EXPERIMENT
_Zenith._ _Law._ _Investigate._ _Conceit._ _Gentleman._ _Love._
_Protestant._
Philosophy, alchemy, and mathematics were not the only branches of
learning in which the Arabs had excelled. The appearance in English
of such words as _azimuth_, _nadir_, and _zenith_ towards the end of
the fourteenth century suggests among other things that the thinking
of this Syrian race contributed in no small degree to the rise in
Europe of the new astronomy. These three Arabic words (two of them
for the first time in English) are to be found in Chaucer’s _Treatise
on the Astrolabe_, written in 1391 for the instruction of his little
son, “Lowis”; and this interesting document contains many other words
also for which the _Oxford Dictionary_ does not give any earlier
quotation, such as _almanac_, _ecliptic_, _equinox_, _equator_,
_horizon_, _latitude_, _longitude_, _meridian_, _minute_ (meaning
one-sixtieth of a degree), while _zodiac_ was used by Gower a few
years before.
Such words show us that the Europe of the Dark Ages had been
experiencing once more what the ancient scientists had known. Its
learned men had been marking down recurrences of natural phenomena
and orientating themselves on the earth by dividing its face up
into imaginary rings and segments. For such purposes they had found
Latin and Greek terms ready to their hand, and the survival of
the Greek _zodiac_ reminds us that they had, moreover, adopted the
ancient system of mapping out the heavens into twelve “signs.”
When, therefore, we find three Arabic words among these relics of
classical wisdom, we need not be surprised to see that they express
something which the ancients had, apparently, never felt the need of
expressing—that is, an abstracted geometrical way of mapping out the
visible heavens. These are conceived of as a vast sphere encircling
the earth; the _zenith_ and the _nadir_ are its poles, while the
_azimuths_ are meridians of celestial longitude.
It is probable that, with the use of these words, there came for the
first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing
himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects. Of
course, the Arab astronomer of the Dark and Middle Ages still saw
the earth as the centre round which the universe revolved, and he
would no more have dreamed of doubting the “astral” quality of the
planets than the schoolmaster of to-day who instructs his pupils to
write down “Let _x_ = 20 oranges” doubts whether oranges have any
taste. Nevertheless we may feel pretty sure that those minds which
were apparently the first to think of cutting up the sky without
reference to the constellations, and which could, moreover, develop
so fully the great and novel system of abstraction which they called
_algebra_, did their part in bringing about that extraordinary
revolution in astronomical thought which is associated with the
name of Copernicus. It is true that the astronomy of Plato’s time
had been intimately connected with arithmetic and geometry; but
Plato’s “number” and his geometry do not appear to have been quite
the abstract sciences which these things are to-day. What we call
their “laws” seem to have been felt, not as intellectual deductions,
but rather as real activities of soul—that human soul which, as we
saw, the philosopher could not yet feel to be wholly separate from
a larger world Soul, or planetary Soul. The Zodiacal signs, for
instance, had been as much, if not more, classifications of this Soul
as they had been sections of space. The word comes from the Greek
‘zōdion’, a little animal, and not only was every sign distinguished
by a constellation, of which the majority were associated with some
beast, but human character and human destiny were believed to be
bound up inextricably with the position of the sun and the planets
among these signs.
If, therefore, there is any truth in the belief of the old Greek
philosophers and of some modern historians that the study of
mathematics has its origin in the observed movements of the stars,
the progress is of the same nature as that which we noticed at the
end of the last chapter. Is it too fanciful to picture to ourselves
how, drawn into the minds of a few men, the relative positions
and movements of the stars gradually developed a more and more
independent life there until, with the rise in Europe first of
trigonometry and then of algebra, they detached themselves from
the outside world altogether? And then by a few great men like
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, these abstract mathematics were
re-fitted to the stars which had given them birth, and the result
was that cosmogony of infinite spaces and a tiny earth in which our
imaginations roam to-day? When the Aryan imagination had at last
succeeded in so detaching its “ideas” about the phenomena of the
universe that these could be “played with,” as mathematicians say, in
the form of an equation, then, no doubt, it was a fairly easy matter
to turn them inside out.
The alterations wrought in the meanings of many of our common words
by this revolution of physical outlook are not difficult to perceive
and yet not easy to realize. As the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo
slowly filtered through to the popular consciousness, first of all
simple words like _atmosphere_, _down_, _earth_, _planet_, _sky_,
_space_, _sphere_, _star_, _up_, ... underwent a profound yet subtle
semantic change. And then, in the eighteenth century, as Newton’s
discoveries became more widely known, further alterations took place.
