But what if our work be not especially intended for the class-room, but only for common reading? Would it still be difficult to have it written in a plain and intelligible manner? I think it would, unless, indeed, we leave out the most fundamental questions of metaphysics. If we were asked only to write a few “academical” essays on philosophical subjects, without concerning ourselves with the intimate nature of things, it would not be very difficult to perform such a task in tolerably readable and popular English; but if we are asked to go to the root of things, and to give a consistent, clear, accurate, and radical account of them and of their objective relations; if we are expected to lay down and explain those grounds of distinction between similar things that will enable us to avoid latent equivocations, to detect paralogistic inferences, and to expose the sophistry of our opponents; if, in short, we must prepare a standard work which will create a deep and lasting interest, and take hold of the public mind by its fitness to uproot prejudice, to confound error, and to silence, if possible, all philosophical knavery, then, I say, we cannot do this in the language with which people are generally familiar, without filling it with a number of other words, phrases, and formulas of our own. This, however, should not be looked upon as discouraging; for the popularity to which a work on philosophy aspires is not the general popularity of the newspaper or the novel, but a popularity confined within the range of deep-thinking minds. Philosophy is not intended for blockheads nor for the general reader; hence, if these have no relish for our philosophical style, we shall not, on that account, complain of any want of popularity.
We must own, however, that a number of philosophical words have become popular in other modern languages which are still above popular comprehension in the English; and on this account the range of popularity of a philosophical work will be less in our country than it would, all other things being equal, in France, Italy, or Spain. In these last countries, where languages are so nearly akin to the philosophic Latin, and where the study of philosophy under the supervision of the Catholic Church formed for centuries a prominent part of public education, every educated person soon learned how to express in his national idiom what he had been taught in the Latin of the schools. It is through this process that the language of philosophy gradually became, in those countries, the language of all educated people. In England, the same process was going on up to the XVIth century, and, if continued, would have led to the same results; but it was checked at the time of the Reformation, to the unphilosophical and maleficent genius of which it must therefore be ascribed that all further popular development of the philosophic language has been arrested for three centuries in the Anglo-Saxon race.
Had England remained Catholic, and continued, like her sister nations, to cultivate the fields of speculative knowledge, there is little doubt that English writers, and the clergy in particular, would have popularized and brought into common use those philosophical and theological expressions which had been received already in their dictionaries, and might have been a most valuable instrument for improving the intellectual education of the country. But while this process of familiarizing speculative knowledge was carried on throughout Catholic Europe, England had something else more pressing to do: she busied herself with tearing to pieces and burning the metaphysical and theological books she had inherited from the great Catholic founders and luminaries of her universities. How could the Anglo-Saxon race attain to even a common degree of philosophic development under the sway of a system which was the very negation of philosophy? Could any one be a philosopher, and yet “protest” against conclusions of which he had to concede the premises? Protestantism was not the offspring of reason, but of passion and tyranny; it is carnal, not intellectual; it popularizes matter, and studies material comfort, but cannot raise the people to the contemplation and appreciation of eternal and universal truth. Hence, whilst in all the branches of knowledge which are connected with their senses the English people made remarkable strides, in philosophy they remained infants; and it was only by rowing the boat against the stream that a few privileged beings saved some relics from the great national wreck. Even now the Anglo-Saxon Protestant is fated to admire Hume and Bain, Darwin and Huxley, Mill and Herbert Spencer; and it will be long before he realizes that it is a shame to talk of these sophists as “our great national philosophers.”
The same evil that stayed in England the process of popularization of the philosophical language, caused this language to remain deficient in many useful and some necessary words wherewith other nations wisely enriched their vernacular tongues. This is equivalent to saying that the English idiom, even as used by the learned, does not always afford sufficient facilities for the exact expression of metaphysical relations, and that, therefore, a writer who wishes to be quite correct in treating of them will be tempted to take liberties with the language, and will yield to the temptation.
As an example of this, suppose we wish to say in plain English what S. Thomas Aquinas teaches in the following sentence (in 1. Sentent. Dist. 2. q. 1, a. 2): “In Deo est sapientia, et bonitas, et hujusmodi, quorum quodlibet est ipsa divina essentia; et ita omnia sunt unum. Et quia unumquodque eorum est in Deo secundum sui verissimam rationem, et ratio sapientiæ non est ratio bonitatis in quantum hujusmodi, relinquitur quod sunt diversa ratione non tantum ex parte ipsius ratiocinantis, sed ex proprietate ipsius rei.”
