THE FALLACIES IN WORDS--(_continued_).
I never learned rhetorike certain;
Things that I speke, it mote be bare and plain.--CHAUCER.
Here is our great infelicity, that, when single words signify
complex ideas, one word can never distinctly manifest all the
parts of a complex idea.--ISAAC WATTS.
If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness
and niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so
employed should perplex and subtilize the signification of
sounds.--LOCKE.
It has been remarked by Archbishop Whately that the words whose
ambiguity is the most frequently overlooked, and produces the
greatest amount of confusion of thought and fallacy, are the
commonest,--the very ones whose meaning is supposed to be best
understood. “Familiar acquaintance is perpetually mistaken for
accurate knowledge.” Such a word is “luxury.”
A favorite theme for newspaper declamations in these days is the
luxury and extravagance of the American people, especially of the
_nouveaux riches_ whose fortunes have been of mushroom growth.
It is easy to declaim thus against luxury,--that is, against the
use of things which, at any particular period, are not deemed
indispensable to life, health, and comfort; but what do those who
indulge in this cheap denunciation mean by the term? Is not luxury
a purely _relative_ term? Is there a single article of dress,
food or furniture which can be pronounced an absolute luxury,
without regard to the wealth or poverty of him who enjoys it? Are
not the luxuries of one generation or country the necessaries of
another? Persons who are familiar with history know that Alfred
the Great had not a chair to sit down upon, nor a chimney to carry
off his smoke; that William the Conquerer was unacquainted with
the luxury of a feather bed, if it can be called one; that the
early aristocracy of England lived on the ground floor, without
drainage; that in the Middle Ages shirts were deemed a useless
superfluity, and men were even put in the pillory for wearing them;
that night-shirts were esteemed a still more needless luxury,
and persons of all ranks and classes slept in the first costume
of Adam; that travelling carriages are an ingenious invention of
modern effeminacy; that the men who first carried umbrellas in
the streets, even in the severest rain-storms, were hooted at
as dandies and coxcombs; that the nobles and dames of the most
brilliant epochs of England’s annals ate with their fingers,
generally in couples, out of one trencher on a bare table; and
that when forks were introduced, they were long hotly opposed as
an extravagance, and even denounced by many as a device of Satan,
to offer an affront to Providence, who had provided man with
fingers to convey his food to his mouth. In the introduction to
Hollinshed’s “Chronicles,” published in 1577, there is a bitter
complaint of the multitude of chimneys lately erected, of the
exchange of straw pallets for mattresses or flock beds, and of
wooden platters for earthenware and pewter. In another place, the
writer laments that oak only is used for building, instead of
willow as heretofore; adding, that “formerly our houses indeed were
of willow, but our men were of oak; but now that our houses are of
oak, our men are not only of willow, but some altogether of straw,
which is a sore alteration.”
Erasmus tells us that salt beef and strong ale constituted the
chief part of Queen Elizabeth’s breakfast, and that similar
refreshments were served to her in bed for supper. There is not
a single able-bodied workingman in the United States who does
not enjoy fare which would have been deemed luxurious by men of
high station in the iron reign of the Tudors; hardly a thriving
shopkeeper who does not occupy a house which English nobles in
1650 would have envied; hardly a domestic servant or factory girl
who does not on Sundays adorn herself with apparel which would
have excited the admiration of the duchesses in Queen Elizabeth’s
ante-rooms. Xenophon accounts for the degeneracy of the Persians
by their luxury, which, he says, was carried to such a pitch that
they used gloves to protect their hands. Tea and coffee were once
denounced as idle and injurious luxuries; and throughout the larger
part of the world tooth-brushes, napkins, suspenders, bathing-tubs,
and a hundred other things now deemed indispensable to the health
or comfort of civilized man, would be regarded as proofs of
effeminacy and extravagance.
Luxury has been a favorite theme of satire and denunciation by
poets and moralists from time immemorial. But it may be doubted
whether in nations or individuals its effects, even when it rages
most fiercely, are half so pernicious as those springing from that
indifference to comforts and luxuries which is sometimes dignified
with the name of contentment, but which is only another name for
sheer laziness. While thousands are ruined by prodigality and
extravagance, tens of thousands are kept in poverty by indifference
to the comforts and ornaments of life,--by a too feeble development
of those desires to gratify which the mass of men are striving. It
is a bad sign when a man is content with the bare necessities of
life, and aspires to nothing higher; and equally ominous is it when
a nation, however rich or powerful, is satisfied with the capital
and glories it has already accumulated. Cry up as we may the
virtues of simplicity and frugality, it is yet quite certain that a
people content to live upon garlic, macaroni, or rice, are at the
very lowest point in the scale both of intellect and morality. A
civilized man differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity
of his wants. The truth is, man is a constitutionally lazy being,
and requires some stimulus to prick him into industry. He must have
many difficulties to contend with, many clamorous appetites and
tastes to gratify, if you would bring out his energies and virtues;
and it is because they are always grumbling,--because, dissatisfied
amid the most enviable enjoyments, they clamor and strive for
more and more of what Voltaire calls _les superflues choses, si
nécessaires_,--that the English people have reached their present
pinnacle of prosperity, and accumulated a wealth which almost
enables them to defy a hostile world.
