PHILOSOPHY AND SPECIALTIES. 
27 
like other batteries, the expenditure of energy which must 
do more than shovel out words as counters in a child’s 
game. Treat words as mere counters and they will never be 
more than counters. Culture them as factors and they may 
become factors. Now that language has long been visual in 
script and print its seemingly paradoxical relations to thought 
can be examined. Even the dictionary definitions prove 
that old words express new thoughts widely diverse from 
those first connected with them. This fact is not always due 
to blunders or to expedients to supplement the paucity of 
the vocabulary, but may be imaged as an exhibition of 
independent life in which the word, long since severed from 
its parent germ, is fertilized by the attraction to it of new 
thought to bring forth flower and fruit. When language is 
defined as a vehicle there is too much supposition of a wheel¬ 
barrow by which ideas are trundled. Frequent experience 
of the phenomena of expressed mentation decides that the 
transport is often less mechanical, and may be likened to the 
rush of a mettled steed bearing thoughts with the thinker to 
their goal. It is true that the steed Language sometimes 
runs away into verbosity, or plunges into the abyss of mys¬ 
ticism, but that is with the careless, stupid, or pompous rider 
who does not believe in manege. Words, like other forces, 
are beneficent or dangerous as they are servants or masters. 
They are certainly not inert except when, treated as corpses, 
their bones are articulated to serve as dry statements of 
concrete facts. 
The prime requisite of style in philosophic as distinguished 
from specialistic writing is that it should be clear to all who 
have sufficient culture for its apprehension, the second that 
it should be attractive, or perhaps the proper term would 
be—engaging. 
Ben Jonson says: “ Whatever loseth the grace and clear¬ 
ness converts into a riddle: the obscurity is marked, but not 
the value. Our style is like a skein of silk, to be carried and 
found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed: then 
all is a knot, a heap.” 
