INFLUENCE OP WORDS AND NAMES. 245 



It would be amusing as well as instructive to 

 catalogue the dominant words which, in different lan- 

 guages, meet us at the threshold of all learning. 

 Many of these are the bequest of ancient philosophy - 

 some necessary as aids to thought and speech, some 

 obstructive for want of due definition, others insuscep- 

 tible of definition altogether ; many altered in meaning 

 by time and human changes, some the growth of 

 common use, others the petted offspring of particular 

 schools. Psychology, under its various titles, is that 

 part of science in which the dominion of words is 

 largest and most uncontrolled. When we speak of the 

 soul, the mind, the spiritual nature of sensation, per- 

 ception, ideas, feelings, volitions, conceptions, &c., 

 these terms serve their purpose, it may be, as well as 

 any others would do, yet they are all apt to become 

 what Berkeley has called ' scholastic shadows,' vaguely 

 understood and vaguely applied. 1 It is, indeed, very 

 especially in metaphysical enquiries that words become 

 the bladders upon which ancient errors and crude con- 

 ceptions are floated down the stream of time. No 

 writer has expressed this more strongly than Goethe ; 

 yet he himself, while following the philosophy of 

 Spinoza and Leibnitz, was enslaved by the language of 

 his own poetical temperament. Every physician knows 

 that in diseases hitherto found incurable the number 

 of remedies professing to cure is always the greatest : 

 so in the more inscrutable problems of life and mind, 



1 A recent struggle between Mr. Mill and Dean Mansel over the body 

 of Sir W. Hamilton's philosophy somewhat recalls the language and 

 methods of the scholastic age. 