_Weight_,[39] for instance, acquired a new significance, differing
from _mass_, which also changed, having formerly meant simply a lump
of matter.[40] _Gravity_,[41] (from the Latin ‘gravitas’ ‘heaviness’)
took on its great new meaning, and the new words _gravitation_ and
_gravitate_ were formed, the later being soon adapted to metaphorical
uses. If we cared to examine them closely enough, we should probably
find that from this point a certain change of meaning gradually
spread over all words containing the notion of attraction, or
ideas closely related to it. The twin phenomena of gravitation and
magnetism, contemplated by most of us at an early age, and impalpably
present in the meanings of so many of the words we hear spoken around
us, make the conception of one lifeless body acting on another from
a distance easy and familiar.[42] But the very word _attraction_
(from the Latin ‘ad-trahere’, ‘to draw’ or ‘drag towards’) may well
serve to remind us that until the discovery of gravitation this
conception must have been practically beyond the range of human
intellection. There was formerly no half-way house in the imagination
between actual dragging or pushing and forces emanating from a living
being, such as love or hate, human or divine, or those “influences”
of the stars which have already been mentioned.
A good illustration of this fact—and one which takes us back again to
the seventeenth century—is the word _law_. The Latin ‘lex’ was first
applied to natural phenomena by Bacon. Later in the century _law_ was
used in the same sense, but it did not then mean quite what it does
to-day. The “laws of Nature” were conceived of by those who first
spoke of them as present commands of God. It is noticeable that we
still speak of Nature “obeying” these laws, though we really think of
them now rather as abstract principles—logical deductions of our own
which we have arrived at by observation and experiment.
Some account of Francis Bacon’s general influence, as a writer, on
our language has already been given in Chapter IV. His influence on
thought was far greater, for he was in some sense the moving spirit
of that intellectual revolution which began to sweep over Europe in
the sixteenth century. It was a revolution comparable in many ways
to the change inaugurated by Aristotle twenty centuries earlier, and
there is accordingly much in Bacon’s work that reminds us of the
Greek philosopher. To begin with, he was thoroughly dissatisfied with
the whole _method_ of thought as he found it in his day, and, like
Aristotle, he strove first of all to effect a reformation in this.
Aristotle had written the _Organum_—that is to say, the “Instrument”
(of Thought)—and Bacon intended his _Novum Organum_ to go one step
farther. He proclaimed himself satisfied with Aristotle’s legacy—the
prevailing logical system of syllogism and deduction—as far as it
went. Given the “premises,” it was the correct line of further
discovery. What he questioned was the Scholastic premises themselves,
and he propounded accordingly a new and surer method of establishing
fresh ones. It is known as the “inductive method.” This is not the
place to expound Bacon’s logical system, and it will suffice that it
was based on an extensive and, above all, a systematic observation of
Nature herself. Aristotle had indeed (though the Schoolmen had nearly
forgotten it) pointed the way to such an observation, but it was left
for Bacon to try and construct a prejudice-proof system of arranging
and classifying the results. These _instances_, as they were called,
were, on the one hand, to be manufactured by means of _experiment_,
and on the other to be arranged and weeded out according to their
significance. The word _crucial_ comes to us from Bacon’s Latin
phrase ‘instantia crucis’—the _crucial instance_—which, like a
sign-post, decided between two rival hypotheses by proving one and
disproving the other; and it may be said that he endeavoured, but
failed, to alter the meaning of _axiom_ itself from “a self-evident
proposition” to “a proposition established by the method of
experimental induction”.
