There is indeed no such fruitful source of confusion and mischief as this—two words are tacitly assumed as equivalent, and therefore exchangeable, and then that which may be assumed, and with truth, of one, is assumed also of the other, of which it is not true. Thus, for instance, it often is with 'instruction' and 'education,' Cannot we 'instruct' a child, it is asked, cannot we teach it geography, or arithmetic, or grammar, quite independently of the Catechism, or even of the Scriptures? No doubt you may; but can you 'educate' without bringing moral and spiritual forces to bear upon the mind and affections of the child? And you must not be permitted to transfer the admissions which we freely make in regard of 'instruction,' as though they also held good in respect of 'education.' For what is 'education'? Is it a furnishing of a man from without with knowledge and facts and information? or is it a drawing forth from within and a training of the spirit, of the true humanity which is latent in him? Is the process of education the filling of the child's mind, as a cistern is filled with waters brought in buckets from some other source? or the opening up for that child of fountains which are already there? Now if we give any heed to the word 'education,' and to the voice which speaks therein, we shall not long be in doubt. Education must educe, being from 'educare,' which is but another form of 'educere'; and that is to draw out, and not to put in. 'To draw out' what is in the child, the immortal spirit which is there, this is the end of education; and so much the word declares. The putting in is indeed most needful, that is, the child must be instructed as well as educated, and 'instruction' means furnishing; but not instructed instead of educated. He must first have powers awakened in him, measures of value given him; and then he will know how to deal with the facts of this outward world; then instruction in these will profit him; but not without the higher training, still less as a substitute for it.
It has occasionally happened that the question which out of two apparent synonyms should be adopted in some important state-document has been debated with no little earnestness and passion; as at the great English Revolution of 1688, when the two Houses of Parliament were at issue whether it should be declared of James II, that he had 'abdicated,' or had 'deserted,' the throne. This might seem at first sight a mere strife about words, and yet, in reality, serious constitutional questions were involved in the debate. The Commons insisted on the word 'abdicated,' not as wishing to imply that in any act of the late king there had been an official renunciation of the crown, which would have been manifestly untrue; but because 'abdicated' in their minds alone expressed the fact that James had so borne himself as virtually to have entirely renounced, disowned, and relinquished the crown, to have forfeited and separated himself from it, and from any right to it for ever; while 'deserted' would have seemed to leave room and an opening for a return, which they were determined to declare for ever excluded; as were it said of a husband that he had 'deserted' his wife, or of a soldier that he had 'deserted' his colours, this language would imply not only that he might, but that he was bound to return. The speech of Lord Somers on the occasion is a masterly specimen of synonymous discrimination, and an example of the uses in highest matters of state to which it may be turned. As little was it a mere verbal struggle when, at the restoration a good many years ago of our interrupted relations with Persia, Lord Palmerston insisted that the Shah should address the Queen of England not as 'Maleketh' but as 'Padischah,' refusing to receive letters which wanted this superscription.
Let me press upon you, in conclusion, some few of the many advantages to be derived from the habit of distinguishing synonyms. These advantages we might presume to be many, even though we could not ourselves perceive them; for how often do the greatest masters of style in every tongue, perhaps none so often as Cicero, the greatest of all, [Footnote: Thus he distinguishes between 'voluntas' and 'cupiditas'; 'cautio' and 'metus' (Tusc. iv. 6); 'gaudium,' 'laetitia,' 'voluptas' (Tusc. iv. 6; Fin. ii. 4); 'prudentia' and 'sapientia' (Off. i. 43); 'caritas' and 'amor' (De Part. Or. 25); 'ebrius' and 'ebriosus,' 'iracundus' and 'iratus,' 'anxietas' and 'angor' (Tusc. iv. 12); 'vitium,' 'morbus,' and 'aegrotatio' (Tusc. iv. 13); 'labor' and 'dolor' (Tusc. ii. 15); 'furor' and 'insania' (Tusc. iii. 5); 'malitia' and 'vitiositas' (Tusc. iv. 15); 'doctus' and 'peritus' (Off. i. 3). Quintilian also often bestows attention on synonyms, observing well (vi. 3. 