On the Study of Words by Richard Chenevix Trench (great book club books .TXT) 📖

wickedness—that, namely, of cruelty; leaving another domain, which borders close on this, and which, he assures me, would yield proofs quite as terrible, altogether untouched. It is impossible to imagine a record more hideous of what the works of the arch-murderer are, or one more fitted to stir up missionary zeal in behalf of those dark places of the earth which are full of the habitations of cruelty. A very few specimens must suffice. The language of Fiji has a word for a club which has killed a man; for a dead body which is to be eaten; for the first of such bodies brought in at the beginning of a war; for the flesh on each side of the backbone. It has a name of honour given to those who have taken life; it need not have been the life of an enemy; if only they have shed blood—it may have been the life of a woman or a child—the title has been earned. It has a hideous word to express the torturing and insulting of an enemy, as by cutting off any part of his body—his nose or tongue, for instance—cooking and eating it before his face, and taunting him the while; the [Greek: hakrotaeriazein] of the Greeks, with the cannibalism added. But of this enough.] And I have been informed, on the authority of one excellently capable of knowing, an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen's Land, that in the native language of that island there are [Footnote: This was written in 1851. Now, in 1888, Van Diemen's Land is called Tasmania, and the native language of that island is a thing of the past.] four words to express the taking of human life—one to express a father's killing of a son, another a son's killing of a father, with other varieties of murder; and that in no one of these lies the slightest moral reprobation, or sense of the deep-lying distinction between to 'kill' and to 'murder'; while at the same time, of that language so richly and so fearfully provided with expressions for this extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that a word for 'love' is wanting in it altogether. Yet with all this, ever and anon in the midst of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language of the savage, some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished civilization, now utterly unintelligible to the speaker; or some other note, which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which was a royal one once. The fragments of a broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith once he held dominion (he, that is, in his progenitors) over large kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly from his sway. [Footnote: See on this matter Tylor, Early History of Mankind, pp. 150-190; and, still better, the Duke of Argyll, On Primeval Man; and on this same survival of the fragments of an elder civilization, Ebrard, Apologetik, vol. ii. p. 382. Among some of the Papuans the faintest rudiments of the family survive; of the tribe no trace whatever; while yet of these one has lately written:—'Sie haben religiöse Gebräuche und Uebungen, welche, mit einigen anderen Erscheinungen in ihrem Leben, mit ihrem jetzigen Culturzustande ganz unvereinbar erscheinen, wenn man darin nicht die Spuren einer früher höhern Bildung erkennen will.' Sayce agrees with this.]

But while it is thus with him, while this is the downward course of all those that have chosen the downward path, while with every impoverishing and debasing of personal and national life there goes hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language; so on the contrary, where there is advance and progress, where a divine idea is in any measure realizing itself in a people, where they are learning more accurately to define and distinguish, more truly to know, where they are ruling, as men ought to rule, over nature, and compelling her to give up her secrets to them, where new thoughts are rising up over the horizon of a nation's mind, new feelings are stirring at a nation's heart, new facts coming within the sphere of its knowledge, there will language be growing and advancing too. It cannot lag behind; for man feels that nothing is properly his own, that he has not secured any new thought, or entered upon any new spiritual inheritance, till he has fixed it in language, till he can contemplate it, not as himself, but as his word; he is conscious that he must express truth, if he is to preserve it, and still more if he would propagate it among others. 'Names,' as it has been excellently said, 'are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold upon the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when past might be dissipated for ever, are by their connexion with language always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment.'

Men sometimes complain of the number of new theological terms which the great controversies in which the Church from time to time has been engaged, have left behind them. But this could not have been otherwise, unless the gains through those controversies made, were presently to be lost again; for as has lately been well said: 'The success and enduring influence of any systematic construction of truth, be it secular or sacred, depends as much upon an exact terminology, as upon close and deep thinking itself. Indeed, unless the results to which the human mind arrives are plainly stated, and firmly fixed in an exact phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end. "Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own nature more fugacious and shifting than thought; and particularly thoughts upon the mysteries of Christianity. A conception that is plain and accurate in the understanding of the first man becomes obscure and false in that of the second, because it was not grasped and firmly held in the form and proportions with which it first came up, and then handed over to other minds, a fixed and scientific quantity.' [Footnote: Shedd, History of Christian Doctrine, vol. i. p. 362; compare Guesses at Truth, 1866, p. 217; and Gerber, Sprache als Kunst, vol. i. p. 145.] And on the necessity of names at once for the preservation and the propagation of truth it has been justly observed: 'Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.' [Footnote: Mill, System of Logic, vol. ii. p. 291.] And this holds good alike of the false and of the true. I think we may observe very often the way in which controversies, after long eddying backward and forward, hither and thither, concentrate themselves at last in some single word which is felt to contain all that the one party would affirm and the other would deny. After a desultory swaying of the battle hither and thither 'the high places of the field' the critical position, on the winning of which everything turns, is discovered at last. Thus the whole controversy of the Catholic Church with the Arians finally gathers itself up in a single word, 'homoousion;' that with the Nestorians in another, 'theotokos.' One might be bold to affirm that the entire secret of Buddhism is found in 'Nirvana'; for take away the word, and it is not too much to say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone. So too when the medieval Church allowed and then adopted the word 'transubstantiation' (and we know the exact date of this), it committed itself to a doctrine from which henceforward it was impossible to recede. The floating error had become a fixed one, and exercised a far mightier influence on the minds of all who received it, than except for this it would have ever done. It is sometimes not a word, but a phrase, which proves thus mighty in operation. 'Reformation in the head and in the members 'was the watchword, for more than a century before an actual Reformation came, of all who were conscious of the deeper needs of the Church. What intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive terms, as 'the survival of the fittest,' 'the struggle for existence,' 'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they know that he called it 'the positive philosophy.'

We have been tempted to depart a little, though a very little, from the subject immediately before us. What was just now said of the manner in which language enriches itself does not contradict a prior assertion, that man starts with language as God's perfect gift, which he only impairs and forfeits by sloth and sin, according to the same law which holds good in respect of each other of the gifts of heaven. For it was not meant, as indeed was then observed, that men would possess words to set forth feelings which were not yet stirring in them, combinations which they had not yet made, objects which they had not yet seen, relations of which they were not yet conscious; but that up to man's needs, (those needs including not merely his animal wants, but all his higher spiritual cravings,) he would find utterance freely. The great logical, or grammatical, framework of language, (for grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason,) he would possess, he knew not how; and certainly not as the final result of gradual acquisitions, and of reflexion setting these in order, and drawing general rules from them; but as that rather which alone had made those acquisitions possible; as that according to which he unconsciously worked, filled in this framework by degrees with these later acquisitions of thought, feeling, and experience, as one by one they arrayed themselves in the garment and vesture of words.

Here then is the explanation of the fact that language should be thus instructive for us, that it should yield us so much, when we come to analyse and probe it; and yield us the more, the more deeply and accurately we do so. It is full of instruction, because it is the embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It stands like the Pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have enriched it for ever—making in that new word a new region of thought to be henceforward in some sort the common heritage of all. Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning. 'Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.' And for all these reasons far more and mightier in every way is a language than any one of the works which may have been composed in it. For that work, great as it may be, at best embodies what was in the heart and mind of a single man, but this of a nation. The Iliad is great, yet not so great in