Among the familiar words that we employ, few have been more
frequently made the instrument of sophistry than “nature” and
“art.” There are many persons who oppose the teaching of elocution,
because they like a “natural” and “artless” eloquence, to which,
they think, all elaborate training is opposed. Yet nothing is more
certain than that nature and art, between which there is supposed
to be an irreconcilable antagonism, are often the very same thing.
What is more natural than that a man who lacks vocal power should
cultivate and develop his voice by vocal exercises; or that,
if he is conscious of faults in his manner of speaking,--his
articulation, gestures, etc.,--he should try, by the help of a good
teacher, to overcome them? So with the style of a writer; what is
more natural than for one who feels that he has not adequately
expressed his thought, to blot the words first suggested and try
others, and yet others, till he despairs of further improvement?
There are subjects so deep and complex, ideas so novel and
abstruse, that the most practised writer cannot do justice to
them without great labor. A conscientious author is, therefore,
continually transposing clauses, reconstructing sentences,
substituting words, polishing and repolishing paragraphs; and this,
unquestionably, is “art,” or the application of means to an end.
But is this art inconsistent with nature?
Similar to the fallacy which lurks in the words “nature” and
“natural,” as thus employed, is that which lurks in a popular use
of the word “simplicity.” It has been happily said that while some
men talk as if to speak naturally were to speak like a natural,
others talk as if to speak with simplicity meant to speak like a
simpleton. But what is true “simplicity,” as applied to literary
composition? Is it old, worn-out commonplace,--“straw that has been
thrashed a hundred times without wheat,” as Carlyle says,--the
shallowest ideas expressed in tame and insipid language? Or is it
not rather
“Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”--
in other words, a just and striking thought expressed in the aptest
and most impressive language? Those persons who declaim against
the employment of art in speaking and writing, forget that we are
all exceedingly artificial, conventional beings. Without training,
a speaker is almost sure to be awkward in gesture and unnatural
in utterance. The very preacher who in the street forgets himself
and uses the most natural gesticulation and tones, will become
self-conscious the moment he ascends the pulpit, and speak in a
falsetto key. It is to get rid of these artificial habits that
“art” (which is the employment of proper means) is needed.
How many controversies about the “transmutation of Species,”
and the “fixity of Species,” would have been avoided, had the
scientists who use these phrases fully pondered their meaning,
or rather no-meaning! Some writers have tried to explain the
law of constancy in transmission, and its independence of
the law of variation, by maintaining that it is the Species
only, not the individual, which is reproduced. “Species,” says
Buffon, “are the only beings in nature.” A sheep, it is said, is
always and everywhere a sheep, and a man a man, reproducing the
_specific type_, but not necessarily reproducing any individual
peculiarities. This hypothesis is a striking example of the
confusion which results from the introduction of old metaphysical
ideas into science. It is evident, as a late writer has clearly
shown, that Species cannot reproduce itself, for Species does not
exist. It is an entity, an abstract idea, not a concrete fact.
The _thing_ Species no more exists than the thing Goodness or the
thing Whiteness. “Nature only knows individuals. A collection of
individuals so closely resembling each other as all sheep resemble
each other, are conveniently classed under one general term,
Species; but this general term has no objective existence; the
abstract or typical sheep, apart from all concrete individuals, has
no existence out of our systems. Whenever an individual sheep is
born, it is the offspring of two individual sheep, whose structures
and dispositions it reproduces; it is not the offspring of an
abstract idea; it does not come into being at the bidding of a
type, which as a Species sits apart, regulating ovine phenomena....
If, therefore, ‘transmutation of Species’ is absurd, ‘fixity of
Species’ is not a whit less so. That which does not exist can
neither be transmuted nor maintained in fixity. Only individuals
exist; they resemble their parents, and they differ from their
parents. Out of these resemblances we create Species; out of
these differences we create Varieties; we do so as conveniences
of classification, and then believe in the reality of our own
figments.”[35]
A popular fallacy, which is partly verbal, is the notion, so
tenaciously held by many, that exposure to hardship, and even want,
in youth, is the cause of the bodily vigor of those men who have
lived to a good age in countries with a rocky soil and a bleak
climate. What is more natural, it is argued, than that _hardships_
should _harden_ the constitution? Look at the Indians; how many of
them live till eighty or ninety! Yet no person who reasons thus
would think, if engaged in cattle-breeding, of neglecting to feed
and shelter his animals in their youth; nor if a dozen men, out
of a hundred who had faced a battery, should survive and live to
a good age, would he think of regarding the facing of batteries
as conducive to longevity. The truth is, that early hardships,
by destroying all the weak, merely prove the hardiness of the
survivors,--which latter is the cause, not the effect, of their
having lived through such a training. So “loading a gun-barrel to
the muzzle, and firing it off, does not _give_ it strength; though
it proves, if it escape, that it was strong.”
