GENERALLY indeed I complain of the German Philosophers (as we are most apt to complain of our dearest Friends)—of the Post-Kantians at least—for the precipitance with which they pass to their own determinations of what the thing is, without having first enquired what the word means when it is used appropriately. Whenever I can convince a man that another term would express his meaning far more unexceptionably, the term used was not appropriate—but the rule is that the same word should not have heterogeneous or even disparate senses. Thus instead of asking, Was Schönheit sey? [What Beauty is?] I would enquire what schön properly meant—i.e. what men mean when they use the word schön in preference to any other epithet. A rose is a pleasing sight: and so to a hungry man is a Hogspudding. But a Rose is beautiful—ergo, beautiful means something else or something more than pleasing. The difference is not in the degree—for add to a keen appetite a long involuntary abstinence from animal food, and a particular predilection, the Hogspudding will become tenfold more pleasing without advancing a single step toward Beauty. In this way I would proceed with all the other phrases that are confounded with beautiful, because perhaps they fare in some common effect or because they are often in juxtaposition &c.: till I had exhausted the meanings of these words, and of course discovered that one meaning which the word, beautiful, and that word alone, peculiarized and expressed. And this, if I mistake not, is the true Socratic Method: assuredly that which best suits the Dialogue form, which only the analytic suits at any time, but this piece of analysis, i.e. desynonymization, best of all—it so naturally arises out of conversation. The Synthetic on the contrary demands the paideutic continuous form. We want a classification of words sadly—into the universals as applying to all the acts of the human Being—2. the generals, subdivided into the sensuous, intellectual, moral, 3. the words appropriate to each particular sense, at least to the imperfect, Taste, Smell, and the organized Touch, Sight, Hearing—&c. &c.
MS.
A bath at Tophano is described as ‘one of the loveliest I have ever seen’.
Coleridge comments: Lovely is a darling word of this Translator, a word that should never be applied except to objects that excite a moral feeling of attachment. I may say, ‘a lovely Woman’ or ‘a lovely Infant’, but not ‘a lovely Diamond, or Topaz’.
MS.
I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, etc.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun, is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse, If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.
Table Talk
I do not know whether you are opticians enough to understand me when I speak of a Focus formed by converging rays of Light or Warmth in the Air. Enough that it is so—that the Focus exercises a power altogether different from that of the rays not converged—and to our sight and feeling acts precisely as if a solid flesh and blood reality were there. Now exactly such focal entities we are all more or less in the habit of creating for ourselves in the world of Thought. For the given point in the Air take any given word, fancy-image, or remembered emotion. Thought after Thought, Feeling after Feeling, and at length the sensations of Touch, and the blind Integer of the numberless number of the Infinitesimals that make up our sense of existing, converge in it—and there ensues a working on our mind so utterly unlike what any one of the confluents, separately considered, would produce, and no less disparate from what any mere Generalization of them all, would present to us, that I do not wonder at the unsatisfactoriness of every attempt to undeceive the person by an analysis, however, clear. The focal word has acquired a feeling of reality—it heats and burns, makes itself be felt. If we do not grasp it, it seems to grasp us, as with a hand of flesh and blood, and completely counterfeits an immediate presence, an intuitive knowledge. And who can reason against an intuition?
MS.
… It is indeed never harmless to confound terms: for words are no passive Tools, but organized Instruments, re-acting on the Power which inspirits them. For one fair instance of Logomachy in any controversy of long standing, I will shew a score of Logodædalies—or mental Legerdemain—by first misusing a word for some other, and then drawing the consequences from its proper meaning.
MS.
In the description of enthusiasm, the author has plainly had in view individual characters, and those too in a light in which they appeared to him; not clear and discriminate ideas. Hence a mixture of truth and error, of appropriate and inappropriate terms, which it is scarcely possible to disentangle. Part applies to fanaticism; part to enthusiasm; and no small portion of this latter to enthusiasm not pure, but as exists in particular men, modified by their imperfections—and bad because not wholly enthusiasm. I regret this, because it is evidently the discourse of a very powerful mind;—and because I am convinced that the disease of the age is want of enthusiasm, and a tending to fanaticism. You may very naturally object that the senses, in which I use the two terms, fanaticism and enthusiasm, are private interpretations equally as, if not more than, Mr. Birch’s. They are so; but the difference between us is, that without reference to either term, I have attempted to ascertain the existence and diversity of two states of moral being; and then having found in our language two words of very fluctuating and indeterminate use, indeed, but the one word more frequently bordering on the one state, the other on the other, I try to fix each to that state exclusively. And herein I follow the practice of all scientific men, whether naturalists or metaphysicians, and the dictate of common sense, that one word ought to have but one meaning. Thus by Hobbes and others of the materialists, compulsion and obligation were used indiscriminately; but the distinction of the two senses is the condition of all moral responsibility. Now the effect of Mr. Birch’s use of the words is to continue the confusion. Remember, we could not reason at all, if our conceptions and terms were not more single and definite than the things designated. Enthusiasm is the absorption of the individual in the object contemplated from the vividness or intensity of his conceptions and convictions: fanaticism is heat, or accumulation and direction, of feeling acquired by contagion, and relying on the sympathy of sect or confederacy; intense sensation with confused or dim conceptions. Hence the fanatic can exist only in a crowd, from inward weakness anxious for outward confirmation; and, therefore, an eager proselytizer and intolerant. The enthusiast, on the contrary, is a solitary, who lives in a world of his own peopling, and for that cause is disinclined to outward action. Lastly, enthusiasm is susceptible of many degrees, (according to the proportionateness of the objects contemplated), from the highest grandeur of moral and intellectual being, even to madness; but fanaticism is one and the same, and appears different only from the manners and original temperament of the individual. There is a white and a red heat; a sullen glow as well as a crackling flame; cold-blooded as well as hot-blooded fanaticism.… I am fully aware that the words are used by the best writers indifferently, but such must be the case in very many words in a composite language, such as the English, before they are desynonymized. Thus imagination and fancy; chronical and temporal, and many others.
Note on a Sermon on the Prevalence of Infidelity
and Enthusiasm, by Walter Birch, B.D.
Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a Symbol is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. The other are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter.
The Statesman’s Manual.
It has been remarked by the celebrated Haller, that we are deaf while we are yawning. The same act of drowsiness that stretches open our mouths, closes our ears. It is much the same in acts of the understanding. A lazy half-attention amounts to a mental yawn. Where then a subject that demands thought, has been thoughtfully treated, and with an exact and patient derivation from its principles, we must be willing to exert a portion of the same effort, and to think with the author, or the author will have thought in vain for us. It makes little difference for the time being whether there be an hiatus oscitans in the reader’s attention, or an hiatus lacrymahilis in the author’s manuscript. When this occurs during the perusal of a work of known authority and established fame, we honestly lay the fault on our own deficiency, or on the unfitness of our present mood; but when it is a contemporary production, over which we have been nodding, it is far more pleasant to pronounce it insufferably dull and obscure. Indeed, as charity begins at home, it would be unreasonable to expect that a reader should charge himself with lack of intellect, when the effect may be equally well accounted for by declaring the author unintelligible; or accuse his own inattention, when by half a dozen phrases of abuse, as ‘heavy stuff, metaphysical jargon, &c. he can at once excuse his laziness, and gratify his pride, scorn, and envy. To similar impulses we must attribute the praises of a true modern reader, when he meets with a work in the true modern taste, videlicet, either in skipping, unconnected, short-winded, asthmatic sentences, as easy to be understood as impossible to be remembered, in which the merest common-place acquires a momentary poignancy, a petty titillating sting, from affected point and wilful antithesis; or else in strutting and rounded periods, in which the emptiest truisms are blown up into illustrious bubbles by help of film and inflation. ‘Aye!’ (quoth the delighted reader) ‘this is sense, this is genius! this I understand and admire! I have thought the very same a hundred times myself!’ In other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him. O! for one piece of egotism that presents itself under its own honest bare face of “I myself I”, there are fifty that steal out in the mask of tuisms and ille-isms!
Essays On His Own Times.
A philosopher’s ordinary language and admissions, in general conversation or writings ad populum, are as his watch compared with his astronomical timepiece. He sets the former by the town-clock, not because he believes it right, but because his neighbours and his cook go by it.
Table Talk.
Coleridge has just been writing of number, and of that sense in which the number One is not a number because it is ‘the source’ of all Number.
