Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

And danger lurks in i without a dot.—O. W. Holmes.

On some of the great American rivers, where lumbering operations are carried on, the logs, in floating down, often get jammed up here and there, and it becomes necessary to find the timber which is a kind of keystone and stops all the rest. Once detach this, and away dash the giant trunks, thundering headlong, helter-skelter, down the rapids. It is just this office which he who defines his terms accurately performs for the dead-locked questions of the day. Half the controversies of the world are disputes about words. How often do we see two persons engage in what Cowper calls “a duel in the form of a debate,”—tilting furiously at each other for hours,—slashing with syllogisms, stabbing with enthymemes, hooking with dilemmas, and riddling with sorites,—with no apparent prospect of ever ending the fray, till suddenly it occurs to one of them to define precisely what he means by a term on which the discussion hinges; when it is found that the combatants had no cause for quarrel, having agreed in opinion from the beginning! The juggle of all sophistry lies in employing equivocal expressions,—that is, such as may be taken in two different meanings, using a word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion. Frequently the word on which a controversy turns is unconsciously made to do double duty, and under a seeming unity there lurks a real dualism of meaning, from which endless confusions arise. Accurately to define such a term is to provide one’s self with a master-key which unlocks the whole dispute.

Who is not familiar with the fierce contests of the Nominalists and Realists, which raged so long in the Middle Ages? Though turning upon refinements of abstraction so subtle that one would think they never could stir in the human bosom the faintest breath of passion, the dispute roused the combatants on both sides to the most frenzied fury. Beginning with words, these two metaphysical sects came at last to blows, and not only shed blood, but even sacrificed lives for the question, whether an abstract name (as man, for example) represented any one man in particular, or man in general. Yet, properly understood, they maintained only opposite poles of the same truth; and were, therefore, both right, and both wrong. The Nominalists, it has been said, only denied what no one in his senses would affirm, and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses would deny; a hair’s breadth parted those who, had they understood each other’s language, would have had no altercation. Again, who can tell how far the clash of opinions among political economists has been owing to the use in opposite senses of a very few words? Had Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus, M’Culloch, Mill, begun framing their systems by defining carefully the meanings attached by them to certain terms used on every page of their writings,—such as Wealth, Labor, Capital, Value, Supply and Demand, Over-trading,—it may be doubted whether they would not, to some extent, have harmonized in opinion, instead of giving us theories as opposite as the poles.

How many fallacies have grown out of the ambiguity of the word “money,” which, instead of being a simple and indivisible term, has at least half-a-dozen different meanings! Money may be either specie, bank-notes, or both together, or credit, or capital, or capital offered for loan. A merchant is said to fail “for lack of money,” when, in fact, he fails because he lacks credit, capital, or merchandise, money having no more to do with the matter than the carts or railway wagons by which the merchandise is transported. Again: money is spoken of as yielding “interest,” which it cannot do, since wherever it is, whether in a bank, in one’s pocket, or in a safe, it is dead capital. The confusion of the terms “wealth” and “money” gave birth to “the mercantile system,” one of the greatest curses that ever befell Europe. As in popular language to grow rich is to accumulate “money,” and to grow poor is to lose “money,” this term became a synonym for “wealth”; and, till recently at least, all the nations of Europe studied every means of accumulating gold and silver in their respective countries. To accomplish this they prohibited the exportation of money, gave bounties on the importation, and restricted the importation of other commodities, expecting thus to produce a “favorable balance of trade,”—a conduct as wise as that of a shop-keeper who should sell his goods only for money, and hoard every dollar, instead of replacing and increasing his stock, or putting his surplus capital at interest. France, under Colbert, acted upon this principle, and Voltaire extolled his wisdom in thus preferring the accumulation of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it for articles which must, sooner or later, wear out. The effect of this fallacy has been to make the nations regard the wealth of their customers as a source of loss instead of profit, and an advantageous market as a curse instead of a blessing, by which errors the improvement of Europe has been more retarded than by all other causes put together.

So with the mortal theological wars in which so much ink has been shed. Who has not read of the disputes between the Arians and Semi-Arians and their enemies, when orthodoxy became so nice that a slip in a single expression, the use or omission of a single word, sufficed to make a man a heretic,—when every heresy produced a new creed, and every creed a new heresy? The shelves of our public libraries groan under the weight of huge folios and quartos once hurled at each other by the giants of divinity, which never would have been published but for their confused notions, or failure to discriminate the meaning, of certain technical and oft-recurring terms. Beginning with discordant ideas of what is meant by the words Will, Necessity, Unity, Law, Person,—terms vital in theology,—the more they argued, the farther they were apart, and while fancying they were battling with real adversaries, were, Quixote-like, tilting at windmills, or fighting with shadows, till at last utter

“Confusion umpire sat,

And by deciding worse embroiled the fray.”

The whole vast science of casuistry, which once occupied the brains and tongues of the Schoolmen, turned upon nice, hair-splitting verbal distinctions, as ridiculous as the disputes of the orthodox Liliputians and the heretical Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of the eggs. The readers of Pascal will remember the fierce wars in the Sorbonne between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, touching the doctrine of “efficacious” and “sufficient” grace. The question was, “Whether all men received from God sufficient grace for their conversion.” The Jesuits maintained the affirmative; the Jansenists insisted that this sufficient grace would never be efficacious, unless accompanied by special grace. “Then the sufficient grace, which is not efficacious, is a contradiction in terms,” cried the Jesuits; “and, besides, it is a heresy!” We need not trace the history of the logomachy that followed, which Pascal has immortalized in his “Provincial Letters,”—letters which De Maistre denounces as “Les Menteurs,” but which the Jesuits found to be both “sufficient” and “efficacious” for their utter discomfiture. The theological student will recall the microscopic distinctions; the fine-spun attenuations; the spider-like threads of meaning; the delicate, infinitesimal verbal shavings of the grave and angelic doctors; how one subtle disputant, with syllabical penetration, would discover a heresy in his opponent’s monosyllables, while the other would detect a schism in his antagonist’s conjunctions, till finally, after having filled volumes enough with the controversy to form a library, the microscopic point at issue, which had long been invisible, was whittled down to nothing.

A controversy not less memorable was that which raged in the church in the third and fourth centuries between the “Homoousians” and the “Homoiusians” concerning the nature of Christ. The former maintained that Christ was of the same essence with the Father; the latter that he was of like essence,—a dispute which Boileau has satirized in these witty lines: