Curiosities of Literature Volume Iii Part 7

[36] It was published in 1616: the writer only catches at some verbal expressions--as, for instance:--

The vulgar proverb runs, "The more the merrier."

The cross,--"Not so! one hand is enough in a purse."

The proverb, "It is a great way to the bottom of the sea."

The cross,--"Not so! it is but a stone's cast."

The proverb, "The pride of the rich makes the labours of the poor."

The cross,--"Not so! the labours of the poor make the pride of the rich."

The proverb, "He runs far who never turns."

The cross,--"Not so! he may break his neck in a short course."

[37] It has been suggested that this whimsical amus.e.m.e.nt has been lately revived, to a certain degree, in the _acting of charades_ among juvenile parties.

[38] Now the punning motto of a n.o.ble family.

[39] At the ROYAL INSt.i.tUTION there is a fine copy of Polydore Vergil's "Adagia," with his other work, curious in its day, _De Inventoribus Rerum_, printed by Frobenius, in 1521. The _wood-cuts_ of this edition seem to me to be executed with inimitable delicacy, resembling a pencilling which Raphael might have envied.

[40] Since the appearance of the present article, several collections of PROVERBS have been attempted. A little unpretending volume, ent.i.tled "Select Proverbs of all Nations, with _Notes_ and _Comments_, by Thomas Fielding, 1824," is not ill arranged; an excellent book for popular reading. The editor of a recent miscellaneous compilation, "The Treasury of Knowledge," has whimsically bordered the four sides of the pages of a Dictionary with as many proverbs. The plan was ingenious, but the proverbs are not. Triteness and triviality are fatal to a proverb.

[41] A new edition of Ray's book, with large additions, was published by Bohn, in 1855, under the t.i.tle of "A Handbook of Proverbs." It is a vast collection of "wise saws" of all ages and countries.

CONFUSION OF WORDS.

"There is nothing more common," says the lively Voltaire, "than to read and to converse to no purpose. In history, in morals, in law, in physic, and in divinity, be careful of equivocal terms." One of the ancients wrote a book to prove that there was no word which did not convey an ambiguous and uncertain meaning. If we possessed this lost book, our ingenious dictionaries of "synonyms" would not probably prove its uselessness. Whenever _the same word_ is a.s.sociated by the parties with _different ideas_, they may converse, or controverse, till "the crack of doom!" This with a little obstinacy and some agility in s.h.i.+fting his ground, makes the fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in disentangling a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned, carelessly or perversely slipped into an argument, may prolong it for a century or two--as it has happened! Vaugelas, who pa.s.sed his whole life in the study of words, would not allow that the _sense_ was to determine the meaning of _words_; for, says he, it is the business of _words_ to explain the _sense_. Kant for a long while discovered in this way a facility of arguing without end, as at this moment do our political economists. "I beseech you," exclaims a poetical critic, in the agony of a confusion of words, on the Pope controversy, "not to ask whether I mean _this_ or _that_!" Our critic, positive that he has made himself understood, has shown how a few vague terms may admit of volumes of vindication. Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses, and you raise fifty parties! Should some friend of peace enable the fifty to repose on one sense, that innocent word, no longer ringing the _tocsin_ of a party, would lie in forgetfulness in the Dictionary. Still more provoking when an ident.i.ty of meaning is only disguised by different modes of expression, and when the term has been closely sifted, to their mutual astonishment both parties discover the same thing lying under the bran and chaff after this heated operation. Plato and Aristotle probably agreed much better than the opposite parties they raised up imagined; their difference was in the manner of expression, rather than in the points discussed. The Nominalists and the Realists, who once filled the world with their brawls, and who from irregular words came to regular blows, could never comprehend their alternate nonsense; "whether in employing general terms we use _words_ or _names_ only, or whether there is _in nature anything_ corresponding to what we mean by a _general idea_?" The Nominalists only denied what no one in his senses would affirm; and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses would deny; a hair's breadth might have joined what the spirit of party had sundered!