Once more men turned the light of their curiosity upon the stubborn
phenomena of the outside world, and as it was Aristotle’s works in
which we first found the Greek _anatomy_, ‘cutting up’, so it is
Bacon who first uses _dissection_ (from the Latin for the same thing)
in its modern technical meaning. After an interval of about 1,500
years, the weighing, measuring, examining, and cutting up had now
begun again, and they have gone on ever since. How far Francis Bacon
was responsible for the form subsequently taken by scientific thought
will probably remain a matter of dispute. His views on ecclesiastical
authority, on Scholastic philosophy, on Aristotle, on the Alchemists,
certainly suggest that he possessed what the nineteenth century has
called the “scientific attitude” to an extent which distinguishes
him startlingly from any previous or contemporary writer; _acid_,
_hydraulic_, and _suction_ are among the words first found in his
pages; but, above all, his consciousness of greater changes afoot
is manifested linguistically in such things as his use of the words
_progressive_ and _retrograde_ in an historical sense unknown, as
we shall see, to the majority of thinkers until the middle of the
eighteenth century, or his equally innovating distinction between
_ancient_ and _modern_. A marked increase over the second quarter
of the seventeenth century in the number of words expressing the
notion of doubt, such as _dubious_ (used of opinions), _dubiousness_,
_dubitable, ceptic_, _sceptical_, _sceptically_, _scepticism_,
_scepticity_, _scepticize_, compares with an increase of only one or
two during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And at about the
same time the words _curious_, _curiosity_, and _inquisitive_ seem
to have lost the air of pious disapproval which they had previously
carried with them when used to express the love of inquiry. How much
of this is due to novel combinations, such as “a natural _curiosity_
and _inquisitive_ appetite”, which we find in Bacon’s _Advancement
of Learning_? We cannot say. There are symptoms of the coming
metamorphosis already, before his time, in the appearance in English
of the sixteenth century of such significant new terms as _analyse_,
_distinguish_, _investigate_, together with the semantic change of
_observe_ from “to obey a rule”, or “to inspect auguries” into its
modern meaning, and similar changes in the case of _experiment_ and
_experimental_. It is impossible to prove these things. As with
Aristotle, so with Bacon, it is impossible to say whether his own
intellectual volume displaced the great wave or whether he merely
rose upon its early crest.
There are other influences, too, that must be taken into
account. _Discovery_ (it was a new word) was in the very air of
sixteenth-century England. From the West came tidings of a new
world; from the East news yet more marvellous of an old one; and
the rebirth of Science was, in its infancy, but a single aspect
of that larger Renaissance which played such an important part
in moulding the subsequent life and outlook of Europe. Italy had
felt the shock first, and we have a special group of words in our
language to remind us of the visual arts in which the new impulse
drove her to excel. _Cameo_, _cupola_, _fresco_, and _model_ all
reached us in the sixteenth century from or through the Italian,
and the next saw the arrival of _attitude_, _bust_, _chiaroscuro_,
_dado_, _dome_, _filigree_, _intaglio_, _mezzotinto_, and _pastel_.
If these are of a somewhat technical nature, words like _antic_,
_canto_, _capriole_, _galligaskins_, _sonnet_, and _stanza_ build a
bridge in the imagination from Renaissance Italy to Tudor England,
and _ducat_, _incarnadine_, and _madonna_ are three Italian words
with pleasant Shakespearian associations. They remind us, too,
that by the time the Renaissance reached England it was already in
full swing. No wonder the literary world was swept off its feet.
First-hand acquaintance with the works of Classical writers gradually
substituted an affectionate, an almost passionate, familiarity for
that religious awe with which the Middle Ages had honoured their
garbled translations. One of the first results—an immediate and
violent intellectual revolt against the Schoolmen and all things
connected with them—is faithfully preserved to us in the unenviable
immortality achieved about this time by the luckless Duns Scotus,
whose patronymic has given us _dunce_. The history of the word
_conceit_, which in Chaucer merely meant ‘anything conceived’, tells
its tale of the wild, undiscriminating rush after elegance of thought
and diction. By Shakespeare’s time the tasteless habit of piling
fanciful conceit upon conceit had already become a thing to parody,
the merest affectation of wit, and so the word lives to-day chiefly
as a synonym for personal vanity, the language having been obliged by
its degradation to re-borrow the Latin original ‘conceptus’ in the
more exact form of _concept_.
It can readily be imagined that the restless activity which these
little symptoms betoken had a remarkable effect in altering,
developing, and indeed modernizing, the English vocabulary. The
genius of the language sprouted and burgeoned in the genial warmth
of Elizabethan and Jacobean fancy, and—most effective of all—it
passed through the fire of Shakespeare’s imagination. There is an
unobtrusiveness about Shakespeare’s enormous influence on his native
tongue which sometimes recalls the records of his private life. This
is no doubt partly due to the very popularity of his plays, which has
preserved the direct influence in every age. Where the word which he
employs is a new one, it has usually become so common in the course
of years that we find it hard to conceive of the time when it was
not. Where it is a meaning or a shade of meaning which he has added,
as likely as not that very shade was the one most familiar to our
own childhood before we had ever read a line of his poetry. Phrases
and whole lines from the plays and sonnets are as much a part of the
English vocabulary as individual words. Such are _pitched battle_,
_play on words_, _give him his due_, _well on your way_, _too much
of a good thing_, _to the manner born_, _the glass of fashion_,
_snapper-up of unconsidered trifles_, _more honoured in the breach
than the observance_,... The influence of such a mind on the language
in which it expresses itself can only be compared to the effect of
high temperatures on solid matter. As imagination bodies forth the
forms of things unknown, each molecule of suggestiveness contained
in each word gains a mysterious freedom from its neighbours; the old
images move to and fro distinctly in the listener’s fancy, and when
the sound has died away, not merely the shape, but what seemed to be
the very substance of the word has been readjusted.
