148 IMAGES AND NAMES. 



times. In America especially^ a number of very harmless 

 words have been " tabooed " of late years^ not for any offence 

 of tlieii" own^ but for having a resemblance in sound to words 

 looked upon as indelicate, or even because slang has adopted 

 them to express ideas ignored by a somewhat over-fastidious 

 propriety. We in England are not wholly clear from this of- 

 fence against good taste, but we have been fortunate in seeing 

 it developed into its full ugliness abroad, and may hope that it 

 is checked once for all among ourselves. 



It may be said in concluding the subject of Images and 

 Names, that the effect of an inability to separate, so clearly as we 

 do, the external object from the mere thought or idea of it in 

 the mind, shows itself very fully and clearly in the superstitious 

 beliefs and practices of the untaught man, but its results are by 

 no means confined to such matters. It is not too much to say 

 that nothing short of a history of Philosophy and Religion 

 would be required to follow them out. The accumulated ex- 

 perience of so many ages has indeed brought to us far clearer 

 views in these matters than the savage has, though after all we 

 soon come to the point where our knowledge stops, and the 

 opinions which ordinary educated men hold, or at least act 

 upon, as to the relation between ideas and things, may come 

 in time to be superseded by others taken from a higher level. 

 But between our clearness of separation of what is in the 

 mind from what is out of it, and the mental confusion of the 

 lowest savages of our own day, there is a vast interval. More- 

 over, as has just been said, the appearance even in the system 

 of savage superstition, of things which seem to have outlived 

 the recollection of their original meaning, may perhaps lead us 

 back to a still earlier condition of the human mind. Especially 

 we may see, in the superstitions connected with language, the 

 vast difference between what a name is to the savage and what 

 it is to us, to whom '' words are the counters of wise men and 

 the money of fools.'" Lower down in the history of culture, the 

 word and the idea are found sticking together with a tenacity 

 very different from their weak adhesion in our minds, and there 

 is to be seen a tendency to grasp at the word as though it 

 were the object it stands for, and to hold that to be able to 