Do we flatter ourselves that the Logomachies of the Nominalists and the Realists terminated with these scolding schoolmen? Modern nonsense, weighed against the obsolete, may make the scales tremble for awhile, but it will lose its agreeable quality of freshness, and subside into an equipoise. We find their spirit still lurking among our own metaphysicians! "Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again!" exclaimed my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on _abstract ideas_, on which there is still a doubt whether they are anything more than _generalising terms_.[42] Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term _sufficient reason_: for every existence, for every event, and for every truth there must be a _sufficient reason_.

This vagueness of language produced a perpetual misconception, and Leibnitz was proud of his equivocal triumphs in always affording a new interpretation! It is conjectured that he only employed his term of _sufficient reason_ for the plain simple word of _cause_. Even Locke, who has himself so admirably noticed the "abuse of words," has been charged with using vague and indefinite ones; he has sometimes employed the words _reflection_, _mind_, and _spirit_ in so indefinite a way, that they have confused his philosophy: thus by some ambiguous expressions, our great metaphysician has been made to establish doctrines fatal to the immutability of moral distinctions. Even the eagle-eye of the intellectual Newton grew dim in the obscurity of the language of Locke. We are astonished to discover that two such intellects should not comprehend the same ideas; for Newton wrote to Locke, "I beg your pardon for representing that you struck at the root of morality in a principle laid down in your book of Ideas--and that I took you for a Hobbist!"[43] The difference of opinion between Locke and Reid is in consequence of an ambiguity in the word _principle_, as employed by Reid. The removal of a solitary word may cast a luminous ray over a whole body of philosophy: "If we had called the _infinite_ the _indefinite_," says Condillac, in his _Traite des Sensations_, "by this small change of a word we should have avoided the error of imagining that we have a positive idea of _infinity_, from whence so many false reasonings have been carried on, not only by metaphysicians, but even by geometricians." The word _reason_ has been used with different meanings by different writers; _reasoning_ and _reason_ have been often confounded; a man may have an endless capacity for _reasoning_, without being much influenced by _reason_, and to be _reasonable_, perhaps differs from both! So Moliere tells us,

Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison; Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison!

In this research on "confusion of words," might enter the voluminous history of the founders of sects, who have usually employed terms which had no meaning attached to them, or were so ambiguous that their real notions have never been comprehended; hence the most chimerical opinions have been imputed to founders of sects. We may instance that of the _Antinomians_, whose remarkable denomination explains their doctrine, expressing that they were "against law!" Their founder was John Agricola, a follower of Luther, who, while he lived, had kept Agricola's follies from exploding, which they did when he a.s.serted that there was no such thing as sin, our salvation depending on faith, and not on works; and when he declaimed against the _Law of G.o.d_. To what length some of his sect pushed this verbal doctrine is known; but the real notions of this Agricola probably never will be! Bayle considered him as a harmless dreamer in theology, who had confused his head by Paul's controversies with the Jews; but Mosheim, who bestows on this early reformer the epithets of _ventosus_ and _versipellis_, windy and crafty!

or, as his translator has it, charges him with "vanity, presumption, and artifice," tells us by the term "law," Agricola only meant the ten commandments of Moses, which he considered were abrogated by the Gospel, being designed for the Jews and not for the Christians. Agricola then, by the words the "Law of G.o.d," and "that there was no such thing as sin," must have said one thing and meant another! This appears to have been the case with most of the divines of the sixteenth century; for even Mosheim complains of "their want of precision and consistency in expressing _their sentiments_, hence their real sentiments have been misunderstood." There evidently prevailed a great "confusion of words"

among them! The _grace suffisante_ and the _grace efficace_ of the Jansenists and the Jesuits show the s.h.i.+fts and stratagems by which nonsense may be dignified. "Whether all men received from G.o.d _sufficient grace_ for their conversion!" was an inquiry some unhappy metaphysical theologist set afloat: the Jesuits, according to their worldly system of making men's consciences easy, affirmed it; but the Jansenists insisted, that this _sufficient grace_ would never be _efficacious_, unless accompanied by _special grace_. "Then the _sufficient grace_, which is not _efficacious_, is a contradiction in terms, and worse, a heresy!" triumphantly cried the Jesuits, exulting over their adversaries. This "confusion of words" thickened, till the Jesuits introduced in this logomachy with the Jansenists papal bulls, royal edicts, and a regiment of dragoons! The Jansenists, in despair, appealed to miracles and prodigies, which they got up for public representation; but, above all, to their Pascal, whose immortal satire the Jesuits really felt was at once "sufficient and efficacious,"

though the dragoons, in settling a "confusion of words," did not boast of inferior success to Pascal's. Former ages had, indeed, witnessed even a more melancholy logomachy, in the _h.o.m.oousion_ and the _h.o.m.oiousion_!