The revelations of travellers have dissipated the illusions
which once prevailed concerning the hardiness and health of the
Indians and other savages. The savage, it is now known, lives in
a condition but one degree above starvation. If he sink below it,
he disappears instantaneously, as if he had never been. A certain
amount of hardship he can endure; but it has limits, which if he
passes, he sinks unnoticed and unknown. There is no registrar or
newspaper to record that a unit has been subtracted from the amount
of human existence. It is true that severe diseases are rarely seen
by casual visitors of savage tribes,--and why? Because death is
their doctor, and the grave their hospital. When patients are left
wholly to nature, nature presses very hard for an immediate payment
of her debt.
An ambiguous word, which has been a source of not a little error,
is the adjective “light,” which is used sometimes in a literal,
sometimes in a figurative sense. When writers on Agricultural
Chemistry declare that what are called _heavy_ soils are always
specifically the _lightest_, the statement looks like a paradox.
By “heavy” soils are meant, of course, not those which are the
weightiest, but those which are ploughed with difficulty,--the
effect being like that of dragging a heavy weight. So some articles
of food are supposed to be _light of digestion_ because they
are _specifically light_. Again, there is a popular notion that
_strong_ drink must make men _strong_; which is a double fallacy,
since the word “strong” is applied to alcoholic liquors and to the
human body in entirely different senses, and it is assumed that an
effect must be like its cause, which is not true.
Another ambiguous term, at least as popularly used, is “murder.”
There are persons who assert that the _coup d’état_ of Louis
Napoleon, in 1851, was murder in the strictest sense of the term.
To send out into the streets of a peaceful town a party of men
dressed in uniform, with muskets and bayonets in their hands, and
with orders to kill and plunder, is just as essentially murder and
robbery, it is said, as to break into a house with half-a-dozen
companions out of uniform, and do the same things. Was not Orsini’s
crime, they ask, as truly a murder as when a burglar kills a man
with a revolver in order to rob him? So, again, there are Christian
moralists, who, when asked for proof that suicide is sinful, adduce
the Scriptural injunction, “Thou shalt do no murder,” assuming
that suicide, because it is called self-_murder_, is a species
of “murder” in the primary sense of the word. It is evident,
however, that most, if not all, of these assertions are founded
on palpable fallacies. “Murder” is a technical term, and means
the wilful, deliberate killing, without just cause, and without
certain specified excuses, of a man who belongs to a settled state
of society, in which security is afforded to life and property. In
all that is said about the atrocity of murder, there is a latent
reference to this state of things. Were the “Vigilance Committee”
of San Francisco murderers, when they executed criminals illegally?
Are the men who “lynch” horse-thieves on our western frontiers,
murderers? Were the rebels who, in our late Civil War, shot down
Union soldiers, murderers?
The common sentiment of the civilized world recognizes a vast
difference between the rights and duties of sovereigns and
subjects, and the relations of nations to each other, on the one
hand, and the rights and duties of private individuals on the
other; and hence the rules of public and those of private morality
must be essentially different. According to legal authority, it
is not murder to kill an alien enemy in time of war; nor is it
murder to take away a man’s life by perjury. Revolutions and _coups
d’état_ most persons will admit to be sometimes justifiable; and
both, when justifiable, justify a certain degree of violence to
person, to property, or to previous engagements. The difficulty
is to tell just when, and how far, violence may justify and be
justified. It has been well said by an acute and original writer
that “it is by no means the same thing whether a man is plundered
and wounded by burglars, or by the soldiers of an absolute king
who is trying to maintain his authority. The sack of Perugia
shocked the sensibilities of a great part of Europe; but if the
Pope had privately poisoned one of his friends or servants from
any purely personal motive, even the blindest religious zeal
would have denounced him as a criminal unfit to live. A man must
be a very bitter Liberal indeed, who really maintains that the
violation by a sovereign of his promissory oath of office stands
on precisely the same footing as deliberate perjury in an ordinary
court of justice.” Suicide, it is evident, lacks the most essential
characteristic of murder, namely, its _inhumanity_,--the injury
done to one’s neighbor and to others by the _insecurity_ they are
made to feel. Can a man rob himself? If not, how can he, in the
proper sense of the word, murder himself?
