CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Joseph Whitmore Barry dramatic library THE GIFT OF TWO FRIENDS OF Cornell University 1934 Cornell University Library PN 56.I4U71 1910 New word 3 1924 027 130 479 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027130479 THE NEW WORD THE NEW WORD An Open Letter addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the meaning of the word IDEALIST BY ALLEN UPWARD CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE PARNASSUS PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY, ATHENS ' Never change native Names; For there are Names in every nation, God-given, Of miexplained povyer in the Mysteries." Chaldcean Oracle MITCHELL KENNERLEY NEW YORK MCMX Copyright IQIO by Mitchell Kennerley HEADS 1. The Riddle 2. Psychology: The Personal Equation 3. Etymology: The Castle in the Air 4. Lexicography: The Play upon Words 5. Metaphysics: The House of Cards . 6. Altruism: The Face in the Looking-Glass 7. Materialism: The Shape .... 8. Physics: The Knot ..... 9. Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone 10. Chemistry: The Man in the Crumb 11. Mathematics: The Conjuring Trick 12. Logic: The Cipher .... 13. Ontology: The End .... 14. Metastrophe: The Magic Crystal 15. Biology: The Elf .... 16. Theology: The Painted Window 17. Exegetics: The Forbidden Fruit . 18. Pathology: The Pyramid . ig. Astrology: The Eclipse . 20. Ethics: The Book of Etiquette . 21. The Heir PAGE 9 27 46 60 74 85 lOI 116 126 141 156 167 178 192 206 224 243 260 278 294 311 AUTHOR'S NOTE FOR THE AMERICAN EDITION It so happens that when I was first putting forth this little book, and wondering where it would find readers, my hopes fixed themselves chiefly on the United States; and I formed the ambition that "The New Word" should be born an American citizen. But the difficulty of finding any agent to whom I could confide the task of production proved too great to be overcome by correspondence, and I therefore committed it to the press in the republic of Geneva. Since it could not be born in the New World, I am glad that it should now obtain natural- isation. In the few years that have gone by already the world's mind has been turning inside out so fast that I am reminded of a remark made by me to the first publisher to whom I showed the manuscript: "These thoughts are in the air; unless you bring out the book quickly half the things it says will no longer be new." Since then a series of scientific workers such as Curie, Thomson and Ostwald have been making discoveries, as it were, in confirmation of the argument: and it is right that I should put that forward as a ground for confidence in what of the prophecy yet remains unfulfilled. 8 Juthor's Note Although, I am glad to find, no one has misunder- stood the incidental part played in these pages by the Nobel bequest to Literature, it may be proper that I should acknowledge the new departure made by the Trustees last -year in awarding this Prize, not to a celebrated author without reference to the character of his works, but to a book purporting to come within the class pointed out in this interpre- tation. ,, I j Once more I wish to thank the readers and re- viewers, now becoming too many to be named sep- arately, who have given so wholehearted a welcome to a book which came before them with such slight credentials. The only criticism (of which I need take notice) so far made has been that the book afforded a glimpse, or outline, rather than a full repression of the author's mind. The world does not require to be told, however, that works involving long research and close meditation rarely can be undertaken by writers who are not assured of readers. Spencer, in the last century, adopted the plan of issuing a business prospectus of the Synthetical Philosophy, and soliciting orders in advance for the completed work. "The New Word" is my unbusinesslike prospectus, — should the orders never be forthcom- ing, perhaps hereafter it may serve as my apology. A. U. FIRST HEAD THE RIDDLE The Nobel Prize. — i. Philanthropy and Barabbas. — 2. Charity and Genius. — 3. "Idealistic." — 4. Eleven Guesses. — 5. Prize for a New Religion. — 6. Challenge to Materialism? — 7. The Academy and the Idealist. — 8. The Bequest in Abeyance. A LFRED BERNHARD NOBEL, maker of ■**- dynamite, died in the year 1896, and by his will gave the bulk of his great wealth to benefit mankind, by these remarkable provisions: — "With the residue of my convertible estate I hereby direct my Executors to proceed as follows: They shall convert my said residue of property into money, which they shall then invest in safe securities; the capital thus se- cured shall constitute a fund, the interest accruing from which shall be annually awarded in prizes to those persons who shall have contributed most materially to benefit man- kind during the year immediately preceding, "The said interest shall be divided into five equal amounts to be apportioned as follows: — " One share to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention in the domain of Physics; " One share to the person who shall have made the most important Chemical discovery or improvement; " One share to the person who shall have made the 10 The New Word most important discovery in the domain of Physiology or Medicine ; " One share to the person who shall have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of am idealist tendency; " And finally, one share to the person who shall have most or best promoted the Fraternity of Nations and the Abolition or Diminution of Standing Armies and the Formation and Increase of Peace Congresses. " The prizes for Physics and Chemistry shall