The confusion of “opposite” and “contrary” is a source of not a little fallacious reasoning in ethics and in politics. In every good system of government there are contrivances and adjustments by which a force acting in one direction may, at a certain point, be met and arrested by an opposite force. We see this illustrated by the “governor” of a steam engine, by which the supply of steam is checked as the velocity is increased, and enlarged as the velocity is diminished. This system of “checks and balances,” as it is termed, is often sneered at by theoretical politicians, simply because they do not discriminate between things “opposite” and things “contrary.” Things “opposite” complete each other, their action producing a common result compounded of the two; things “contrary” antagonize and exclude each other. The most “opposite” mental or moral qualities may meet in the same person; but “contrary” qualities, of course, cannot. The right hand and the left are “opposites”; but right and wrong are “contraries.” Sweet and sour are “opposites”; sweet and bitter are “contraries.” As it has been happily said, “opposites” unfold themselves in different directions from the same root, as the positive and negative forces of electricity, and in their very opposition uphold and sustain one another; while “contraries” encounter one another from quarters quite diverse, and one subsists only in the exact degree that it puts out of working the other.
Not a few of our English particles are equivocal in their signification, especially “and” and “or.” The dual meaning of the latter particle, which may imply either that two objects or propositions are equivalent, if not identical, or that they are unlike, if not contradictory, is a fruitful source of misunderstanding and confusion. The conjunction “and” is hardly less indefinite and equivocal. This is illustrated in the case of Stradling vs. Stiles, in “Martinus Scriblerus,” familiar to the readers of Pope, where, in a supposed will, a testator, possessed of six black horses, six white horses, and six pied, or black-and-white horses, bequeathed to A. B. “all my black and white horses.” The question, thereupon, rose whether the bequest carried the black horses, and the white horses, or the black-and-white horses only. The equivocation could have been avoided by writing “all my black and all my white horses,” or, “all my pied horses”; still, it is evident that our language needs a new conjunctive.
Sir William Hamilton points out a defect in our philosophical language, in which the terms “idea,” “conception,” “notion,” are used as almost convertible to denote objects so different as the images of sense and the unpicturable notions of intelligence. The confusion thus produced is avoided in the German, “the richest in metaphysical expressions of any living tongues,” in which the two kinds of objects are carefully distinguished.
Again, how many systems of error in metaphysics and ethics have been based upon the etymologies of words, the sophist assuming that the meaning of a word must always be that which it, or its root, originally bore! Thus Horne Tooke tries to prove by a wide induction that since all particles,—that is, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions,—were originally nouns and verbs, they must be so still; a species of logic which would prove that man, if the Darwinian theory be true, is still a reptile. In a similar way the same writer has reached the conclusion that there is no eternal truth, since “truth,” according to its etymology, is simply what one “troweth,” that is, what one thinks or believes. This theory, it is thought, was suggested to Tooke by a conjecture that “if” is equivalent to “gif,” an imperative of the verb “to give”; but as it has been shown, from cognate forms in other languages, that this particle has no connection with the verb “to give,” or any other verb, any system founded on this basis is a mere castle in the air. Truth, argues Tooke, supposes mankind; for whom, and by whom alone the word is formed, and to whom alone it is applicable. “If no man, then no truth. There is no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting truth, unless mankind, such as they are at present, be also eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict each other, and yet both speak truth, for the truth of one person may be opposite to the truth of another.”
Even if we admit this derivation of “truth,” the conclusion does not follow; for whatever the word once meant, it now means that which is certain, whether we think it or not. If we are to be governed wholly by etymology, we must maintain that a “beldam” is a “fine lady,” that “priest” can mean only “advanced in years,” and that “Pontifex” can only signify “a bridge-builder.” But Horne Tooke’s etymology has been disputed by the very highest authority. According to Mr. Garnett, an acute English philologist, “truth” is derived “from the Sanscrit dhru, ‘to be established,’—fixum esse; whence dhruwa, ‘certain,’ i.e. ‘established’; German, trauen, ‘to rely,’ ‘trust’; treu, ‘faithful,’ ‘true’; Anglo-Saxon, treow-treowth (fides); English, ‘true,’ ‘truth.’ To these we may add Gothic, triggons; Icelandic, trygge; (fidus, securus, tutus): all from the same root, and all conveying the same idea of stability or security. ‘Truth,’ therefore, neither means what is thought nor what is said, but that which is permanent, stable, and is and ought to be relied upon, because, upon sufficient data, it is capable of being demonstrated or shown to exist. If we admit this explanation, Tooke’s assertions ... become Vox et preterea nihil.”