N.B. No man can be, or can understand, a Philosopher, till he has acquired the power and the habit of attaching to words the generic sense purely—and unmixed with the accidents of comparative degrees. It is this which constitutes the difference between the proper Nomenclature of Science and the inevitable language of ordinary life. The latter speaks only of degrees. With quantity and quality it is familiar; but knows nothing of quiddity but as a synonyme for worthless subtleties; and only grins wider with more intense self-complacency when it hears the former speak of invisible Light, the Heat of Ice, &c. The Uno nel Più of the Philosopher Saint and Bishop of Geneva (Francesco Sales) would be as senseless to a common Italian, as my ‘Multiety in Unity’ or ‘The One in the Many’ could be to a Mr. Wheatley of Oriel or the ’cute Isaacs of the Stock Exchange.
MS.
… (Nota bene. Not having written my new word lately, I am getting cowardly about it and blush at my own ‘Impetite’, like a grave smug Elder at a Bastard honestly sworn to him!) in my scheme, I say—O all ye Philo-parenthesists—bless the man that invented I say!…
MS.
Punctuation. Four Stops, two marks of movement, and a stroke, or expression of the indefinite or fragmentary—Comma, Semicolon; Colon: Period. Mark of Interrogation? Note of Admiration! Stroke ——. It appears next to self-evident, that the first four or five characters can never be made to represent all the modes and subtle distinctions of connection, accumulation, disjunction, and completion of sense. It would be quite as absurd as to imagine that the? and! should designate all the moods of passion, that we convey by interrogation or wonder, as the simple question for information, the ironical, the impetuous, the ratiocinative &c. No! this must be left to the Understanding of the Reader or Hearer. What then is their use? This will be more easily understood by supposing one person reading what a hundred or more are listening to. Their use is to enable the reader to regulate his breath foresightedly, and inclusively his Tones. This will become plain after having considered the use of each stop separately.
The comma is either simply addive, and [synonymous crossed out] equivalent to the conjunction ‘and’; or it is parenthetic, i.e. marks the insertion of a sentence, between a sentence uncompleted and its completion. He, James, Harry, and I were going=He and James and Harry and I. In such cases therefore I deem the comma before the ‘and’ tautologie. 2. Parenthetic. He and I were going, when we met James, to visit Westminster Abbey.
The semicolon is 1. accumulative, either when it is desired to draw more attention to each member of the cumulus:
‘I would urge you to consider long and earnestly, the power of God; the omniscience and wisdom that direct his omnipotence; the ineffable Love, which makes the happiness of creatures a final cause of that self-sufficing Being, where knowledge and might are the efficient causes of all things; and above all, his long-suffering and tender Redemption, of Sinful Creatures who by sin had forfeited all claims on his Justice ever for that only dire demand, which even an unfallen Angel could make on the Justice of a Creator, viz. Annihilation!’ This sentence contains likewise the illustration of the second—namely, when the component parts of a cumulus contain more than a simple sentence, consequently, must have a comma, and therefore require a something more than a comma in order to distinguish between the parts of the whole; and the parts of the part. Here therefore in both cases the stop is used not so to express a real logical difference of connection from the comma, for there is none; but to regulate the Breath, so as [to crossed out] that the longer pause may mark the limbs of the Period, from the Joints of the Limbs. This use of the Semicolon is far more common in the elder English Classics, from Elizabeth to William the 3rd than in modern writers. See Jeremy Taylor’s Works. It was perhaps used in excess by them; but the disuse seems a worse evil. And I am glad to observe, in some of the best articles of our Reviews, and in the later pamphlets of Sir J. Mackintosh, a moderated use of it in this form restored to our Language. Lord Bacon and Jer[emy] Taylor are the two Authors, to be consulted. The second and more admitted use is to express exception or disjunction and therefore commonly precedes but. To shew however that this primarily and essentially depends on the regularity of the Breathing, and not on any logical symbolism, it is sufficient to consider, that when we except or disjoin the former sense as it exists in the foresight of the writer or speaker as not compleat, and yet would for the moment appear complete to the Listener—the Speaker therefore naturally goes on more quickly to remove or prevent the misunderstanding, than when the sense is complete in itself; and only requires or permits a confirmation by the addition of the reason. Thence is it that the colon, which precedes the causal connective, For, implies a longer pause than the;—and thence too it would be pedantry to place the; before a but, where the shortness and sense of the former sentence rendering its sense wholly incomplete, precludes all misunderstanding. Was it James? No. Not James, but Harry.