An event which Boileau has immortalised by some fine verses, which, in his famous satire on _L'Equivoque_, for reasons best known to the Sorbonne, were struck out of the text.

D'une _syllabe_ impie un saint _mot_ augmente Remplit tous les esprits d'aigreurs si meurtrieres-- Tu fis, dans une guerre et si triste et si longue, Perir tant de Chretiens, _martyrs d'une diphthongue_!

Whether the Son was similar to the substance of the Father, or of the same substance, depended on the diphthong _oi_, which was alternately rejected and received. Had they earlier discovered, what at length they agreed on, that the words denoted what was incomprehensible, it would have saved thousands, as a witness describes, "from tearing one another to pieces." The great controversy between Abelard and St. Bernard, when the saint accused the scholastic of maintaining heretical notions of the Trinity, long agitated the world; yet, now that these confusers of words can no longer inflame our pa.s.sions, we wonder how these parties could themselves differ about words to which we can attach no meaning whatever. There have been few councils or synods where the omission or addition of a word or a phrase might not have terminated an interminable logomachy! At the council of Basle, for the convenience of the disputants, John de Secubia drew up a treatise of _undeclined words_, chiefly to determine the signification of the particles _from_, _by_, _but_, and _except_, which it seems were perpetually occasioning fresh disputes among the Hussites and the Bohemians. Had Jerome of Prague known, like our Shakspeare, the virtue of an IF, or agreed with Hobbes, that he should not have been so positive in the use of the verb IS, he might have been spared from the flames. The philosopher of Malmsbury has declared that "Perhaps _Judgment_ was nothing else but the composition or joining of _two names of things, or modes_, by the verb IS." In modern times the popes have more skilfully freed the church from this "confusion of words." His holiness, on one occasion, standing in equal terror of the court of France, who protected the Jesuits, and of the court of Spain, who maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a phrase, where a comma or a full stop, placed at the beginning or the end, purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions which he condemned; and when the rival parties despatched deputations to the court of Rome to plead for the period, or advocate the comma, his holiness, in this "confusion of words," flung an unpunctuated copy to the parties; nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if the rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that of the other close by a full period!

In jurisprudence much confusion has occurred in the uses of the term _rights_; yet the social union and human happiness are involved in the precision of the expression. When Montesquieu laid down, as the active principle of a republic, _virtue_, it seemed to infer that a republic was the best of governments. In the defence of his great work he was obliged to define the term; and it seems that by _virtue_ he only meant _political virtue_, the love of the country.

In politics, what evils have resulted from abstract terms to which no ideas are affixed,--such as, "The Equality of Man--the Sovereignty or the Majesty of the People--Loyalty--Reform--even Liberty herself!--Public Opinion--Public Interest;" and other abstract notions, which have excited the hatred or the ridicule of the vulgar. Abstract ideas, as _sounds_, have been used as watchwords. The combatants will usually be found willing to fight for words to which, perhaps, not one of them has attached any settled signification. This is admirably touched on by Locke, in his chapter of "Abuse of Words." "Wisdom, Glory, Grace, &c., are words frequent enough in every man's mouth; but if a great many of those who use them should be asked what they mean by them, they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer--a plain proof that though they have learned those _sounds_, and have them ready at their tongue's end, yet there are no determined _ideas_ laid up in their minds which are to be expressed to others by them."

