WORDS NOTHING IN THEMSELVES.
“Credibilius est, quia præsens est eis, quantum id capere
possunt, LUMEN RATIONIS ÆTERNÆ, ubi hæc immutabilia vera
conspiciunt.”--S. AUGUSTIN, _Ret._ i. 4.
“It may lead us a little,” says Locke, “towards the original of all
our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our
words have on common sensible ideas; and how those which are made
use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense,
have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are
transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for
ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses.”[185]
So far we may seem to have been adducing a crowd of illustrations
in support of this statement: for we have traced the germinal
development of language from the seed and root of onomatopœia to
the various ramifications of metaphor, and have seen convincing
reason to infer the primary origin of all words from sensible
ideas.
Are we then obliged to give in our adherence to the sensational
philosophy, and to believe that “Nature, even in the naming of
things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of
all their knowledge?” Are we forced to accept the dogma that “there
is nothing in the intellect, which has not previously existed in
the sense?”
Such are the questions which must now be considered, because
these are the conclusions usually drawn from the premisses,
which have been hitherto receiving our support. The discussion
of them cannot be considered a digression, because it will lead
us at least to recognise the existence of problems which are of
the profoundest importance, the examination of which must always
bear reference to the facts of language, and especially to its
origin and history. The space devoted by Locke to the development
of his views on the use and abuse of words is a sufficient proof
that we are not wilfully turning aside from the direct discussion
of the subject before us. Indeed, it is the assertion of one of
Locke’s acutest[186] and most admiring disciples, that the whole
of the Essay on the Human Understanding is “little more than
a philosophical account of the first sort of abbreviations in
language.”
Before we reject the conclusion which may seem to have been
involved in the facts which we have endeavoured to establish, it
may be well to mark the full consequences which the sensationalists
were gradually led to adopt. Locke, in defining the source of our
ideas, had distinctly acknowledged an _internal sense_, which he
calls reflection, as being necessary to complement the work of
sensation; in the very passage which we quoted at the commencement
of this chapter, he goes on to say that we have “no ideas at all,
but what originally came _either_ from sensible objects without,
_or what we feel within ourselves from the inward workings of
our own spirits of which we are conscious to ourselves within_.”
Similarly, Bishop Berkeley, in his Theory of Vision, very clearly
lays down “that there are properly no ideas or passive objects in
the mind but what are derived from sense, _but there are, besides
these, her own acts and operations_;--such are notions.”
But of that element of our thoughts which he called reflexion,
Locke, although he barely asserted its existence, made so little
use that it hardly counteracted the general tendency of his
philosophy. “When[187] a term so wide and vague, or so complex
and multifarious, so thin and shadowy, or so ponderous and
unmanageable, as this ‘reflexion’ is introduced side by side with
the clear, bodily, definite realities of the senses (sensation),
it can hardly hold its place securely as a philosophical term.”
Accordingly we are not surprised to find that Locke was claimed
as the founder[188] of a sensationalist school, whose ultimate
conclusions his calm and pious mind would have indignantly
repudiated.
But it was in France that the Essay on Human Understanding was
received with the most enthusiastic applause; and when the
metaphysics of Locke had once “crossed the channel on the light
and brilliant wings of Voltaire’s imagination,” sensationalism
reigned for a long period without a rival near the throne. Etienne
de Condillac was the philosopher who was mainly instrumental
in introducing to his countrymen the speculations of the great
English thinker; and it is an interesting fact that in Condillac’s
first work, “L’Essai sur l’Origine des Connaissances Humaines,”
(1746), he had not yet thought of “simplifying” Locke’s system,
by discarding reflexion as an element of knowledge. But eight
years after, in his “Traité des Sensations,” he states, in the
broadest possible manner, that the senses are the source not only
of our knowledge, but even (monstrous as it may appear) of our
_intellectual faculties_ themselves! And as he makes the faculty
of speech the principle of superiority of men over animals, he is
involved in the vicious[189] circle of considering language to
be, at the same time and in the same sense, a cause and an effect
of thought. This system found its most wonderful illustration
in the too-famous description of the statue-man; a being, who,
so far from being capable of acquiring memory, and judgment and
thought, would even be incapable of _anything_, except mere organic
impressions,[190] because it could have had no will whereby to
contrast its personality with the action of external causes.