How should we here translate the word ratio? Andrews’ Dictionary gives reason, account, business, relation, regard, concern, care, manner, plan, reasonableness, proof, and such like; to which we may add the very word “ratio” used by the English geometricians to express the quotient of a quantity divided by another of the same kind. Now, which of these terms can we employ in the present case? There is not one of them which would not transform this beautiful and important passage of the angelic doctor into a clumsy piece of nonsense. To speak of the reason of wisdom, of the concern of goodness, of the manner of eternity, or of the business of immensity would be absurd. The temptation to infringe on the rights of lexicographers is therefore evident. But what other English word can we employ? Should we translate, the concept of wisdom, and the concept of goodness? By no means. Not that this last meaning of the word ratio is not legitimate, but because it is not what we need in the present case; for the holy doctor does not say that God’s wisdom and goodness are distinct only on account of our conceptions, but explicitly teaches that they are distinct on their own grounds, “ex proprietate ipsius rei.” Hence, “concept” is not the right word; and, instead of “concept,” we should rather say “that which is the ground of the concept.” Yet this circumlocution, besides being too long to replace a single word, does not exactly correspond to it, as every intelligent reader will easily perceive. The force of the word ratio might be sufficiently rendered by the compound expression “objective notion”; but this is forbidden by our dictionaries, according to which the word “notion” has only a subjective sense. We cannot translate “the nature” of wisdom and “the nature” of goodness, because it would then seem that divine wisdom and divine goodness are of a different nature objectively, and therefore really distinct; which is not the case, as they are only mentally distinct, though on their own real grounds. Perhaps, to avoid misconceptions, we might add an epithet to the word “nature,” and translate ratio sapientiæ as “the notional nature of wisdom,” that is, as that formality which is distinctly represented by the notion of wisdom. This last expression might be considered tolerably correct; yet I should prefer to stick to the Latin ratio, which is so much simpler and clearer, and which has, moreover, a general and uniform application to all objects of thought; as we everywhere find ratio intelligibilis, ratio entitativa, ratio generica, ratio specifica, ratio personæ, ratio substantiæ, and a great number of similar ratios. And, again, the word ratio has another very superior claim to adoption, inasmuch as it is the only word that exactly expresses the transcendental unity resulting from the conspiration of a material with a formal principle, and implies in its concrete meaning the two principles from which it results as actually correlated; for, as the geometric ratio implies a numerator and a denominator correlated as “that which is mensurable” and “that by which it is measured,” so the ratio intelligibilis, the ratio entitativa, and all the others, imply and exhibit a potential and a formal principle, correlated as “that which is determinable” and “that by which it is determined”; and as the terms of a geometric ratio, inasmuch as they are correlated, give rise to a simple result which is the value of the ratio, so also the constituent principles of all beings, inasmuch as they are correlated according to their mutual ontological exigency, give rise to the actuality of the ontological ratio. It would therefore appear that, if mathematicians are allowed freely to use the word “ratio,” as they do, in the peculiar sense just stated, metaphysicians too, a fortiori, may be allowed the free use of the same word in that general sense which I have pointed out, and which, solely through English philosophical apathy, was unduly restricted to its present narrow mathematical meaning.
What I have said of this word may suffice as an instance of the poverty of our philosophical language. There are other words which philosophers are sometimes disappointed not to find in our dictionaries, and which it will be necessary to borrow from other sources, or to translate from the works of the schoolmen; but, as I cannot come to particulars without entering into discussions which would lead me much further than I at present intend to go, I will say nothing more on this point.
I beg to conclude with a last remark which some readers may deem superfluous, but which should not be overlooked by the teachers or the friends of philosophy. It is not so much the want of proper words as the vague and improper use of the words which we already possess that is calculated to impair the merit and mar the usefulness of an English work of philosophy. If I knew that any one was engaged in such a work, I would earnestly entreat him to spare no efforts to the end that all indefiniteness or looseness of expression may be excluded from it, and to take care that his philosophic language be, if possible, as precise and as carefully wielded as that of the mathematician. In philosophy, nothing is so dangerous as loose reasoning; and loose reasoning is inevitable with a loose terminology. Truth, by careless wording, is often changed into error, and even great heresies are frequently nothing but the incorrect expression of great truths; according to the remarkable sentence of S. Thomas: Ex verbo inordinate prolato nascitur hæresis. Hence, all those terms which in the popular language have a vague meaning should in philosophy be either avoided or strictly defined, and constantly taken in the strict sense of the definition.
I remember having found years ago, in the works of an Italian philosopher whose celebrity has since vanished, nine or ten different definitions of the word idea. Which of such definitions he adopted as his own I could not discover; but it seemed to me that he adopted them all in succession, according as they suited the actual needs of his multiform argumentation—a proceeding which, while confounding the minds of his readers, was certainly not calculated to give weight to his conclusions. This same word idea in our popular English is extremely indefinite; it stands for object of thought, plan, judgment, opinion, purpose, and intention, none of which would be the correct philosophical meaning of the word; for “idea,” in all the approved treatises of psychology, means the knowledge of a thing directly perceived in any object of first apprehension. Hence, no accurate philosopher would say that we have an “idea” of God, or of his immensity, or of virtue, but only that we have a “concept” of God, of his immensity, of virtue, and of all those other things that are not objects of first apprehension, and the notions of which can be acquired only by a special operation of the intellect on pre-existing ideas. This distinction between “idea” and “concept” is very important in psychology, and should therefore be adopted in a philosophical work at the very first beginning of logic, as a first precaution against the equivocations of the ontologists.
It is not my intention to point out other words the popular meaning of which must be sharply looked into by a philosopher before he makes use of them; I will only add, in connection with the word “idea,” that, in the classical books of philosophy, the direct knowledge of the existence of a thing was not called “idea,” but notitia. In English, we have the word “notice”; but this word means, according to Webster, the act by which we have knowledge of something within the reach of our senses, whilst the Latin word notitia means rather the permanent knowledge acquired by that act; whence we see that the Latin notitia facti cannot be translated “the notice of the fact,” and yet why should not a philosopher be allowed to use the word “notice” in the sense of the Latin notitia when he wishes to contrast the knowledge of the existence of a thing with the knowledge of its properties? This would be, after all, only a late justice done to the word by again recognizing its primitive legitimate meaning.