When the American exclaimed that he was not represented in the House of Commons, because he was not an elector, he was told that a very small part of the people of England were electors. As they could not call this an _actual representation_, they invented a new name for it, and called it a _virtual one_. It imposed on the English nation, who could not object that others should be taxed rather than themselves; but with the Americans it was a sophism! and this _virtual_ representation, instead of an _actual_ one, terminated in our separation; "which," says Mr.

Flood, "at the time appeared to have swept away most of our glory and our territory; forty thousand lives, and one hundred millions of treasure!"

That fatal expression which Rousseau had introduced, _l'Egalite des Hommes_, which finally involved the happiness of a whole people, had he lived he had probably shown how ill his country had understood. He could only have referred in his mind to _political equality_, but not an equality of possessions, of property, of authority, destructive of social order and of moral duties, which must exist among every people.

"Liberty," "Equality," and "Reform" (innocent words!) sadly ferment the brains of those who cannot affix any definite notions to them; they are like those chimerical fictions in law, which declare the "sovereign immortal, proclaim his ubiquity in various places," and irritate the feelings of the populace, by a.s.suming that "the king can never do wrong!" In the time of James the Second "it is curious," says Lord Russell, "to read the conference between the Houses on the meaning of the words 'deserted' and 'abdicated,' and the debates in the Lords whether or no there is an original contract between king and people."

The people would necessarily decide that "kings derived their power from them;" but kings were once maintained by a "right divine," a "confusion of words," derived from two opposite theories, and both only relatively true. When we listen so frequently to such abstract terms as "the majesty of the people," "the sovereignty of the people," whence the inference that "all power is derived from the people," we can form no definite notions: it is "a confusion of words," contradicting all the political experience which our studies or our observations furnish; for sovereignty is established to rule, to conduct, and to settle the vacillations and quick pa.s.sions of the mult.i.tude. _Public opinion_ expresses too often the ideas of one party in place; and _public interest_ those of another party out! Political axioms, from the circ.u.mstance of having the notions attached to them unsettled, are applied to the most opposite ends! "In the time of the French Directory," observes an Italian philosopher of profound views, "in the revolution of Naples, the democratic faction p.r.o.nounced that 'Every act of a tyrannical government is in its origin illegal;' a proposition which at first sight seems self-evident, but which went to render all existing laws impracticable." The doctrine of the illegality of the acts of a tyrant was proclaimed by Brutus and Cicero, in the name of the senate, _against the populace_, who had favoured Caesar's perpetual dictators.h.i.+p; and the populace of Paris availed themselves of it, _against the National a.s.sembly_.

This "confusion of words," in time-serving politics, has too often confounded right and wrong; and artful men, driven into a corner, and intent only on its possession, have found no difficulty in solving doubts, and reconciling contradictions. Our own history in revolutionary times abounds with dangerous examples from all parties; of specious hypotheses for compliance with the government of the day or the pa.s.sions of parliament. Here is an instance in which the subtle confuser of words pretended to subst.i.tute two consciences, by utterly depriving a man of any! When the unhappy Charles the First pleaded that to pa.s.s the bill of attainder against the Earl of Strafford was against his conscience, that remarkable character of "boldness and impiety," as Clarendon characterizes Williams, Archbishop of York, on this argument of _conscience_ (a simple word enough), demonstrated "that there were _two sorts of conscience_, public and private; that his public conscience as a king might dispense with his private conscience as a man!" Such was the ignominious argument which decided the fate of that great victim of State! It was an impudent "confusion of words" when Prynne (in order to quiet the consciences of those who were uneasy at warring with the king) observed that the statute of twenty-fifth Edward the Third ran in the singular number--"If a man shall levy war against _the king_, and therefore could not be extended to _the houses_, who are many and public _persons_." Later, we find Sherlock blest with the spirit of Williams, the Archbishop of York, whom we have just left. When some did not know how to charge and to discharge themselves of the oaths to James the Second and to William the Third, this confounder of words discovered that there were _two rights_, as the other had that there were _two consciences_; one was a providential right, and the other a legal right; one person might very righteously claim and take a thing, and another as righteously hold and keep it; but that _whoever got the better_ had the _providential_ right by possession; and since all authority comes from G.o.d, the people were obliged to transfer their allegiance to him as a king of G.o.d's making; so that he who had the providential right necessarily had the legal one! a very simple discovery, which must, however, have cost him some pains; for this confounder of words was himself confounded by twelve answers by non-jurors! A French politician of this stamp recently was suspended from his lectures.h.i.+p for a.s.serting that _the possession of the soil_ was a right; by which principle, _any king_ reigning over a country, whether by treachery, crime, and usurpation, was a _legitimate sovereign_. For this convenient principle the lecturer was tried, and declared not guilty--by persons who have lately found their advantage in a confusion of words. In treaties between nations, a "confusion of words" has been more particularly studied; and that negotiator has conceived himself most dexterous who, by this abuse of words, has retained an _arriere-pensee_ which may fasten or loosen the ambiguous expression he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in his mosaic of treachery. A scene of this nature I draw out of "Mesnager's Negociation with the Court of England." When that secret agent of Louis the Fourteenth was negotiating a peace, an insuperable difficulty arose respecting the acknowledgment of the Hanoverian succession. It was absolutely necessary, on this delicate point, to quiet the anxiety of the English public and our allies; but though the French king was willing to recognise Anne's t.i.tle to the throne, yet the settlement in the house of Hanover was incompatible with French interests and French honour. Mesnager told Lord Bolingbroke that "the king, his master, would consent to any such article, _looking the other way, as might disengage him from the obligation of that agreement_, as the occasion should present." This ambiguous language was probably understood by Lord Bolingbroke: at the next conference his lords.h.i.+p informed the secret agent "that the queen could not admit of any _explanations, whatever her intentions might be_; that the _succession_ was settled by act of parliament; that as to the private sentiments of the queen, or of any about her, he could say nothing."

