Now this, put so, is (you will say) so extremely, obvious that it
must needs hide a fallacy or at best a quibble on a word. I shall
try to show that it does not: that it directly opposes plain
truth to a convention accepted by the Ordinance, and that the
fallacy lies in that convention.
A convention may be defined as something which a number of men
have agreed to accept in lieu of the truth and to pass off for
the truth upon others: I was about to add, preferably when they
can catch them young: but some recent travel in railway trains
and listening to the kind of stuff men of mature years deliver
straight out of newspapers for the products of their own digested
thought have persuaded me that the ordinary man is as susceptible
at fifty, sixty, or even seventy as at any earlier period of
growth, and that the process of incubation is scarcely less
rapid.
I am not, to be sure, concerned to deny that there may be
conventions useful enough to society, serving it to maintain
government, order, public and private decency, or the commerce on
which it must needs rest to be a civilised society at all--
commerce of food, commerce of clothing, and so on, up to commerce
in knowledge and ideas. Government itself--any form of it--is a
convention; marriage is a convention; money of course is a
convention, and the alphabet itself I suppose to contain as many
conventions as all the old Courts of Love and Laws of Chivalry
put together, and our English alphabet one tremendous fallacy,
that twenty-six letters, separately or in combination are capable
of symbolising all the sounds produced by an Englishman's organs
of speech, let alone the sounds he hears from foreigners, dogs,
guns, steam-engines, motor-horns and other friends and enemies to
whom we deny the franchise. Also of course it ignores the whole
system of musical notes--another convention--which yet with many
of the older bards could hardly be separated from the words they
used, though now only the words survive and as literature.