Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

As in theology, so in philosophy, words used without precision have been at the bottom of nearly all controversies. How often such terms as Nature, Necessity, Freedom, Law, Body, Matter, Substance, Revelation, Inspiration, Knowledge, Belief, Finite, and Infinite, are tossed about in the wars of words, as if everybody knew their meaning, and as if all the disputants used them in exactly the same sense! Max Müller sensibly observes that people will fight and call each other very hard names for denying or asserting certain opinions about the Supernatural, who would consider it impertinent if they were asked to define what they mean by the Supernatural, and who have never even clearly perceived the meaning of Nature. The same writer shows that the words “to know” and “to believe,” the meanings of which seem so obvious, are each used, in modern languages, in three distinct senses. When we speak of our belief in God, or in the immortality of the soul, we want to express a certainty independent of sense, evidence and reason, yet more convincing than either. But when we say that we believe Our Lord suffered under Pontius Pilate, or lived during the reign of Augustus, we do not mean to say that we believe this with the same belief as the existence of God, or the immortality of the soul. Our assent, in this case, is based on historical evidence, which is only a subdivision of sense evidence, supplemented by the evidence of reason. When, thirdly, we say, “I believe it is going to rain,” “I believe” means no more than “I guess.” The same word, therefore, “conveys the highest as well as the lowest degree of certainty that can be predicated of the various experiences of the human mind, and the confusion produced by its promiscuous employment has caused some of the most violent controversies in matters of religion and philosophy.”[30]

The art of treaty-making appears once to have consisted in a kind of verbal sleight-of-hand; and the most dexterous diplomatist was he who had always “an arrière pensée, which might fasten or loosen the ambiguous expression he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in the mosaic of treachery.” When the American colonies refused to be taxed by Great Britain, on the ground that they were not represented in the House of Commons, a new term, “virtual representation,” was invented to silence their clamors. The sophism was an ingenious one; but it cost the mother country a hundred millions sterling, forty thousand lives, and the most valuable of her colonial possessions.

Hume’s famous argument against miracles is based entirely upon a petitio principii, or begging of the question, artfully concealed in an ambiguous use of the word “experience.” In all our experience, he argues, we have never known the laws of nature to be violated; on the other hand, we have had experience, again and again, of the falsity of testimony; consequently we ought to believe that any amount of testimony is false rather than admit the occurrence of a miracle. But whose experience does Hume mean? Does he mean the experience of all the men that ever lived? If so, he palpably begs the very question in dispute. Does he mean that a miracle is contrary to the experience of each individual who has never seen one? This would lead to the absurdest consequences. Not only was the King of Bantam justified in listening to no evidence for the existence of ice, but no man would be authorized, on this principle, to expect his own death. His experience informs him directly, only that others have died; and, as he has invariably recovered when attacked by disease himself, why, judging by his experience, should he expect any future sickness to be mortal? If, again, Hume means only that a miracle is contrary to the experience of men generally, as to what is common and of ordinary occurrence, the maxim will only amount to this, that false testimony is a thing of common occurrence, and that miracles are not. This is true enough; but “too general to authorize of itself a conclusion in any particular case. In any other individual question as to the admissibility of evidence, it would be reckoned absurd to consider merely the average chances for the truth of testimony in the abstract, without inquiring what the testimony is, in the particular instance before us. As if, e.g., any one had maintained that no testimony could establish Columbus’s account of the discovery of America, because it is more common for travellers to lie than for new continents to be discovered.”[31]

Again, the terms “experience” and “contrary to experience,” imply a contradiction fatal to the whole argument. It is clear that a revelation cannot be founded, as regards the external proof of its reality, upon anything else than miracles; and these events must be, in a sense, contrary to nature, as known to us, by the very definition of the word. If they entered into the ordinary operations of nature,—that is, were subjects of experience,—they would no longer be miracles.

In the very phrase “a violation of nature,” so cunningly used by sceptics, there lurks a sophism. The expression seems to imply that there are effects that have no cause; or, at least, effects whose cause is foreign to the universe. But if miracles disturb or interrupt the established order of things, they do so only in the same way that the will of man continually breaks in upon the order of nature. There is not a day, an hour, or a minute, in which man, in his contact with the material world, does not divert its course, or give a new direction to its order. The order of nature allows an apple-tree to produce fruit; but man can girdle the tree, and prevent it from bearing apples. The order of nature allows a bird to wing its flight from tree to tree; but the sportsman’s rifle brings the bird to the dust. Yet, in spite of this, it is asserted that the smallest conceivable intervention, disturbing the fated order of nature, linked as are its parts indissolubly from eternity in one chain, must break up the entire system of the universe! “If only the free will of man be acknowledged, then” as an able writer says, “this entire sophism comes down in worthless fragments. So long as we allow ourselves to speak as theists, then miracles which we attribute to the will, the purpose, the power of God, are not in any sense violations of nature; or they are so in the same sense in which the entireness of our human existence,—our active converse with the material world from morning to night of every day,—is also a violation of nature.” The truth is, however, that miracles are not properly violations of the laws of nature, but suspensions of them, or rather intercalations of higher and immediate operations of God’s power, in place of the ordinary development of those laws. An eminent scientist finds a rough illustration of this in the famous Strasburg clock. He stood one day, and watched it steadily marking the seconds, minutes, hours, days of the week, and phases of the moon, when suddenly the figure of an angel turned up his hour-glass, another struck four times, and Death struck twelve times with metal marrow-bones to indicate noon; various figures passed in and out of the doorways; the twelve Apostles marched, one by one, before the figure of their Master, and a brass cock three times flapped its wings, threw back its head, and crowed. “All this,” says the scientist, “was as much a part of the designer’s plan as the ordinary marking of time, and he had provided for it in advance, and the machinery for its execution was so arranged as to come into play at a definite moment. So God may have prepared the universe from the beginning with a view to miracles, may have ordered its laws in such a manner that at the predetermined hour in His providence these wonderful phenomena should appear, and bear convincing testimony to His own power and greatness.”