Examples are found readily enough with the help of a volume of
Shakespeare and the _Oxford Dictionary_. As to new words themselves,
it has been said that there are more in Shakespeare’s plays than
in all the rest of the English poets put together. _Advantageous_,
_amazement_, _critic_ and _critical_, _dishearten_, _dwindle_,
_generous_, _invulnerable_, _majestic_, _obscene_, _pedant_, _pious_,
_radiance_, _reliance_, and _sanctimonious_ are a few examples,
but it is still more interesting to trace the subtler part of his
influence. As an instance of what we may call his literary alertness
let us take the word _propagate_. It is not found in English before
1570, and is thus a new word in Shakespeare’s time. Yet he handles
it four times, now literally, now figuratively, with as much ease
and grace as if it had been one of the oldest words in the language.
Listen to Romeo:
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest
With more of thine.
Again, the figurative—that is to say, the only modern use of
_influence_—is first quoted from his works, and we can watch
him gradually taking the meaning of the word sphere through its
historical developments of planetary ‘_sphere_’, high social rank,
any sort of category. A certain curious intransitive use of the verb
_take_, as when a doctor says “the vaccination _took_ very well,” can
also be traced back to Shakespeare, and a few more of the innumerable
new uses of words which appear to have begun from him are _sequence_
and _creed_, with purely secular meanings; _real_, in its ordinary
modern sense of ‘actual’; _magic_, _magical_, and _charm_[43], used
figuratively; _apology_ as the personal and verbal expression of
compunction; _positive_ in its psychological sense; _function_, used
biologically; _fashion_ and _fashionable_ with their modern meanings;
and _action_, meaning a battle. The fact that the first examples
of these new uses quoted in the _Oxford Dictionary_ are taken from
Shakespeare cannot, of course, be taken as absolute proof that he
introduced them. But there are so many of them, and the _Dictionary_
is so thorough, that there can be no doubt of his being the first in
most cases and among the first in every case.
Shakespeare’s influence on the personal relations between the sexes,
as they have developed in subsequent periods of English history, is a
matter for the literary and social historian; but it is interesting
to reflect how the meanings of that group of Norman French words
mentioned in the last chapter, and of others which were slowly drawn
into their circle, must have expanded under the warm breath of his
vivacious and human heroines. The ideal atmosphere of gracious
tenderness which was the contribution to humanity of the Middle
Ages was to some extent realized by the Elizabethans. The women
towards whom it was directed became less and less mere ecclesiastical
symbols, existing only in the imagination of the lover, and more and
more creatures of real flesh and blood. Once again it is a case of a
later age striving to live out what an earlier age—or its few best
minds—have dreamed. Thus, the Blessed Virgin is partly supplanted
in men’s hearts by the virgin Queen; the charming figure of
Sidney—personified gentleness and chivalry—actually passes across the
stage of history; the peculiarly English word _gentleman_ appears.
And we can hardly help holding Shakespeare partly responsible for
what is going forward when we find him writing “the devout religion
of mine eye” and making Richard III implore Anne to “let the soul
forth that adoreth thee”—where the words _religion_ and _adore_ are
both applied to humanity for the first time, as far as we know, in
English literature.
Moreover, the new access to the Classics added to all this the
direct influence of the Platonic philosophy which now played,
through Spenser and his circle, upon the thought and feeling of
the Elizabethan age. A careful reading of Spenser’s four hymns to
_Love_, _Beauty_, _Heavenly Love_, and _Heavenly Beauty_ will throw
much light on the subsequent semantic history of the title words and
of many others. We find in them the Platonic antithesis between the
Eternal and its for-ever-changing outward garment:
For that same goodly hew of white and red,
With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay,
And those sweete rosy leaves so fairely spread
Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away
To that they were, even to corrupted clay.
That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright
Shall turne to dust, and loose their goodly light.