Take another case. When Napoleon Bonaparte was at the climax of
his power, and the entire continent lay at his feet, he aimed a
blow at the naval supremacy of England, which, had it taken effect,
would have fatally crippled her resources. By a secret article in
the Treaty of Tilsit, it was stipulated that he and Alexander, the
czar of Russia, should take possession of the fleets of the Neutral
Powers. Mr. Canning, the British Prime Minister, saw the peril,
and instantly, upon learning of the intrigue, dispatched a naval
force under Nelson to Copenhagen, which captured the Danish fleet,
the object of the confederates, and conveyed it to Portsmouth. The
violation of the law of nations involved in this act was vehemently
denounced in the pulpit, in parliament, and on the hustings; and
to-day there are many persons who regard the audacious measure as
little better than piracy. The world, however, has not sustained
the charge. Problems arise in the life of both men and nations,
for the solution of which the ordinary rules of ethics are
insufficient. It is possible to kill without being guilty of
murder, to rob without being a thief, and to break the law of
nations without being a buccaneer. The justification of the British
Minister lay in the fact that Denmark was powerless to resist the
Continental powers, and that her coveted fleet, if not seized by
England, would have been used against her.
There is hardly any word which is oftener turned into an instrument
of the fallacy of ambiguity than “theory.” There is a class of men
in every community, of limited education and narrow observation,
who, because they have mingled in the world and dealt with
affairs, claim to be preëminently _practical_ men, and ridicule
the opinions of thinkers in their closets as the speculations of
“mere _theorists_.” Not discriminating carefully between the word
“general” and the word “abstract,” and regarding as _abstract_
principles what are in nearly all cases _general_ principles, they
regard all theorizing as synonymous with visionary speculation;
while that which they call “practical knowledge,” and which they
fancy to be wholly devoid of supposition or guesswork, but which
is nothing else than a heap of hasty deductions from scanty and
inaccurately observed phenomena, they deem more trustworthy
than the discoveries of science and the conclusions of reason.
Yet, when correctly defined, this very practical knowledge, so
boastfully opposed to theory, in reality presupposes it. True
practical knowledge is simply a ready discernment of the proper
modes and seasons of applying to the common affairs of life those
general truths and principles which are deduced from an extensive
and accurate observation of facts, by minds stored with various
knowledge, accustomed to investigation, and trained to the art
of reasoning; or, in other words, by _theorists_. Every man who
attempts to trace the causes or effects of an occurrence that falls
under his personal observation, theorizes. The only essential
distinction, in most cases, between “practical” men and those whom
they denounce as visionary, is, not that the latter alone indulge
in speculation, but that the theories of the former are based on
the facts of their own experience,--those that happen within a
narrow sphere, and in a single age; while the conclusions of the
latter are deduced from the _facts of all ages and countries_,
minutely analyzed and compared.
Thus the “practical” farmer does not hesitate to consult the
neighboring farmers, and to make use of the results of their
experience concerning the best soils for certain crops, the best
manures for those soils, etc.; yet if another farmer, instead
of availing himself of his neighbors’ experiences only, consults
a book or books containing the digested and classified results
of a thousand farmers’ experiences touching the same points, he
is called, by a strange inconsistency, “a book-farmer,” “a mere
theorist.” The truth is, the “practical” man, so called, extends
his views no farther than the fact before him. Even when he is so
fortunate as to learn its cause, the discovery is comparatively
useless, since it affords no light in new and more complex cases.
The scientific man, unsatisfied with the observation of one fact,
collects many, and by tracing the points of resemblance, deduces
a comprehensive truth of universal application. “Practical” men
conduct the details of ordinary business with a masterly hand.
As Burke said of George Grenville, they do admirably well so
long as things move on in the accustomed channel, and a new and
troubled scene is not opened; but they are not fitted to contend
successfully with the difficulties of an untried and hazardous
situation. When “the high roads are broken up, and the waters
are out,” when a new state of things is presented, and “the line
affords no precedent,” then it is that they show a mind trained in
a subordinate sphere, formed for servile imitation, and destined
to borrow its lights of another. “Expert men,” says Bacon, “can
execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the
general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come
best from those that are learned.”
Among the current phrases of the day, by which men are led into
error, one of the commonest is the expression “doing good.”
Properly understood, “to do good” is to do right; but the phrase
has acquired a technical sense which is much narrower. It
means, not discharging faithfully the duties of one’s calling,
but stepping aside from its routine to relieve the poor, the
distressed, and the ignorant; or to reform the sinful. The lawyer
who, for a fee, conscientiously gives advice, or pleads in the
courts, is not thought to be doing good; but he is so regarded if
he gratuitously defends a poor man or a widow. A merchant who sells
good articles at fair prices, and pays his notes punctually, is not
doing good; but he is doing good, if he carries broth and blankets
to beggars, teaches in a Sunday School, supports a Young Men’s
Christian Association, or distributes tracts to the irreligious.
Charitable and philanthropic societies of every kind are all
recognized as organs for doing good; but the common pursuits
of life,--law, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, trading,
etc.,--are not.
The incorrectness of this view will be seen if we for a moment
reflect what would become of society, including its charitable
institutions and philanthropists, should its different members
refuse to perform their respective functions. Society is a body
corporate, which can exist,--at least, in a healthy state,--only
on condition that each man performs the specific work which
Providence, or his own sense of his fitness for it, has assigned
to him. Thus one man tills the ground; another engages in
manufacturing; a third gathers and distributes the produce of
labor in its various forms; a fourth loans or exchanges money; a
fifth makes or executes laws; and each of these persons, as he
is contributing to the general good, is doing good as truly as
the most devoted clergyman who labors in the cure of souls, or
philanthropist who carries loaves of bread to hovels. To deny this,
it has been well said, is to say that a commissariat or transport
corps has nothing to do with carrying on a war, and that this
business is discharged entirely by the men who stand in line of
battle or mount the breach.