Some years ago a bulky volume of seven hundred pages octavo was written by Dr. Johnson, a London physician, to prove that “might makes right,”—that justice is the result, not of divine instinct, but purely and simply of arbitrary decree. The foundation for this equally fallacious and dangerous theory was the fact that “right” is derived from the Latin, rego, “to rule”; therefore whatever the rex, or “ruler,” authorizes or decrees, is right! As well might he argue that only courtiers can be polite, because “courtesy” is borrowed from palaces, or that there can be no “heaven” or “hell” in the scriptural sense, because, in its etymological, the one is the canopy heaved over our heads, and the other is the hollow space beneath our feet. Indeed, we have seen an argument, founded on the etymology of the latter word, to prove that there is “no hell beyond a hole in the ground.” In the same way, because our primitive vocabulary is derived solely from sensible images, it has been assumed that the mind has no ideas except those derived through the senses, and that thought therefore is only sensation. But neither idealism nor materialism can derive any support from the phenomena of language, for the names we give either to outward objects or to our conceptions of immaterial entities can give us no conception of the things themselves. It is true that in every-day language we talk of color, smell, thickness, shape, etc., not only as sensations within us, but as qualities inherent in the things themselves; but it has long since been shown that they are only modifications of our consciousness. It has been justly said that our knowledge of beings is purely indirect, limited, relative; it does not reach to the beings themselves in their absolute reality and essences, but only to their accidents, their modes, their relations, limitations, differences, and qualities; all which are manners of conceiving and knowing which not only do not impart to knowledge the absolute character which some persons attribute to it, but even positively exclude it. “Even substance is but a purely hypothetical postulated residuum after the abstraction of all observable qualities.” If, then, our conception of an object in no way resembles the object,—if heat, for example, can be, in no sense, like a live coal, nor pain like the pricking of a pin,—much less can a word by which we denote an object be other than a mere hieroglyphic, or teach us a jot or tittle about the world of sense or thought. Again, the fact that “spirit” once signified “breath,” and animus, ἀνεμὸς, “air,” lends no countenance to materialism. “When we impose on a phenomenon of the physical order a moral denomination, we do not thereby spiritualize matter; and because we assign a physical denomination to a moral phenomenon, we do not materialize spirit.” Even if the words by which we designate mental conceptions are derived from material analogies, it does not follow that our conceptions were themselves originally material; and we shall in vain try to account by any external source for the relations of words among themselves. It is told of the metaphysician, Cudworth, that, in reply to a person who ridiculed the doctrine of innate ideas, he told him to take down the first book that came to hand in his library, open at random, and read. The latter opened Cicero’s “Offices,” and began reading the first sentence, “Quamquam ——” “Stop!” cried Cudworth, “it is enough. Tell me how through the senses you acquire the idea of quamquam.”
It is a mistake to suppose that a language is no more than a mere collection of words. The terms we employ are symbols only, which can never fully express our thought, but shadow forth far more than it is in their power distinctly to impart. Lastly, there are in every language, as another has truly said, a vast number of words, such as “sacrifice,” “sacrament,” “mystery,” “eternity,” which may be explained by the idea, though the idea cannot be discovered by the word, as is the case with whatever belongs to the mystery of the mind; and this of itself is enough to disprove the conclusion which nominalists would draw from the origin of words, and to prove that, whatever the derivation of “truth,” its etymology can establish nothing concerning its essence; and we are still at liberty to regard it as independent, immutable, and eternal, having its archetype in the Divine mind.
Among the terms used in literary criticism, few are more loosely employed than the word “creative” as applied to men of genius. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, are said to have “creative power”; and, as a figure of speech, the remark is true enough: but, strictly speaking, only Omnipotence can create; man can only combine. The genius of a great painter may fill his gallery with the most fantastic representations, but every piece of which his paintings are composed exists in nature. Few artists have been more original than Claude Lorraine; yet all his paintings were composed of picturesque materials gathered from different scenes in nature, united with consummate taste and skill, and idealized by his exquisite imagination. To make a modern statue there is a great melting down of old bronze. The essence of originality is not that it creates new material, but that it invents new combinations of material, and imparts new life to whatever it discovers or combines, whether of new or old. Shakespeare’s genius is at no other time so incontestably sovereign as when he borrows most,—when he adapts or moulds, in a manner so perfect as to resemble a new creation, the old chronicles and “Italian originals,” which have been awaiting the vivida vis that makes them live and move. Non nova, sed nové, sums up the whole philosophy of the subject. “Originality,” says an able writer, “never works more fruitfully than in a soil rich and deep with the foliage of ages.”
The word “same” is often used in a way that leads to error. Persons say “the same” when they mean similar. It has been asked whether the ship Argo, in which Jason sought the Golden Fleece, and whose decaying timbers, as she lay on the Greek shore, a grateful and reverent nation had patched up, till, in process of time, not a plank of the original ship was left, was still “the same” ship as of old. The question presents no difficulty, if we remember that “sameness,” that is “identity,” is an absolute term, and can be affirmed or denied only in an absolute sense. No man is the same man to-day that he was yesterday, though he may be very similar to his yesterday’s self.
A common source of confusion in language is what logicians call “amphibolous” sentences,—that is, sentences that are equivocal, not from a double sense in any word, but because they admit of a double construction. Quintilian mentions several cases where litigation arose from this kind of ambiguity in the wording of a will. In one case a testator expressed a wish that a statue should be erected, and used the following language: poni statuam auream hastam in manu tenentem. The question arose whether it was the statue, or the spear only, that was to be of gold. It is well known that punctuation was unknown to the Greeks and Romans; and hence the ancient oracles were able to deliver responses, which, written down by the priests and delivered to the inquirers, were adapted, through the ambiguity thus caused, to save the credit of the oracle, whether the expected event was favorable or unfavorable. An example of this is the famous response, Aio te Æacida Romanos vincere posse; which may mean either, “Thou, Pyrrhus, I say, shalt subdue the Romans;” or, “I say, Pyrrhus, that the Romans shall subdue thee.” A better illustration is the remarkable response which was given when an oracle was consulted regarding the success of a certain military expedition: Ibis et redibis nunquam peribis in bello, which, not being punctuated, might have been translated either: “Thou shalt go, and shalt never return, thou shalt perish in battle;” or, “Thou shalt go and return, thou shalt never perish in battle.” We have an example of amphibolous sentences in English in the witch prophecy, “The Duke yet lives that Henry shall depose,” and in the words cited by Whately from the Nicene Creed, “by whom all things were made,” which are grammatically referable either to the Father or to the Son.