[67]. These persons who have been so long on the rack of incomprehensible theories and captious disputes, whose minds have been stretched on the Procrustes’ bed of metaphysical systems, till they have acquired a horror of any thing like common sense or familiar expression, put me in mind of what is said of those who have been really put to the rack: they can bear their unnatural distorted state tolerably well; it is the return of sense and motion which is death to them.
[68]. How difficult do we find it, to believe that a person is telling us a falsehood, while we are with him, though we may at the same time be thoroughly convinced that this is the case.
[69]. In this age of solid reason, it is always necessary to refer to particular examples, as it was formerly necessary to explain all hard words to the ladies. Condillac, in his Logic, that favourite manual of the modern sciolist, with admirable clearness proves, that our idea of virtue is a sensible image; because virtue implies a law, and that law must be written in a book, which must consist of letters, or figures of a certain shape, colour, and dimensions, which are real things, the objects of sense: that we are therefore right in asserting virtue to have a real existence, namely on paper, and in supposing that we have some idea of it, that is, as consisting of the letters of the alphabet. Mr. Horne Tooke, a man of wonderful wit, knowledge, and acuteness, but who, with my consent, shall not be empanelled as a juror to decide upon any question of abstruse reasoning, has endeavoured to explain away the whole meaning of language, by doing away its habitual or customary meaning, by denying that words have any meaning but what is derived to them from the umbilical root which first unites them to matter; and by making it out, that our thoughts having no life or motion in them, but as they are dragged about mechanically by words, are ‘just such shard-born beetle things’
‘As only buz to heav’n on ev’ning wings;
Strike in the dark, offending but by chance;
.tb
They know not beings, and but bear a name.’
Mr. Tooke’s description of the formation of language[[70]] is a sort of pantomime or masquerade, where you see the trunks of our abstract ideas going about in search of their heads, or clumsily setting on their own noses, and afterwards pointing to them in answer to all questions: it reminds you of the island of Pantagruel (or some such place), where the men carry their heads before them
[70]. See his account of the terminations head and ness, or nez. in their hands, or you would fancy that our author had lately been at the Promontory of noses. Andrew Paraeus, on the solution of noses, was a novice to him. I am a little uneasy at this scheme of reducing all our ideas to points and solid substances. It is like the project to the philosopher, who contended that all the solid matter in the universe might be contained in a nutshell. This is ticklish ground to tread upon. At this rate, and if the proportion holds, each man will hardly have a single particle of understanding left to his share; and in two large quarto volumes, there may not perhaps be three grains of solid sense. Mr. Tooke, as a man of wit, may naturally wish to turn every thing to point. But this method will not hold in metaphysics: it is necessary to spin the thread of our ideas a little finer, and to take up with the flimsy texture of mental appearances. It is not easy to philosophize in solid epigrams, or explain abstruse questions by the tagging of points. I do not, however, mean to object to Mr. Tooke’s etymological system as an actual history of language, but to that superficial gloss of philosophy which is spread over it, and to the whole of his logic: I might instance in the axiom, on which the whole turns, that ‘it is as absurd to talk of a complex idea as of a complex star.’ Now this and such like phrases had better have been left out: it is a good antithesis, but it is nothing more. Or if it had been put into the mouth of Sir Francis, who is a young man of lively parts, and then gravely answered by Mr. Tooke, it would have been all very well. But as it stands, it is injurious to the interests of philosophy, and an affront to common sense. Hartley proceeded a good way in making a dissected map of the brain; and did all he could to prove the human soul to consist of a white curd. After all, he was forced to confess, that it was impossible to get at the mind itself; and he was obliged to rest satisfied with having spent many years, and wasted immense ingenuity, in ‘vicariously torturing and defacing’ its nearest representative in matter. He was too great a man not to perceive the impossibility of ever reconciling matter and motion with the nature of thought; and he therefore left his system imperfect. But it fell into good hands, and soon had all its deficiencies supplied, and its doubts cleared up, to the entire satisfaction and admiration of all the dull, the superficial, and the ignorant.
[71]. Essay on Human Action.