The popular theory proceeds upon two assumptions, both of which are
false; first, that the motives which urge men to diligence in their
callings are mean and paltry,--that selfishness is the mainspring
which causes all the wheels in the great machine of society to
revolve; and, secondly, that pursuits which benefit those who
prosecute them are necessarily selfish. The truth is, the best
work, and a very large part of the work, done in every calling,
is done not from a mean and sordid hunger for its emoluments,
whether of money, rank, or fame, but from a sincere love for it,
and pride in performing its duties well and creditably. The moment
a man begins to lose this _esprit de corps_, this high-minded
professional pride, and to find his reward in his pay and not in
his work, that moment his work begins to deteriorate, and he ceases
to meet with the highest success. If pursuits which benefit those
who follow them are necessarily selfish, then philanthropy itself
is selfish, for its rewards, in popular estimation, are of the
noblest kind. No sane man will depreciate the blessings that result
from the labors of the Howards, the Frys, and the Nightingales; but
they bear the same relation to the ordinary pursuits of life that
medicine bears to food. Doctors and surgeons are useful members of
society; but their services are less needed than those of butchers
and bakers. Let the farmer cease to sow and reap, let the loom and
the anvil be forsaken, and the courts of justice be closed, and
not only will the philanthropist starve, but society will speedily
become a den of robbers, if it does not utterly cease to exist.
Mr. Mill notices an ambiguity in the word “right,” which has been
made the occasion of an ingenious sophism. A man asserts that he
has a right to publish his opinions, which may be true in one
sense, namely, that it would be wrong in any _other_ person to
hinder or prevent their publication; but it does not follow that,
in publishing his opinions, he is _doing right_, for this is an
entirely distinct proposition from the other. Its truth depends
upon two things; first, whether he has taken due pains to ascertain
that the opinions are true, and second, whether their publication
in this manner, and at this time, will probably be beneficial to
the interests of truth on the whole. Another sophism, based on the
ambiguity of the same word, is that of confounding a right of any
kind with a right to enforce that right by resisting or punishing
any violation of it, as in the case of a people whose right to good
government is ignored by tyrannical rulers. The right or liberty
of the people to turn out their rulers is so far from being the
same thing as the other, that “it depends upon an immense number
of varying circumstances, and is altogether one of the knottiest
questions in practical ethics.”
Montaigne complains with good reason that too many definitions,
explanations, and replies to difficult questions, are purely
verbal. “I demand what ‘nature’ is, what ‘pleasure,’ ‘circle,’ and
‘substitution’ are? The question is about words, and is answer’d
accordingly. A stone is a body; but if a man should further urge,
and ‘what is body?’ ‘Substance;’ ‘and what is substance?’ and
so on, he would drive the respondent to the end of his calepin.
We exchange one word for another, and ofttimes for one less
understood. I better know what man is, than I know what animal
is, or mortal, or rational. To satisfie one doubt, they pop me in
the mouth with three; ’tis the Hydra’s head.”[36] There was a time
when it was said that the essence of gold and its substantial form
consisted in its _aureity_, and this explanation was supposed to
answer all questions, and solve all doubts.
From all this it will be seen that our words are, to a large
extent, carelessly employed,--the signs of crude and indefinite
generalizations. But even when the greatest care is taken in the
employment of words, it is nearly impossible to choose and put
them together so exquisitely that a sophist may not wrest and
pervert their meaning. Those persons who have ever had a lawsuit
need not be told how much ingenious argument may hang on a shade
of meaning, to be determined objectively without reference to the
fancied intentions of the legislator or the writer. Hardly a week
passes, but a valuable bequest is successfully contested through
some loophole of ambiguous phraseology. If, in ordinary life, words
represent impressions and ideas, in legal instruments they are
_things_; they dispose of property, liberty, and life; they express
the will of the lawgiver, and become the masters of our social
being. Yet so carelessly are they used by lawyers and legislators,
that half the money spent in litigation goes to determine the
meanings of words and phrases. O’Connell used to assert that he
could drive a coach-and-six through an Act of Parliament. Many of
our American enactments yawn with chasms wide enough for a whole
railway train. But even when laws have been framed with the most
consummate skill, the subtlety of a Choate or a Follett may twist
what appears to be the clearest and most unmistakable language
into a meaning the very opposite to that which the common sense of
mankind would give it.