17): 'Pluribus nominibus in eadem re vulgo utimur; quae tamen si diducas, suam quandam propriam vim ostendent;' he adduces 'salsum,' 'urbanum,' 'facetum'; and elsewhere (v. 3) 'rumor' and 'fama' are discriminated happily by him. Among Church writers Augustine is a frequent and successful discriminator of words. Thus he separates off from one another 'flagitium' and 'facinus' (De Doct. Christ, iii. 10); 'aemulatio' and 'invidia' (Expl. ad Gal. x. 20); 'arrha' and 'pignus' (Serm. 23. 8,9); 'studiosus' and 'curiosus' (De Util. Cred. 9); 'sapientia' and 'scientia' (De Div. Quaes. 2, qu. 2); 'senecta' and 'senium' (Enarr. in Ps. 70. l8); 'schisma' and 'haeresis' (Con. Cresc. 2. 7); with many more (see my Synonyms of the N.T. Preface, p. xvi). Among the merits of the Grimms' Wörterbuch is the care which they, and those who have taken up their work, bestow on the discrimination of synonyms; distinguishing, for example, 'degen' and 'schwert'; 'feld,' 'acker' and 'heide'; 'aar' and 'adler'; 'antlitz' and 'angesicht'; 'kelch,' 'becher' and 'glas'; 'frau' and 'weib'; 'butter,' 'schmalz' and 'anke'; 'kopf' and 'haupt'; 'klug' and 'weise'; 'geben' and 'schenken'; 'heirath' and 'ehe.'] pause to discriminate between the words they are using; how much care and labour, how much subtlety of thought, they have counted well bestowed on the operation; how much importance they avowedly attach to it; not to say that their works, even where they do not intend it, will afford a continual lesson in this respect: a great writer merely in the precision and accuracy with which he employs words will always be exercising us in synonymous distinction. But the advantages of attending to synonyms need not be taken on trust; they are evident. How large a part of true wisdom it is to be able to distinguish between things that differ, things seemingly, but not really, alike, is very remarkably attested by our words 'discernment' and 'discretion'; which are now used as equivalent, the first to 'insight,' the second to 'prudence'; while yet in their earlier usage, and according to their etymology, being both from 'discerno,' they signify the power of so seeing things that in the seeing we distinguish and separate them one from another. [Footnote: L'esprit consiste à connaitre la ressemblance des choses diverses, et la différence des choses semblables (Montesquieu). Saint-Evremond says of a reunion of the Précieuses at the Hotel Rambouillet, with a raillery which is not meant to be disrespectful— 'Là se font distinguer les fiertés des rigueurs, Les dédains des mépris, les tourments des langueurs; On y sait démêler la crainte et les alarmes, Discerner les attraits, les appas et les charmes.'] Such were originally 'discernment' and 'discretion,' and such in great measure they are still. And in words is a material ever at hand on which to train the spirit to a skilfulness in this; on which to exercise its sagacity through the habit of distinguishing there where it would be so easy to confound. [Footnote: I will suggest here a few pairs or larger groups of words on which those who are willing to exercise themselves in the distinction of synonyms might perhaps profitably exercise their skill;—'fame,' 'popularity,' 'celebrity,' 'reputation,' 'renown';— 'misfortune,' 'calamity,' 'disaster';—'impediment,' 'obstruction,' 'obstacle,' 'hindrance';—'temerity,' 'audacity,' 'boldness';— 'rebuke,' 'reprimand,' 'censure,' 'blame';—'adversary,' 'opponent,' 'antagonist,' 'enemy';—'rival,' 'competitor';—'affluence,' 'opulence,' 'abundance,' 'redundance';—'conduct,' 'behaviour,' 'demeanour,' 'bearing';—'execration,' 'malediction,' 'imprecation,' 'anathema';—'avaricious,' 'covetous,' 'miserly,' 'niggardly';— 'hypothesis,' 'theory,' 'system' (see De Quincey, Lit. Rem. American ed. p.229);—'masculine,' 'manly';—'effeminate,' 'feminine';— 'womanly,' 'womanish';—'malicious,' 'malignant';—'savage,' 'barbarous,' 'fierce,' 'cruel,' 'inhuman';—'low, 'mean,' 'abject,' 'base';—'to chasten,' 'to punish,' 'to chastise';—'to exile,' 'to banish';—'to declare,' 'to disclose,' 'to reveal,' 'to divulge';—'to defend,' 'to protect,' 'to shelter';—'to excuse,' 'to palliate';—'to compel,' 'to coerce,' 'to constrain,' 'to force.'] Nor is this habit of discrimination only valuable as a part of our intellectual training; but what a positive increase is it of mental wealth when we have learned to discern between things which really differ, and have made the distinctions between them permanently our own in the only way whereby they can be made secure, that is, by assigning to each its appropriate word and peculiar sign.