So far is it from being true, that there is nothing in the
intellect which has not previously been in the sense, that even
our conception of matter[191] itself is derived from a superior
source, and would without the intellect be one at which we could
not arrive. The senses themselves can tell us nothing except in so
far as they are “the scribes[192] of the soul.”
It might have been thought that sensationalism itself could go no
farther than Condillac, but it found exponents still more audacious
in Helvetius and St. Lambert. According to the former, man is
merely an animal superior to other animals because of the greater
perfection of the organs with which he has been endowed; according
to the latter, man, when born, is only an organised sensible mass;
and the first objects which strike our senses give us our first
ideas, until thus, gradually, Nature has created the soul within
us. We are hardly surprised after this to find that Helvetius
considers love to be only the feeling of a need, courage to be the
fear of death (!), and “Do what is useful” to be the moral rule;
and that St. Lambert avows openly, that pleasure and pain are the
masters of man, so that the object of life will be to seek the one,
and avoid the other.
Are we obliged by our theory respecting the origin of language to
accept any of these conclusions? Must we say, with Condillac, that
“science is only a well-constructed language?” or with M. Destutt
de Tracy, that “thought[193] is sensation?” or (to go back to the
cradle of these materialist imaginings), must we believe, with the
old sophist, that “man[194] is the measure of all things?” that
there is no eternal right or truth? that justice and turpitude
are the result not of divine instinct, but of association, habit,
custom, convention? Must all morality be founded, with Occam,[195]
on the result of an arbitrary decree? and must we believe, with
Horne Tooke, that truth is simply and purely relative, since
its derivation is supposed to imply that it is merely what one
“troweth?”
To establish such conclusions was the direct object of Horne Tooke
in his “Diversions of Purley,”[196] and it is astonishing that he
should have met with such complete success. A certain Dutchman[197]
had preceded him in the same line of argument; abusing the fact
that the terms of theology, morals, and metaphysics, are originally
derived from material images, he turned theology and the Christian
faith into ridicule in a little Dutch dictionary, in which he gave
to words, not such definitions as usage demands, but such as seemed
to carry a malignant inference drawn from the original meaning; and
since he had shown marks of impiety elsewhere, they say that he was
punished for it in the Raspel-Huyss.
Far different was the acceptance given to the “Diversions of
Purley,” which to this day is praised and quoted, although a recent
philologist has not scrupled to affirm that Tooke’s “alluring[198]
speculations will not bear the light of advancing knowledge, and
it _is hardly too much to say that there is not a sound etymology
in the work_.” No one has done more to overthrow his baseless
fabric than the late Mr. Garnett,[199] in an article on English
Lexicography, who has shown in particular that the details of his
much-vaunted analysis of the particles may be contested more often
than admitted, and indeed that his theory contains very little
that can be safely relied upon. Tooke seems to have been led to
his system by the conjecture that “if” is equivalent to “gif,”
an imperative of the verb “to give;” but as the cognate forms in
other languages prove that this particle has no connection whatever
either with the verb “to give” or with any other verb (a fact which
was proved by Dr. Jamieson in his Scottish Dictionary), “any system
founded on this basis is a mere castle in the air.” “According to
Plutarch,” says Mr. Garnett, “the Delphian EI supported the tripod
of truth; we fear that Tooke’s _if imperative_ led him into a
labyrinth of error.”