I have heard Judge Story make the following statement to show
the extreme difficulty of framing a statute so as to avoid all
ambiguity in its language. Being once employed by Congress to draft
an important law, he spent six months in trying to perfect its
phraseology, so that its sense would be clear beyond a shadow of
a doubt, leaving not the smallest loophole for a lawyer to creep
through. Yet, in less than a year, after having heard the arguments
of two able attorneys, in a suit which came before him as a Judge
of the United States Supreme Court, he was utterly at a loss to
decide upon the statute’s meaning!
A signal illustration of the ambiguity that lurks in the most
familiar words, is furnished by a legal question that was fruitful
of controversy and “costs” not long ago in England. An English
nobleman, Lord Henry Seymour, who lived in Paris many years,
executed a will in 1856, wherein he made a bequest of property
worth seventy thousand pounds to the hospitals of London and Paris.
No sooner was it known that he was dead, than the question was
raised, “What does ‘London’ mean? Where are its limits, and what
is its area? What does it contain, and what does it exclude?” Four
groups of claimants appeared, each to some extent opposed by the
other three. Group the first said, “The gift is obviously confined
to the _City_ proper of London,”--that is, “London within the
walls,” comprising little more than half of a square mile. “Not
so,” protested group the second; “it extends to all the hospitals
within the old bills of mortality,”--that is, London, Westminster,
Southwark, and about thirty out-parishes, but excluding Marylebone,
St. Pancras, Paddington, Chelsea, and everything beyond. Group
the third insisted that “London” included “all the area within the
metropolitan boroughs”; while group the fourth, for cogent reasons
of their own, were positive that the testator meant, and the
true construction was, nothing less than the whole area included
within the Registrar-General’s and the Census Commissioner’s
interpretation of the word “Metropolis.” The Master of the Rolls
decided that the testator meant to use the word “London” in its
full, complete, popular sense, as including all the busily occupied
districts of what is usually called the Metropolis, as it existed
in the year when the will was made. No sooner, however, was this
vexed question settled, than another, hardly less puzzling,
arose,--namely, What is a “Hospital”? Nearly every kind of
charitable institution put in its claim; but it was finally decided
that only such charities should share in the bequest as fell within
the definition of the French word _hospice_ used in the will.
Another perplexing question which came before the English courts
some years ago, and which not less vividly shows the importance
of attention to the words we use, related to the meaning of the
word “team,” as used by writers generally, and used in a written
agreement. A certain noble duke made an agreement with one of his
tenants in Oxfordshire concerning the occupancy of a farm, and a
portion of the agreement was couched in the following terms: “The
tenant to perform each year for the Duke of ----, at the rate of
one day’s team-work, with two horses and one proper person, for
every fifty pounds of rent, when required (except at hay or corn
harvest), without being paid for the same.” In other words, the
rent of the farm was made up of two portions, the larger being a
money payment, and the former a certain amount of farm service.
All went on quietly and smoothly in reference to this agreement,
until one particular day, when the duke’s agent or bailiff desired
the farmer to send a cart to fetch coals from a railway station to
the ducal mansion. “Certainly not,” said the farmer. “I’ll send
the horses and a man, but you must find the cart.” “Pooh, pooh!
what do you mean? Does not your agreement bind you to do team-work
occasionally for his Grace?” “Yes, and here’s the team; two horses
and a careful man to drive them.” “But there can’t be a team
without a cart or wagon.” “O yes, there can, the horses are the
team.” “No, the horses and cart together are the team.”
The question which the court was called on to decide in the lawsuit
which followed, was,--What is a “team”? The case was at first tried
at Oxford, before a common jury, who gave a verdict substantially
for the duke. A rule was afterward obtained, with a view to bring
the question of definition before the judges at the Court of
Queen’s Bench. The counsel for the duke contended that as team-work
cannot be done by horses without a cart or wagon, it is obvious
that a team must include a vehicle as well as the horses by which
it was to be drawn. Mr. Justice A. said that, in the course of his
reading, he had met with some lines which tend to show that the
team is separate from the cart,--
“Giles Jelt was sleeping, in his cart he lay;
Some waggish pilf’rers stole his team away.
Giles wakes and cries, ‘Ods Bodikins, what’s here?
Why, how now; am I Giles or not?
If he, I’ve lost six geldings to my smart;
If not, Ods Bodikins, I’ve found a cart.’”
Mr. Justice B. quoted a line from Wordsworth,--
“My jolly team will work alone for me,”
as proving the farmer’s interpretation, seeing that, though horses
might possibly be jolly, a cart cannot. The counsel for His Grace
urged that the dictionaries of Johnson and Walker both speak of a
team as “a number of horses drawing the same carriage.” “True,”
said Justice A. “do not these citations prove that the team and the
carriage are distinct things?” “No,” replied the counsel on the
duke’s side; “because a team without a cart would be of no use.”
He cited the description given by Cæsar of the mode of fighting in
chariots adopted by the ancient Britons, and of the particular use
and meaning of the word _temanem_. From Cæsar he came down to Gray,
the English poet, and cited the lines,--
“Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe hath broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield,
How bowed the wood beneath their sturdy stroke;”
and from Gray he came down to the far-famed “Bull Run” affair in
the recent American civil war, a graphic account of which told that
“the teamsters cut the traces of the horses.”