In the effort to trace lines of demarcation you may little by little be drawn into the heart of subjects the most instructive; for only as you have thoroughly mastered a subject, and all which is most characteristic about it, can you hope to trace these lines with accuracy and success. Thus a Roman of the higher classes might bear four names: 'praenomen,' 'nomen,' 'cognomen,' 'agnomen'; almost always bore three. You will know something of the political and family life of Rome when you can tell the exact story of each of these, and the precise difference between them. He will not be altogether ignorant of the Middle Ages and of the clamps which in those ages bound society together, who has learned exactly to distinguish between a 'fief' and a 'benefice.' He will have obtained a firm grasp on some central facts of theology who can exactly draw out the distinction between 'reconciliation,' 'propitiation,' 'atonement,' as used in the New Testament; of Church history, who can trace the difference between a 'schism' and a 'heresy.' One who has learned to discriminate between 'detraction' and 'slander,' as Barrow has done before him, [Footnote: 'Slander involveth an imputation of falsehood, but detraction may be couched in truth, and clothed in fair language. It is a poison often infused in sweet liquor, and ministered in a golden cup.' Compare Spenser, Fairy Queen, 5. 12. 28-43.] or between 'emulation' and 'envy,' in which South has excellently shown him the way, [Footnote: Sermons, 1737, vol. v. p. 403. His words are quoted in my Select Glossary, s. v 'Emulation.'] or between 'avarice' and 'covetousness,' with Cowley, will have made no unprofitable excursion into the region of ethics.
How effectual a help, moreover, will it prove to the writing of a good English style, if instead of choosing almost at hap-hazard from a group of words which seem to us one about as fit for our purpose as another, we at once know which, and which only, we ought in the case before us to employ, which will prove the exact vesture of our thoughts. It is the first characteristic of a well-dressed man that his clothes fit him: they are not too small and shrunken here, too large and loose there. Now it is precisely such a prime characteristic of a good style, that the words fit close to the thoughts. They will not be too big here, hanging like a giant's robe on the limbs of a dwarf; nor too small there, as a boy's garments into which the man has painfully and ridiculously thrust himself. You do not, as you read, feel in one place that the writer means more than he has succeeded in saying; in another that he has said more than he means; in a third something beside what his precise intention was; in a fourth that he has failed to convey any meaning at all; and all this from a lack of skill in employing the instrument of language, of precision in knowing what words would be the exactest correspondents and aptest exponents of his thoughts. [Footnote: La propriété des termes est le caractère distinctif des grands écrivains; c'est par là que leur style est toujours au niveau de leur sujet; c'est à cette qualité qu'on reconnaît le vrai talent d'écrire, et non à l'art futile de déguiser par un vain coloris les idées communes. So D'Alembert; but Caesar long before had said, Delectus verborum, eloquentiae origo.]
What a wealth of words in almost every language lies inert and unused; and certainly not fewest in our own. How much of what might be as current coin among us, is shut up in the treasure-house of a few classical authors, or is never to be met at all but in the columns of the dictionary, we meanwhile, in the midst of all this riches, condemning ourselves to a voluntary poverty; and often, with tasks the most delicate and difficult to accomplish,—for surely the clothing of thought in its most appropriate garment of words is such,—needlessly depriving ourselves of a large portion of the helps at our command; like some workman who, being furnished for an operation that will challenge all his skill with a dozen different tools, each adapted for its own special purpose, should in his indolence and self-conceit persist in using only one; doing coarsely what might have been done finely; or leaving altogether undone that which, with such assistances, was quite within his reach. And thus it comes to pass that in the common intercourse of life, often too in books, a certain restricted number of words are worked almost to death, employed in season and out of season—a vast multitude meanwhile being rarely, if at all, called to render the service which they could render far better than any other; so rarely, indeed, that little by little they slip out of sight and are forgotten nearly or altogether. And then, perhaps, at some later day, when their want is felt, the ignorance into which we have allowed ourselves to fall, of the resources offered by the language to satisfy new demands, sends us abroad in search of outlandish substitutes for words which we already possess at home. [Footnote: Thus I observe in modern French the barbarous 'derailler,' to get off the rail; and this while it only needed to recall 'derayer' from the oblivion into which it had been allowed to fall.] It was, no doubt, to avoid so far as possible such an impoverishment of the language which he spoke and wrote, for the feeding of his own speech with words capable of serving him well, but in danger of falling quite out of his use, that the great Lord Chatham had Bailey's Dictionary', the best of his time, twice read to him from one end to the other.