"All this was said with such an air, as to let me understand that he gave a _secret a.s.sent_ to what I had proposed, &c.; but he desired me to drop the discourse." Thus two great negotiators, both equally urgent to conclude the treaty, found an insuperable obstacle occur, which neither could control. Two honest men would have parted; but the "skilful confounder of words," the French diplomatist, hit on an expedient; he wrote the words which afterwards appeared in the preliminaries, "That Louis the Fourteenth will acknowledge the Queen of Great Britain in that quality, as also _the succession of the crown according to the_ PRESENT SETTLEMENT." "The English agent," adds the Frenchman, "would have had me add--_on the house of Hanover_, but this I entreated him not to desire of me." The term PRESENT SETTLEMENT, then, was that article which was LOOKING THE OTHER WAY, _to disengage his master from the obligation of that agreement_, as occasion should present! that is, that Louis the Fourteenth chose to understand by the PRESENT SETTLEMENT the _old one_, by which the British crown was to be restored to the Pretender! Anne and the English nation were to understand it in their own sense--as the _new one_, which transferred it to the house of Hanover!

When politicians cannot rely upon each other's interpretation of _one of the commonest words_ in our language, how can they possibly act together? The Bishop of Winchester has proved this observation, by the remarkable anecdote of the Duke of Portland and Mr. Pitt, who, with a view to unite parties, were to hold a conference _on_ FAIR _and_ EQUAL _terms_. His grace did not object to the word FAIR, but the word EQUAL was more specific and limited; and for a necessary preliminary, he requested Mr. Pitt to inform him what he _understood_ by the word EQUAL?

Whether Pitt was puzzled by the question, or would not deliver up an _arriere-pensee_, he put off the explanation to the conference. But the duke would not meet Mr. Pitt till the _word_ was explained; and this important negotiation was broken off by not explaining a simple word which appeared to require no explanation.

There is nothing more fatal in language than to wander from the popular acceptation of words; and yet this popular sense cannot always accord with precision of ideas, for it is itself subject to great changes.

