"They be not wise, therefore that say, what care I for man's wordes and utterance, if hys matter and reasons be good? Such men, say so, not so much of ignorance, as eyther of some singular pride in themselves, or some speciall malice of other, or for some private and parciall matter, either in Religion or other kynde of learning. For good and choice meates, be no more requisite for helthy bodyes, than proper and apt wordes be for good matters, and also playne and sensible utterance for the best and deepest reasons; in which two poyntes standeth perfect eloquence, one of the fayrest and rarest giftes that God doth geve to man." ASCHAM'S SCHOLEMASTER, fol. 46, ed. 1571. "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 himselfe entangled in words as a bird in lime-twiggs. The more he struggles the more belimed." HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN, I. 4 "F. Must we always be seeking after the meaning of words? "H. Of important words we must, if we wish to avoid important error. The meaning of these words especially is of the greatest consequence to mankind, and seems to have been strangely neglected by those who have made most use of them." TOOKE, DIVERsions of PurlEY, Part II., ch. I. "Mankind in general are so little in the habit of looking steadily at their own meaning, or of weighing the words by which they express it, that the writer who is careful to do both will sometimes mislead his readers through the very excellence which qual ifies him to be their instructor; and this with no other fault on his part than the modest mistake on his part of supposing in those to whom he addresses himself an intellect as watchful as his own." COLERIDGE, THE FRIEND, II., 2d Landing Place. (12) CHAPTER I. Ο INTRODUCTION. NE of the last judgments pronounced in philology is, that words are merely arbitrary sounds for the expression and communication of ideas; that, for instance, a man calls the source of light and heat the sun, because his mother taught him so to call it, and that is the name by which it is known to the people around him, and that if he had been taught in his childhood, and by example afterwards, to call it the moon, he would have done so without question. But this truth was declared more than two hundred years ago by Oliver Cromwell in his reply to the committee that waited upon him from Parliament to ask him to take the title of king. In the course of his refusal to yield to their request, he said, "Words have not their import from the natural power of particular combinations of characters, or from the real efficacy of certain sounds, but from the consent of those that use them, and arbitrarily annex certain ideas to them, which might have been signified with equal propriety by any other." Thus mother wit forestalled philological deduction; but the reasoning would be weak that found in the fact that language is formed, on the whole, by consent and custom, an argument in favor 13 |