The counsel for the farmer, on the other hand, referred to
Richardson’s English dictionary, and to Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon
dictionary, for support to the assertion that a team implies only
the horses, not the vehicle also; and he then gave the following
citations to the same effect: From Spenser,--
“Thee a ploughman all unmeeting found,
As he his toilsome team that way did guide.
And brought thee up a ploughman’s state to bide.”
From Shakespeare,--
“We fairies that do run,
By the triple Hecat’s team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream.”
Again from Shakespeare,--
“I am in love, but a team of horse shall
Not pluck that from me, nor who ’tis I love.”
From Dryden,--
“He heaved with more than human force to move
A weighty straw, the labor of a team.”
Again from Dryden,--
“Any number, passing in a line;
Like a long team of snowy swans on high,
Which clap their wings and cleave the liquid sky.”
Spenser, Roscommon, Martineau, and other authorities, were also
cited to the same purport, and all the light which English
literature could throw upon the point was converged upon it. The
learned judges were divided in their opinions, one deciding that
the word “team” clearly implied the cart as well as the horses, two
other judges deciding that it was enough if the farmer sent the
horse and the driver to be put to such service as the duke’s agent
might please. The arguments by which each supported his conclusion
were so acute, cogent, and weighty, that their disagreement seems
to have been inevitable.
The English historian, Hallam, says of the language of Hobbes that
it is so lucid and concise that it would be almost as improper
to put an algebraical process in different terms as some of his
metaphysical paragraphs. Having illustrated his precept by his
practice, Hobbes speaks with peculiar authority on the importance
of discrimination in the use of words. In a memorable passage
of the “Leviathan,” from which we have already quoted, he says:
“Seeing that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in
our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to
remember what every name he useth stands for, and to place it
accordingly; or else he will find himself entangled in words as
a bird in limetwigs,--the more he struggles, the more belimed.
Words are wise men’s counters,--they do but reckon by them; but
they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of
an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever.”
Fuller quaintly suggests that the reason why the Schoolmen wrote
in so bald a style was, “that the vermin of equivocation might not
hide themselves in the nap of their words.” The definition of words
has been often regarded as a mere pedagogue’s exercise; but when we
call to mind the persecutions, proscriptions, tortures, and even
massacres, which have resulted from mistakes about the meaning of
certain words, the office of the lexicographer assumes a grave and
dignified aspect. It is not enough, however, in guarding against
error, to discriminate our words, so as to understand their exact
force. We must also keep constantly in mind the fact that language,
when used with the utmost precision, is at best but an imperfect
representation of thought. Words are properly neither the “names of
things,” as modern writers have defined them, nor, as the ancients
viewed them, the “pictures of ideas.” The most they can do is to
express the _relations_ of things; they are, as Hobbes said, “the
signs of our conceptions,” serving as a mark to recall to ourselves
the likeness of a former thought, and as a sign to make it known to
others.
Even as the signs of our conceptions, they are at best imperfect
and unsatisfactory, representing only approximately what we
think, and never coordinating with the conceptions they are
used to represent. “Seizing on some characteristic mark of the
conception, they always express too little or too much. They
are sometimes distinctly metaphorical, sometimes indefinitely
assertive; sometimes too concrete, sometimes too abstract.” Our
sentences are not images of thought, reflected in a perfect
mirror, nor photographs which lack coloring only; they are but
the merest skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, tentative
signs, which can put another only into a partial possession of our
consciousness. To apprehend perfectly the thought of another man,
even one who uses language with the utmost nicety and accuracy, we
need to know his individuality, his entire past history; we must
interpret and supplement his meaning by all that we know of his
intellectual and moral constitution, his ways of thinking, feeling,
and speaking; we must be _en rapport_ with him; and even then we
may fail to penetrate to the central meaning of his words, the very
core of his thought.
The soul of every man is a mystery which no other man can fathom;
we are, as one has said, spirits in prison, able only to make
signals to each other, but with a world of things to think and
say which our signals cannot describe at all. There is hardly an
abstract term in any language which conveys precisely the same
meaning to two different minds; every word is sure to awaken in
one mind more or less different associations from those it awakens
in another. Words mean the same thing only to persons who are
psychologically the same, and who have had the same experiences.
It is obvious that no word can explain any sensation, pleasant or
painful, to one who has never felt the sensation. When Saunderson,
who was born blind, tried to define “red,” he compared that color
to the blowing of a trumpet, or the crowing of a cock. In like
manner Massieu, the deaf-mute, in trying to describe the sound of
a trumpet, said that it was “red.” The statement that words have
to two persons a common meaning only when they suggest ideas of a
common experience, is true even of the terms we stop to ponder; how
much more true, then, of words whose full and exact meaning we no
more pause to consider, than we reflect that the gold eagle which
passes through our hands is a thousand cents. Try to ascertain the
meaning of the most familiar words which are dropping from men’s
lips, and you find that each has its history, and that many are an
epitome of the thoughts and observations of ages.