A further and not less fatal objection to Hume’s argument is that it confounds the distinction between testimony and authority, between the veracity of a witness and his competency. The miraculous character of an event is not a matter of intuition or observation, but of inference, and cannot be decided by testimony, but only by reasoning from the probabilities of the case. The testimony relates only to the happening of the event; the question concerning the nature of this event, whether it is, or is not, a violation of physical law, can only be determined by the judgment, after weighing all the circumstances of the case. No event whatever, viewed simply as an event, as an external phenomenon, can be so marvellous that sufficient testimony will not convince us that it has really occurred. A thousand years ago the conversion of five loaves of bread into as many hundred, or the raising of a dead man to life, would not have appeared more incredible than the transmission of a written message five thousand miles, without error, within a minute of time, or from Europe to America, under the waters of the Atlantic; yet these feats, miraculous as they would once have seemed, have been accomplished by the electric telegraph. Hume’s argument against miracles, therefore, which is based entirely upon an appeal to experience and testimony, without reference to the competency of the conclusion that the events testified to were supernatural, is altogether inapplicable.

Hume’s argument reminds us of the fallacies that lurk in the word “Nature,” and the phrase “Law of Nature.” Etymologically, “Nature” means she who gives birth, or who brings forth. But what is she? Is she an independent power, a being endowed with intelligence and will? Or is it not evidently a mere figure of speech, when we personify Nature, and speak of her works and her laws? “It is easy,” says Cuvier, “to see the puerility of those philosophers who have conferred on Nature a kind of individual existence, distinct from the Creator, from the laws which He has imposed on the movement, and from the properties and forms which He has given to His creatures; and who represent Nature as acting on matter by means of her own power and reason.” Again, the phrase “Law of Nature” is sometimes used as if it were equivalent to efficient cause. There are persons who attempt to account for the phenomena of the universe by the mere agency of physical laws, when there is no such agency, except as a figure of speech. A “Law of Nature” is only a general statement concerning a large number of similar individual facts, which it describes, but in no way accounts for, or explains. It is not the Law of Gravitation which causes a stone thrown into the air to fall to the earth; but the fact that the stone so falls is classed with many other facts, which are comprehended under the general statement called the “Law of Gravitation.” “Second causes,” as physical laws are sometimes called, “are no causes at all; they are mere fictions of the intellect, and exist only in thought. A cause, in the proper sense of the word, that is, an efficient cause, as original and direct in its action, must be a first cause; that through which its action is transmitted is not a cause, but a portion of the effect,—as it does not act, but is acted upon.”[32]

The changes of meaning which words undergo in the lapse of time, and the different senses in which the same word is used in different countries, are a fruitful source of misunderstanding and error. Hence in reading an old author it is necessary to be constantly on our guard lest our interpretations of his words involve a gross anachronism, because his “pure ideas” have become our “mixed modes.” The titles of “tyrant,” “sophist,” “parasite,” were originally honorable distinctions; and to attach to them their modern significations would give us wholly false ideas of ancient history. When Bishop Watson, in defending Christianity and the Bible from the attacks of Gibbon and Thomas Paine, entitled his books “An Apology for Christianity,” and “An Apology for the Bible,” he used the word “apology” in its primitive sense of “a defence,” as Plato had used it in his “Apologia Socratis,” and Quadratus in his “Apology for Christianity” to the Emperor Adrian; but the author was probably understood by many of his readers to be offering an excuse for the Christian system and for the faults of the Scriptures, instead of a vindication of their truth. “Apology for the Bible!” exclaimed George the Third, on hearing of the book; “the Bible needs no apology.” When we find an old English writer characterizing his opponent’s argument as “impertinent,” we are apt to attach to the word the idea of insolence or rudeness; whereas the meaning is simply “not pertinent” to the question. So a magistrate who “‘indifferently’ administered justice” meant formerly a magistrate who administered justice “impartially.”

Were we to use the word “gravitation” in translating certain passages of ancient authors, we should assert that the great discovery of Newton had been anticipated by hundreds of years, though we know that these authors had never dreamed of the law which that word recalls to our minds. Most of the terminology of the Christian church is made up of words that once had a more general meaning. “Bishop” meant originally overseer; “priest,” or “presbyter,” meant elder; “deacon” meant administrator; and “sacrament,” a vow of allegiance. In reading the passage in the Athanasian Creed where the persons of the Trinity are spoken of as the Father “incomprehensible,” the Son “incomprehensible,” and the Holy Ghost “incomprehensible,” almost all persons suppose the word “incomprehensible” to mean “inconceivable,” or beyond or above the human understanding. But when the Creed was translated into English from the Latin, the word meant simply “not comprehended within any limits,” and corresponded to the term “immense,” used in the original. In studying the Greek and Latin classics, we shall be continually led into error, unless we note the difference between the meanings attached in them to certain terms, and those we now attach to corresponding terms. Thus the “God” denoted by the Greek and Latin words which we so translate, was not the eternal Maker and Governor of the Universe, whom Christians worship, but a being such as our Pagan forefathers worshipped. In reading the history of France, an American or Englishman is constantly in danger of misapprehension by associating with certain words common to the French and English languages similar ideas. When he reads of Parliaments or the Noblesse, he is apt to suppose that they resembled the Parliaments and Nobility of England, when their constitution was altogether different. To confound them is like confounding a Jacobin and a Jacobite, a French vicaire with an English vicar, or a French gouvernante with an English governess. The list is almost endless of words, which, derived from the same Latin term, connote one class of ideas in French and another in English.