Another source, therefore, of the abuse of words, is that mutability to which, in the course of time, the verbal edifice, as well as more substantial ones, is doomed. A familiar instance presents itself in the t.i.tles of _tyrant_, _parasite_, and _sophist_, originally honourable distinctions. The abuses of dominion made the appropriate t.i.tle of kings odious; the t.i.tle of a magistrate, who had the care of the public granaries of corn, at length was applied to a wretched flatterer for a dinner; and absurd philosophers occasioned a mere denomination to become a by-name. To employ such terms in their primitive sense would now confuse all ideas; yet there is an affectation of erudition which has frequently revived terms sanctioned by antiquity. Bishop Watson ent.i.tled his vindication of the Bible "an _apology_:" this word, in its primitive sense, had long been lost for the mult.i.tude, whom he particularly addressed in this work, and who could only understand it in the sense they are accustomed to. Unquestionably, many of its readers have imagined that the bishop was offering an _excuse_ for a belief in the Bible, instead of a _vindication_ of its truth. The word _impertinent_, by the ancient jurisconsults, or law-counsellors, who gave their opinion on cases, was used merely in opposition to _pertinent_--_ratio pertinens_ is a pertinent reason, that is, a reason _pertaining_ to the cause in question, and a _ratio impertinens_, an impertinent reason, is an argument _not pertaining_ to the subject.[44] _Impertinent_ then originally meant neither absurdity nor rude intrusion, as it does in our present popular sense. The learned Arnauld having characterised a reply of one of his adversaries by the epithet _impertinent_, when blamed for the freedom of his language, explained his meaning by giving this history of the word, which applies to our own language. Thus also with us the word _indifferent_ has entirely changed: an historian, whose work was _indifferently_ written, would formerly have claimed our attention.

In the Liturgy it is prayed that "magistrates may _indifferently_ minister justice." _Indifferently_ originally meant _impartially_. The word _extravagant_, in its primitive signification, only signified to digress from the subject. The Decretals, or those letters from the popes deciding on points of ecclesiastical discipline, were at length incorporated with the canon law, and were called _extravagant_ by _wandering out_ of the body of the canon law, being confusedly dispersed through that collection. When Luther had the Decretals publicly burnt at Wittemberg, the insult was designed for the pope, rather than as a condemnation of the canon law itself. Suppose, in the present case, two persons of opposite opinions. The catholic, who had said that the decretals were _extravagant_, might not have intended to depreciate them, or make any concession to the Lutheran. What confusion of words has the _common sense_ of the Scotch metaphysicians introduced into philosophy! There are no words, perhaps, in the language which may be so differently interpreted; and Professor Dugald Stewart has collected, in a curious note in the second volume of his "Philosophy of the Human Mind," a singular variety of its opposite significations. The Latin phrase, _sensus communis_, may, in various pa.s.sages of Cicero, be translated by our phrase _common sense_; but, on other occasions, it means something different; the _sensus communis_ of the schoolmen is quite another thing, and is synonymous with _conception_, and referred to the seat of intellect; with Sir John Davies, in his curious metaphysical poem, _common sense_ is used as _imagination_. It created a controversy with Beattie and Reid; and Reid, who introduced this vague ambiguous phrase in philosophical language, often understood the term in its ordinary acceptation. This change of the meaning of words, which is constantly recurring in metaphysical disputes, has made that curious but obscure science liable to this objection of Hobbes, "with many words making nothing understood!"

Controversies have been keenly agitated about the principles of morals, which resolve entirely into _verbal disputes_, or at most into questions of arrangement and cla.s.sification, of little comparative moment to the points at issue. This observation of Mr. Dugald Stewart's might be ill.u.s.trated by the fate of the numerous inventors of systems of thinking or morals, who have only employed very different and even opposite terms in appearance to express the same thing. Some, by their mode of philosophising, have strangely unsettled the words _self-interest_ and _self-love_; and their misconceptions have sadly misled the votaries of these systems of morals; as others also by such vague terms as "utility, fitness," &c.

When Epicurus a.s.serted that the sovereign good consisted in _pleasure_, opposing the unfeeling austerity of the Stoics by the softness of pleasurable emotions, his principle was soon disregarded; while his _word_, perhaps chosen in the spirit of paradox, was warmly adopted by the sensualist. Epicurus, of whom Seneca has drawn so beautiful a domestic scene, in whose garden a loaf, a Cytheridean cheese, and a draught which did not inflame thirst,[45] was the sole banquet, would have started indignantly at

The fattest hog in Epicurus' sty!

