USE OF A SYMBOLICAL LANGUAGE. 237 



divided into conditional disjunctives and unconditional (or 

 pure) disjunctives — the former being those already referred 

 to as conditional in meaning though disjunctive in form. 

 Among these may be classed the famous disjvmctive of 

 Edward I.^ " By God, sir Earl, you shall either go or 

 hang''' (symbolically, g + h), the meaning of which is evi- 

 dently, " If you won't go, I will have you hanged." The 

 king, by a not uncommon trick of speech, used the weaker 

 statement in order to express a stronger meaning. The 

 earl, in his reply, " By God, sir king, I shall neither go 

 nor hang'' (//'A'), secures emphasis of a more direct kind 

 by flatly denying even the king's weak disjunctive, instead 

 of the much stronger conditional statement which would 

 more logically, though less emphatically, express the king's 

 real meaning. The denial of " If you won't go, I will 

 have you hanged," would be the very mild assertion, " I 

 may refuse to go Avithout your having me hanged," a mode 

 of speech which would not at all have suited the temper of 

 Earl Bigod. 



As an instance of a simple unconditional disjunctive, we 

 may take the statement, " We shall either go to Brighton 

 or Hastings this summer." There appears to me to be a 

 fundamental difference between the class of disjunctives of 

 which this is a type, and the conditional class of disjunctives 

 previously illustrated. At the same time it must be ad- 

 mitted that in common language, just as statements which 

 are conditional in meaning are often expressed in a disjunc- 

 tive form, so real disjunctives unconditional in meaning are 

 often expressed in a conditional form. The last example, 

 for instance, "We shall either go to Brighton or to Hastings 

 this summer," might, according to usage and without any 

 perceptible difference of meaning, be expressed as " If we 

 don't go to Brighton this summer, we shall go to Hast- 

 ings," or in the same words with Brighton and Hastings 



