, was claiming for man's work the homage which belonged only to God. But one is 'presumptuous' who takes things to himself before he has acquired any title to them (prae sumo); as the young man who already usurps the place of the old, the learner who speaks with the authority of the teacher. By and by all this may very justly be his, but it is 'presumption' to anticipate it now. 'Insolent' means properly no more than unusual; to act 'insolently' is to act unusually. The offensive meaning which 'insolent' has acquired rests upon the sense that there is a certain well-understood rule of society, a recognized standard of moral and social behaviour, to which each of its members should conform. The 'insolent' man is one who violates this rule, who breaks through this order, acting in an unaccustomed manner. The same sense of the orderly being also the moral, is implied in 'irregular'; a man of 'irregular' is for us a man of immoral life; and yet more strongly in Latin, which has but one word (mores) for customs and morals.