Again, let us take the etymology by which Tooke endeavours to
explode the common notion of truth. He assumes that the word
‘truth’ is merely a contraction of “troweth,” and that “trow”
simply denotes to _think_ or _believe_. The inferences are as
follows: “Truth[200] 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.” Here we are
removed at once from the solid basis of certainty and conviction
to the shifting deserts and treacherous waves of conjecture and
doubt; and the etymologist would reduce morality and religion to
shadowy superstructures built upon moving and trembling sands. Even
if the derivation were admissible we should reject the conclusion,
but the etymology is as erroneous as the inference drawn from it is
dangerous and false. Mr. Garnett, with infinitely more probability,
derives truth “from the Sanskrit _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 præterea nihil_. In all inquiries after truth,
the question is, not what people, who may or may not be competent
to form an opinion, _think_ or _believe_, but what _grounds_ they
have for believing it.”[201]
The question how mind can be affected by matter has in all
ages been a problem of philosophy. Descartes accounted for it
by occasional causes; Leibnitz, by pre-established harmony;
Malebranche, by a vision of all things in God; Kant, by the
existence of innate ideas. However the question be resolved, it is
closely analogous to the question, ‘how can things immaterial[202]
and unsubstantial like thought and conception be represented,
and for all practical purposes adequately represented by things
physical, _i.e._, by pulsations and modifications of the ambient
air?’
Idealism denies the existence of an external world, and obtrudes on
us in its stead “a world of spectres and apparitions;” materialism
denies us the possession of any ideas but those which we have
derived from sense, and thus deprives us of all belief in an
eternal and pre-existing truth; between the two we lose alike “the
starry heaven above, and the moral law within.” But neither of
these systems can derive any real support from the phenomena of
language, which indeed in no way affect the considerations they
involve. For if confessedly our words have nothing to tell us, and
_can_ tell us nothing about the world of phenomena, and yet the
common sense of mankind forces us to believe in the existence of
that outer world, then it can be no argument against the existence
of _noumena_, _i.e._, against the existence of eternal ideas and
necessary truths, that the words which we apply to our conceptions
of immaterial entities are borrowed from the analogy which those
conceptions offer to the objects surrounding us in the world of
sense. “When we impose on a phenomenon of the physical order a
moral denomination, we do not thereby spiritualise matter; and
because we assign a physical denomination to a moral phenomenon,
we do not materialise spirit. Let us not from these appellations,
more or less inexact, draw conclusions either as to the nature of
our ideas or the essence of things.”[203]
Even if it were possible that we could invent names for each
separate particle of matter in the material universe, we should
_know_ nothing of any one particle except that it _causes_ (or,
perhaps, we ought to say no more than that it _is_) a modification
of ourselves; and yet we believe that there is a non-ego entirely
and wholly independent of the ego, though it may in no way
_resemble_ our notions respecting it. Why then may we not equally
believe in the independent absolute existence of ideas which
correspond to our terms,--truth and justice, goodness and beauty,
space and time?
A shower falls while the sun is shining, and we are conscious of
a sensation which presents to us an arch shining with the divided
perfection of seven-fold light to which we have given the name
Rainbow. But what does the name teach us of the thing itself? It
is not even a name for the thing itself, but only for the effect
it produces upon us; indeed for us, the very existence of the
object _is_ its perception, “its _esse_ is _percipi_.” Not only
is the coloured arch a phenomenon existing merely for us and our
visual sense, but the very raindrops are only empirical phenomena,
and “their[204] round shape--_nay, even the space in which they
are formed_, are nothing in themselves but a mere modification
or principle of our sensuous intuition; with all this, however,
the object itself remains to us completely unknown.” We cannot
even say that our conception of the object is in any way like the
object itself: can pain, for instance, resemble the pricking of
a pin? Such language, as Bp. Berkeley showed long ago, is a mere
contradiction in terms; for “an idea can be like nothing but an
idea; a colour or figure can be like nothing but another colour
or figure. I appeal to any one whether it be sense to assert that
a colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like
something which is intangible.”