I have thus anticipated the use of the Colon—which is distinguished from the full stop by this, that tho’ the sense is compleat, yet in that same moment of thought the speaker connects with it and during speaking it foresees the grounds, cause, or reason, or confirmation of it. Here I would use the Colon. But when the sense is completed as far as it existed at that moment in the mind; and then the mind starting a fresh either commences a new train or adds an argument, after a pause of Thought, then tho’ the For or But should be first word, I would use a full stop.—Instances from any good writer,
In short, I look on the stops not as logical Symbols, but rather as dramatic directions representing the process of Thinking and Speaking conjointly—either therefore the regulation of the Breath simply, for in very long periods of exceedingly close reasoning this occurs; or as the movements in the Speaker’s Thought make him regulate his Breath, pause longer or shorter, and prepare his voice before the pause for the pause—as for instance—‘No good man can contemplate the African Slave-Trade without horror, who has once read an account of the wars and atrocious kidnapping practised in the procuring of the Slaves, the horrors of the middle passage in the conveyance of them, or the outrage to our common nature in the too frequent and always possible final cruelty in employing and punishing them. Then, too, the fearful effect on the oppressor’s own mind, the hardness, pride, proneness to frantic anger, sensuality, and the deadening of the moral senses respecting the distinction between Thing and Person will force the Thoughts thro’ a fresh Channel to the common Bay and Receptacle, in which the mind floats at anchor upon its accumulated Thoughts, deep and with a sure bottom of Arguments and grounds, yet wary with the passions of honest Indignation.’ Now here the latter sense is equally the ground of the preparation with the former; but the former might be, and is gracefully represented as the whole, at the commencement in the Speaker’s view. He pauses—then the activity of the mind, generating upon its generations, starts anew—and the pause is not, for which I am contending, at all retrospective, but always prospective, or that is, the pause is not affected by what actually follows, but by what anterior to it was foreseen as following.
It is the first and simplest duty of a Writer to make the pauses, which the movements of his Thought require in order to be intelligible, consistent with an easy regulation of the Breath—not that the Stop depends on the Breath, but that it should prevent the Breath from making a stop from its own necessity. (Tho’ in the modern French Writers and their English Translators one might suppose the necessity of the Breath to be the sole principle of punctuation, and the powers of the Breath averaged from a nation of asthmatic patients). Supposing this therefore (and surely, it would be absurd to lay down rules for punctuating what ought not to have been written) I would say, that Punctuation expresses—say, rather—generally hints the sorts of pause which the Speaker makes, and the tones accompanying and leading to them from the Speaker’s foresight of his own meaning. Punctuation therefore is always prospective: that is, it is not made according to the actual weight and difference or equality of the logical connections, but to the view which the Speaker is supposed to have at the moment, in which he speaks the particular sentence. Therefore I call them not symbols of Logic, but dramatic directions, enabling the reader more easily to place himself in the state of the writer or original Speaker.1
MS.
We insensibly imitate what we habitually admire; and an aversion to the epigrammatic unconnected periods of the fashionable Anglo-Gallican taste has too often made me willing to forget, that the stately march and difficult evolutions, which characterize the eloquence of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor, are, notwithstanding their intrinsic excellence, still less suited to a periodical essay. This fault I am now endeavouring to correct; though I can never so far sacrifice my judgment to the desire of being immediately popular, as to cast my sentences in the French moulds, or affect a style which an ancient critic would have deemed purposely invented for persons troubled with the asthma to read, and for those to comprehend who labour under the more pitiable asthma of a short-witted intellect. It cannot but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel reading. It is true that these short and unconnected sentences are easily and instantly understood: but it is equally true, that wanting all the cement of thought as well as of style, all the connections, and (if you will forgive so trivial a metaphor) all the hooks-and-eyes of the memory, they are as easily forgotten: or rather, it is scarcely possible that they should be remembered. Nor is it less true, that those who confine their reading to such books dwarf their own faculties, and finally reduce their understandings to a deplorable imbecility.… Like idle morning visitors, the brisk and breathless periods hurry in and hurry off in quick and profitless succession; each indeed for the moments of its stay prevents the pain of vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth; but all together they leave the mistress of the house (the soul, I mean) flat and exhausted, incapable of attending to her own concerns, and unfitted for the conversation of more rational guests.
Friend.
It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasisynonyms, which the Germans have not. For ‘the pomp and prodigality of Heaven’, the Germans must have said ‘the spendthriftness’. Shakespeare is particularly happy in his use of the Latin synonyms, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon.
Table Talk.
It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek. If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous.
Table Talk.