Such are the facts which ill.u.s.trate that principle in "the abuse of words," which Locke calls "an affected obscurity arising from applying _old words to new, or unusual significations_."

It was the same "confusion of words" which gave rise to the famous sect of the Sadducees. The master of its founder Sadoc, in his moral purity, was desirous of a disinterested wors.h.i.+p of the Deity; he would not have men like slaves, obedient from the hope of reward or the fear of punishment. Sadoc drew a quite contrary inference from the intention of his master, concluding that there were neither rewards nor punishments in a future state. The result is a parallel to the fate of Epicurus. The morality of the master of Sadoc was of the most pure and elevated kind, but in the "confusion of words," the libertines adopted them for their own purposes--and having once a.s.sumed that neither rewards nor punishments existed in the after-state, they proceeded to the erroneous consequence that man perished with his own dust!

The plainest words, by accidental a.s.sociations, may suggest the most erroneous conceptions, and have been productive of the grossest errors.

In the famous Bangorian controversy, one of the writers excites a smile by a complaint, arising from his views of the signification of a plain word, whose meaning he thinks had been changed by the contending parties. He says, "the word _country_, like a great many others, such as _church_ and kingdom, is, by the Bishop of Bangor's leave, become to signify a _collection of ideas_ very different from its _original meaning_; with some it implies _party_, with others _private opinion_, and with most _interest_, and perhaps, in time, may signify _some other country_. When this good innocent word has been tossed backwards and forwards a little longer, some new reformer of language may arise to reduce it to its primitive signification--_the real interest of Great Britain!_" The antagonist of this controversialist probably retorted on him his own term of _the real interest_, which might be a very opposite one, according to their notions! It has been said, with what truth I know not, that it was by a mere confusion of words that Burke was enabled to alarm the great Whig families, by showing them their fate in that of the French _n.o.blesse_; they were misled by the _similitude of names_. The French _n.o.blesse_ had as little resemblance to our n.o.bility as they have to the Mandarins of China. However it may be in this case, certain it is that the same terms misapplied have often raised those delusive notions termed false a.n.a.logies. It was long imagined in this country, that the _parliaments_ of France were somewhat akin to our own; but these a.s.semblies were very differently const.i.tuted, consisting only of lawyers in courts of law. A misnomer confuses all argument. There is a trick which consists in bestowing good names on bad things. Vices, thus veiled, are introduced to us as virtues, according to an old poet,

As drunkenness, good-fellows.h.i.+p we call?

SIR THOMAS WIAT.

Or the reverse, when loyalty may be ridiculed, as

The right divine of kings--to govern wrong!

The most innocent recreations, such as the drama, dancing, dress, have been anathematised by puritans, while philosophers have written elaborate treatises in their defence--the enigma is solved, when we discover that these words suggested a set of opposite notions to each.

But the nominalists and the realists, and the _doctores fundatissimi_, _resolutissimi_, _refulgentes_, _profundi_, and _extatici_, have left this heirloom of logomachy to a race as subtle and irrefragable! An extraordinary scene has recently been performed by a new company of actors, in the modern comedy of Political Economy; and the whole dialogue has been carried on in an inimitable "confusion of words!" This reasoning and unreasoning fraternity never use a term as a term, but for an explanation, and which employed by them all, signifies opposite things, but never the plainest! Is it not, therefore, strange that they cannot yet tell us what are _riches_? what is _rent_? what is _value_?

Monsieur Say, the most sparkling of them all, a.s.sures us that the English writers are obscure, by their confounding, like Smith, the denomination of _labour_. The vivacious Gaul cries out to the grave Briton, Mr. Malthus, "If I consent to employ your word _labour_, you must understand me," so and so! Mr. Malthus says, "Commodities are not exchanged for commodities only; they are also exchanged for _labour_;"

and when the hypochondriac Englishman, with dismay, foresees "the glut of markets," and concludes that we may produce more than we can consume, the paradoxical Monsieur Say discovers that "commodities" is a _wrong word_, for it gives a wrong idea; it should be "productions;" for his axiom is, that "productions can only be purchased with productions."