But that faire lampe, from whose celestial ray
That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers’ fire,
Shall never be extinguisht nor decay,
But when the vitall spirits doe expyre,
Unto her native planet shall retyre,
For it is heavenly borne and can not die,
Being a parcell of the purest skie.
and the conception of contemplation rising, through love, from the
one to the other, as in
For love is Lord of truth and loialtie,
Lifting himselfe out of the lowly dust,
On golden plumes up to the purest skie....
or:
But they which love indeede, look otherwise,
With pure regard and spotless true intent,
Drawing out of the object of their eyes
A more refyned forme, which they present
Unto their minde....
until finally, in the _Hymne of Heavenly Beauty_, Spenser reveals the
source of his faith:
Faire is the heaven, where happy soules have place,
In full enjoyment of felicitie....
More faire is that where those _Idees_ on hie,
Enraunged be, which _Plato_ so admyred,
And pure _Intelligences_ from God inspyred.
When we recall the great influence which Spenser’s poetry has exerted
on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can
clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism—a direct Platonism, and a
Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions
of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and
Middle Ages—combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is
now contained in such words as _love_ and _beauty_. Let us remember,
then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly,
we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist
or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a
vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual
capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort.
The fact that a great deal of what had formerly been religious
emotion was being secularized in this way does not, however, mean
that the Church had ceased to play an all-important part in the
life of the people. The Reformation seems, with its insistence
on the _inwardness_ of all true grace, to have been but another
manifestation of that steady shifting inwards of the centre of
gravity of human consciousness which we have already observed in
the scientific outlook. That shift is, in a larger sense, the story
told by the whole history of the Aryan languages. Thus _religion_
itself, which had formerly been used only of external observances or
of monastic orders, took on at about this time its modern, subjective
meaning. Now it was that _piety_, differentiating itself from _pity_,
began to acquire its present sense. _Godly_, _godliness_, and
_godless_ are first found in Tindale’s writings, and _evangelical_
and _sincere_ are words which have been noted by a modern writer as
being new at this time and very popular among the Protestants. The
great word _Protestant_ itself was applied formerly to the German
princes who had dissented from the decision of the Diet of Spires in
1529, and together with _Reformation_ it now acquired its new and
special meaning, while the old words, _dissent_ and _disagree_, were
transferred at about the same time from material objects to matters
of opinion.
Another little group of words which appeared in the language at about
this time is interesting in its suggestion that human emotions,
like the forces of Nature, are usually accompanied by their equal
and opposite reactions. The well-known phrases, _odium theologicum_
and _odium philosophicum_, survive to remind us of a new kind of
bitterness and hatred which had slowly been arising in men’s hearts,
and which were also, it would seem, the gifts of Christianity and
the Dark Ages. Very soon after the Reformation we find alongside the
syllables of tenderness and devotion a very pretty little vocabulary
of abuse. _Bigoted, action_, _factious_, _malignant_, _monkish_,
_papistical_, _pernicious_, _popery_ are among the products of the
struggle between Catholic and Protestant; and the terms _Roman_,
_Romanist_, and _Romish_ soon acquired such a vituperative sense
that it became necessary to evolve _Roman Catholic_ in order to
describe the adherents of that faith without giving offence to them.
The later internecine struggles among the Protestants themselves
gave us _Puritan_, _precise_, _libertine_—reminiscent of a time when
“liberty” of thought was assumed as a matter of course to include
licence of behaviour—_credulous_, _superstitious_, _selfish_,
_selfishness_, and the awful Calvinistic word _reprobate_. It
was towards the end of the Puritan ascendancy that _atone_ and
_atonement_ (_at-one-ment_) acquired their present strong suggestion
of legal expiation, and it may not be without significance that the
odious epithet _vindictive_ was then for the first time applied
approvingly to the activities of the Almighty Himself.
As the language grows older, when all the principal tributaries have
met at last in the main stream, it begins, unfortunately, to tell
a less and less coherent tale of the people who speak it. The few
large groups of new words and meanings which we have hitherto been
tracing give way to a much greater number of small groups—or even of
single words—for the vocabulary is now so capacious that important
new movements of thought are likely to find the old terms adaptable
to their use with very slight semantic alterations, or perhaps with
the formal addition of an _-arian_, an _-ism_, or an _-ology_. These
become accordingly harder to trace, and a book of these dimensions is
obliged to select a word here and a word there in almost arbitrary
fashion. It must be remembered, then, in this and the succeeding
chapters that only a few of the tendencies and changes at work have
been picked out for inspection, though it is probable that a study
of words, which should be at the same time subtle and comprehensive
enough, would throw some light on them all.