796 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



little more and now a little less.* "What wonder, then, tliat " tlie 

 high and formal discussions of learned men " have so often begun 

 and ended in pure logomachy, and that in discussions which are 

 neither high nor formal and in which the disputants talk hotly and 

 carelessly the random bandying of words is so apt to terminate in 

 nothing beyond the darkening of counsel and the confusion of 

 thought ? 



Bacon notes two ways particularly in which words impose on the 

 understanding — they are employed sometimes " for fantastic sup- 

 positious ... to which nothing in reality corresponds," and some- 

 times for actual entities, which, however, they do not sharply, cor- 

 rectly, and completely describe. The eighteenth century specu- 

 lated at length on a state of Nature and the social contract, unaware 

 that it was deluding itself with unrealities, and we have not yet done 

 with such abstractions as the Rights of Man, Nature (personified), 

 Laws of Nature (conceived as analogous to human laws), and the 

 Vital Principle. The more common and serious danger of lan- 

 guage, however, lies in the employment of words not clearly or 

 firmly grasped by the speaker or writer — ^words which, in all proba- 

 bility, he has often heard and used, and which he therefore imagines 

 to represent ideas to him, but which, closely analyzed, will be found 

 to cover paucity of knowledge or ambiguity of thought. Cause, 

 effect, matter, mind, force, essence, creation, occur at once as ex- 

 amples. Few among those who so glibly rattle them off the tongue 

 have ever taken the trouble to inquire what they actually mean to 

 them, or whether, indeed, they can translate them into thought 

 at alL 



Among the Idols of the Market Place we must also class the evils 

 arising from the tendency of words to acquire, through usage and 

 association, a reach and emotional value not inherent in their origi- 

 nal meanings. This is what Oliver Wendell Holmes happily de- 

 scribed as the process of polarization. " When a given symbol 

 which represents a thought," said the Professor at the Breakfast 

 Table, " has lain for a certain length of time in the mind it un- 

 dergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives 

 to iron. It becomes magnetic in its relations — it is traversed by 



* The need of a language of rigid mathematical precision for the purposes of philo- 

 sophic thought and discussion has long been the subject of remark. Hence Bishop Wil- 

 kins's Essay toward a real character and a philosophic language (1668), and the earlier Ars 

 Signorum of George Dalgamo — boldly presented by its inventor as a " remedy for the con- 

 fusion of tongues, as far as this evil is reparable by art." We may give these ingenious 

 authors full credit for the excellent intentions with which they set out on impossible under- 

 takings. A philosophic language may perhaps be attained in the millennium, but then prob- 

 ably it will be no longer needed. Meanwhile readers interested in the history of the mad 

 scheme called Volapiik may find some curious matter in these rare works. 