And let us not suppose the power of exactly saying what we mean, and neither more nor less than we mean, to be merely a graceful mental accomplishment. It is indeed this, and perhaps there is no power so surely indicative of a high and accurate training of the intellectual faculties. But it is much more than this: it has a moral value as well. It is nearly allied to morality, inasmuch as it is nearly connected with truthfulness. Every man who has himself in any degree cared for the truth, and occupied himself in seeking it, is more or less aware how much of the falsehood in the world passes current under the concealment of words, how many strifes and controversies, 'Which feed the simple, and offend the wise,' find all or nearly all the fuel that maintains them in words carelessly or dishonestly employed. And when a man has had any actual experience of this, and at all perceived how far this mischief reaches, he is sometimes almost tempted to say with Shakespeare, 'Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools'; to adopt the saying of his clown, 'Words are grown so false I am loathe to prove reason with them.' He cannot, however, forego their employment; not to say that he will presently perceive that this falseness of theirs whereof he accuses them, this cheating power, is not of their proper use, but only of their abuse; he will see that, however they may have been enlisted in the service of lies, they are yet of themselves most true; and that, where the bane is, there the antidote should be sought as well. If Goethe's Faust denounces words and the falsehood of words, it is by the aid of words that he does it. Ask then words what they mean, that you may deliver yourselves, that you may help to deliver others, from the tyranny of words, and, to use Baxter's excellent phrase, from the strife of 'word- warriors.' Learn to distinguish between them, for you have the authority of Hooker, that 'the mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.' [Footnote: See on all this matter in Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, chapters 9, 10 and 11 of the 3rd book, certainly the most remarkable in the Essay; they bear the following titles: Of the Imperfection of Words, Of the Abuse of Words, Of the Remedies of the Imperfection and Abuse of Words.] And although I cannot promise you that the study of synonyms, or the acquaintance with derivations, or any other knowledge but the very highest knowledge of all, will deliver you from the temptation to misuse this or any other gift of God—a temptation always lying so near us—yet I am sure that these studies rightly pursued will do much in leading us to stand in awe of this gift of speech, and to tremble at the thought of turning it to any other than those worthy ends for which God has endowed us with a faculty so divine.
LECTURE VII.
THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
At the Great Exhibition of 1851, there might be seen a collection, probably by far the completest which had ever been got together, of what were called the material helps of education. There was then gathered in a single room all the outward machinery of moral and intellectual training; all by which order might be best maintained, the labour of the teacher and the taught economized, with a thousand ingenious devices suggested by the best experience of many minds, and of these during many years. Nor were these material helps of education merely mechanical. There were in that collection vivid representations of places and objects; models which often preserved their actual forms and proportions, not to speak of maps and of books. No one who is aware how much in schools, and indeed everywhere else, depends on what apparently is slight and external, would lightly esteem the helps and hints which such a collection would furnish. And yet it would be well for us to remember that even if we were to obtain all this apparatus in its completest form, at the same time possessing the most perfect skill in its application, so that it should never encumber but always assist us, we should yet have obtained very little compared with that which, as a help to education, is already ours. When we stand face to face with a child, that spoken or unspoken word which the child possesses in common with ourselves is a far more potent implement and aid of education than all these external helps, even though they should be accumulated and multiplied a thousandfold. A reassuring thought for those who may not have many of these helps within their reach, a warning thought for those who might be tempted to put their trust in them. On the occasion of that Exhibition to which I have referred, it was well said, 'On the structure of language are impressed the most distinct and durable records of the habitual operations of the human powers. In the full possession of language each man has a vast, almost an inexhaustible, treasure of examples of the most subtle and varied processes of human thought. Much apparatus, many material helps, some of them costly, may be employed to assist education; but there is no apparatus which is so necessary, or which can do so much, as that which is the most common and the cheapest—which is always at hand, and ready for every need. Every language contains in it the result of a greater number of educational processes and educational experiments, than we could by any amount of labour and ingenuity accumulate in any educational exhibition expressly contrived for such a purpose.'