What two persons, for example, attach the same meaning to the words
“democracy,” “conservatism,” “radicalism,” “education”? What is the
meaning of “gentleman,” “comfortable,” “competence”? De Quincey
says that he knew several persons in England with annual incomes
bordering on twenty thousand pounds, who spoke of themselves, and
seemed seriously to think themselves, “unhappy paupers.” Lady
Hester Stanhope, with an income of two thousand seven hundred
pounds a year, thought herself an absolute pauper in London, and
went to live in the mountains of Syria; “for how, you know,” she
would say pathetically, “could the humblest of spinsters live
decently on that pittance?” Do the chaste and the licentious, the
amiable and the revengeful, mean the same thing when they speak
of “love” or “hate”? With what precious meaning are the words
“home” and “heaven” flooded to some persons, and with what icy
indifference are they heard by others!
So imperfect is language that it is doubtful whether such a thing
as a self-evident verbal proposition, the absolute truth of which
can never be contested, is possible; for it can never be absolutely
certain what is the meaning of the words in which the proposition
is expressed, and the assertion that it is founded on partial
observation, or that the words imperfectly express the observation
on which it is founded, or are incomplete metaphors, or are
defective in some other respect, must always be open to proof.
Even words that designate outward, material objects, cognizable by
the senses, do not always call up similar thoughts in different
minds. The meaning they convey depends often upon the mental
qualities of the hearer. Thus the word “sun” uttered to an
unlettered man of feeble mental powers, conveys simply the idea of
a ball of light and heat, which rises in the sky in the morning,
and goes down at evening; but to the man of vivid imagination, who
is familiar with modern scientific discoveries, it suggests, more
or less distinctly, all that science has revealed concerning that
luminary. If we estimate words according to their etymological
meaning, we shall still more clearly see how inadequate they are
in themselves to involve the mass of facts which they connote,--as
inadequate as is a thin and worthless bit of paper, which yet may
represent a thousand pounds. In no case is the whole of an object
expressed or characterized by its appellation, but only some
salient feature or phenomenon is suggested, which is sometimes
real, at others only apparent. Take the name of an animal, and it
may probably express some trivial fact about its nose or its tail,
as in “rhinoceros” we express nothing but the horn in its nose,
and in “squirrel” we note only its shady tail; but each of these
animals has other important characteristics, and other animals may
have the very characteristics which these names import. The Latin
word _Homo_ means, etymologically, a creature made of earth, which
is but metaphorically true; but for what an infinity, almost, of
complex conceptions and relations does it stand! The Sanskrit has
four names for “elephant,” from different petty characteristics
of the animal, and yet how few of its qualities do they describe!
“Take a word expressive of the smallest possible modification
of matter,--a word invented in the most expressive language in
the world, and invented by no less eminent a philosopher than
Democritus, and that, too, with great applause,--the word ‘atom,’
meaning that which cannot be cut. Yet simple as is the notion to
be expressed, and great as were the resources at command, what a
failure the mere _word_ is! It expresses too much and too little,
too much as being applicable to other things, and consequently
ambiguous; too little, because it does not express all the
properties even of an atom. Its inadequacy cannot be more forcibly
illustrated than by the fact that its precise Latin equivalent is
by us confined to the single acceptation ‘insect’!”[37]
But if words are but imperfect symbols for designating material
objects, how much more unequal must they be to the task of
expressing that which lies above and behind matter and sensation,
especially as all abstract terms are metaphors taken from sensible
objects! How many feelings do we have, in the course of our lives,
which beggar description! How many apprehensions, limitations,
distinctions, opinions are clearly present, at times, to our
consciousness, which elude every attempt to give them verbal
expression! Even the profoundest thinkers and the most accurate,
hair-splitting writers, who weigh and test to the bottom every term
they use, are baffled in the effort so to convey their conclusions
as to defy all misapprehension or successful refutation. Beginning
with definitions, they find that the definitions themselves need
defining; and just at the triumphant moment when the structure of
argument seems complete and logic-proof, some lynx-eyed adversary
detects an inaccuracy or a contradiction in the use of some
keystone term, and the whole magnificent pile, so painfully reared,
tumbles into ruins.
The history of controversy, in short, in all ages and nations,
is a history of disputes about words. The hardest problems, the
keenest negotiations, the most momentous decisions, have turned on
the meaning of a phrase, a term, or even a particle. A misapplied
or sophistical expression has provoked the fiercest and most
interminable quarrels. Misnomers have turned the tide of public
opinion; verbal fallacies have filled men’s souls with prejudice,
rage, and hate; and “the sparks of artful watchwords, thrown among
combustible materials, have kindled the flames of deadly war and
changed the destiny of empires.”
FOOTNOTES:
[35] “Westminster Review,” September, 1856.
[36] “Essays,” Cotton’s edition.
[37] “Chapters on Language,” by F. W. Farrar.