What, then, is the word (_e.g._ rainbow) to us? _In itself_ it is
worthless, a mere hieroglyphic, which cannot even teach us one iota
about the phenomenal world. We are very far from agreeing with
the “divers philosophers” mentioned by Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry
Wives[205] of Windsor, who “hold that the lips is parcel of the
mind.” We still believe that objects _do_ exist in the external
world, even although it be absurd to say that they _resemble_ our
“ideas” of them. Although to _us_ they can only exist as “ideas,”
and not as objects, we do not therefore deny that they _have_ a
real independent existence of their own. And precisely in the
same way, whatever may be the derivation of the word truth, and
however much our conceptions of that word must be modified by the
laws of thought, we yet believe, as firmly as we believe anything,
that truth _has_ an independent, eternal, immutable existence;
that it is infinitely more than a mere “_flatus vocis_;” that its
indestructible idea, its original, its antetype, exists in the
Divine[206] mind, and that if man and the works of man were to
sink for ever into annihilation in the flames of a fiery surge,
truth and wisdom would still exist, even as they existed when God
prepared the heavens, “from the[207] beginning, or ever the earth
was.”
There is then no reason to complain of the materialism of language,
or to be afraid of the conclusions which nominalists like Horne
Tooke and his Dutch predecessor would willingly draw from the
origin of words. No system of materialism will account for
grammar, that _form_ of language which is due to the pure reason.
No treatise on the history of words will be able to point to any
external source as sufficient to account for the relation[208]
of words among themselves. No language is a _mere_ collection of
words; and Locke in all that he has written about _words_ has
offered no proof that any system of _syntax_ is ultimately due to
sensible ideas. His followers have attempted this, but they have
failed. An eminent modern scholar has observed that a “careful[209]
dissection of the whole body of inflected speech will make it
plain, that while words are merely outward symbols, designating
certain notions of the mind, those notions do not stand related in
all cases, just as the words or inflections which express them, and
that we cannot by means of mere words convert into physical truth
all that is logically and metaphysically true.”
Language is not what it has been called, “la pensée[210] devenue
matière.” The very expression involves a contradiction. Words _can_
be nothing but symbols, and, at the best, very imperfect ones. To
make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought, is to bring
down the infinite to the measure of the finite. Our words mean far
more than they express, they shadow forth far more than it is in
their power to define. When two men converse their words are but
an instrument; the speaker is descending from[211] thoughts to
words, the listener rising from words to thoughts. Onomatopœia and
metaphor are sufficient to provide us with the material part of
language, the articulate _sounds_; but to translate those sounds
into signs or words is the effort of a faculty which transcends the
sense. On the one hand we have a spiritual perception,[212] the
thought; on the other hand a material accident, the combination
of articulate utterances;--but what power can bridge the abysm
between the two? The reason, and the reason only. Without reason,
the use of metaphor would be impossible, and the result of
imitation would be a collection of sounds as meaningless as the
screams of a parrot or the chatterings of an ape.
Surely these considerations are sufficient to show that there is
no danger to true philosophy in the inferences to which language
leads us. But, indeed, the whole of nominalism rests on a vast
_petitio principii_. Because our primitive vocabulary is deduced
solely from corporeal or sensible images, it is assumed, _per
saltum_, that our intellect only admits of conceptions directly
derived from the agency of the senses, and that therefore thought
is nothing but sensation. But the _consciousness_ of the metaphor
has vanished for ages from language, and when we use such a word
as “spirit,” we do not even remember that our word means in itself
no more than “a whisper of the wind.” Our primitive conceptions
admitted only of _expression_ by means of a material analogy:--this
is the sole ground of nominalism, and it will not bear the enormous
structure of inferences built upon it; 1st, that our conceptions
were themselves originally material; and, 2ndly, that they are and
must be so still, because we are incapable of any others.
Finally, there are in every language “a vast number of words
which may be explained by the idea, although the idea cannot be
discovered by the word, as is the case with whatever belongs to
the mystery of the mind.” Such words are sacrifice, sacrament,
mystery, eternity. The conclusion to which they lead us is a plain
one, and it is one which will render us fearless of the arguments
which the sensational philosophy has so long paraded with triumph
as the main support of its unbeliefs. It is that “Words are at most
intellectual symbols, and symbols are, at the best, words. Neither
the words of language, nor the symbols of religion, are the basis
and reality of thought or of worship; _they have no reality but in
reason and conscience_, and are of no use but in so far as they
express this reality, and are so[213] understood and applied.”