be aw^arded by the Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm; the one for Physiology or Medicine by the Caroline Medical In- stitute in Stockholm; the prize for Literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for Peace by a Committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storthing. " I declare it to be my express desire that in the awarding of prizes no consideration whatever be paid to the nation- ality of the candidates; that is to say, that the most deserv- ing be awarded the prize, whether of Scandinavian origin or not." The more attentively we study these provisions the more we shall be struck by their originality and insight. Hitherto the hereditary objects of charity have been the sad leavings of mankind — The poor, whose broken lives Lie underneath great empires' pageantry Like rubble underneath rich palace walls. The Riddle II Nobel is the first philanthropist who has desired to benefit the forerunners of the race, as well as the laggards, and who has seen that in benefiting them he would benefit all the rest. There are two kinds of human outcasts. Man, in his march upward out of the deep into the light, throws out a vanguard and a rearguard, and both are out of step with the main body. Humanity con- demns equally those who are too good for it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the stunted members of the race are racked; the giants are cut down. It puts to death with the same ruth- less equality the prophet and the atavlst. The poet and the drunkard starve side by side. Of these two classes of victims the stragglers are not more in need than the forlorn hope ; but the am- bulance has always waited in the rear. It would ^ seem as though the vanity of benevolence were / soothed by the sight of degradation, but affronted by that of genius. Even the loafer and the criminal | have found friends. The thinker and the discoverer j have been left to the struggle for existence. For them are no asylums; for them no societies stand ready to offer help. Millions have been spent in providing libraries for the populace ; the founder of | German literature was refused a librarian's place. I And so philanthropy has cast its vote to this day for Barabbas. Nobel alone has had the courage not to be afraid of genius, and the wisdom to see that whatever 12 The New Word is conferred on it really is conferred on all man- kind. Th'e third of these bequests may serve to illustrate the superiority of Nobel's method. Many benefactors have desired to relieve bodily suffering. But they have discerned no way of doing this except by building a hospital for the advantage of a limited class. Nobel's aim has been at once wider and higher. He has sought to relieve all suffering. He has demanded worldwide remedies; he has offered rewards for the abolition of disease. And in doing so he has at the same time remedied a great injustice, by endowing medical discovery. The mechanical inventor has long had it in his power to acquire wealth by the sale of his idea. Nobel's own fortune owed its rise to a patented Invention. But the noble etiquette of the healer's calling volun- tarily renounces an advantage that would hinder the relief of human pain. In medicine every advance made by one is placed freely at the service of all. For such saviours of humanity there has been hith- erto no material recompense, and humanity has been content that it should be so. Neither parliaments nor emperors have ever wished that the healers of men should take rank with their destroyers, and that a Pasteur should receive the rewards of a Krupp. Nobel willed otherwise. The fifth bequest contains a yet more striking Instance of that refined and beautiful inspiration which distinguishes the Testament of Nobel. The Riddle 13 This is a bequest for practical work on behalf of peace, disarmament and the fraternity of nations. At the time when Nobel drew up his will these aspira- tions seemed to have no more active enemies than the Norwegian people. Norway was seeking sepa- ration from Sweden, and seeking it in that temper of hatred which unhappily accompanies such move- ments almost everywhere. The Norwegian Stor- thing was building fortresses on the Swedish fron- tier, and providing battleships. Every Norwegian boy was being trained with a view to an armed struggle with the Swedes, and taught to regard them with revengeful feelings, as American children were long taught to regard the English. Nobel was a Swede who loved his country, and he has placed the administration of his other bequests in Swedish hands. He entrusted the endowment of peace and brotherhood to the Norwegian Storthing. Surely no more magnanimous appeal than this has ever been addressed by a man to men. The direc- tions of such a Testator ought not to be regarded lightly. They begin to assume the character of a sacred text. II What was the wish of Nobel's mind when, in lan- guage destined to immortality, he drew up the Fourth Bequest? — " One share to the person who shall have produced 14 The New Word in the field of Literature the most remarkable work of an idealistic tendency?" There is hardly any class which gives so much to humanity, and receives so little in retumi, as the class of men of letters. There is hardly any class whose sufferings are greater; and there is none which philanthropy has done so little to relieve. The works of Homer have been an unfailing spring of noble pleasure for three thousand years, and dur- ing all that time humanity has repeated with more complacency than shame the story of the poet begging his bread, and has warned its children to' shun the literary career. The dreadful death of Chatterton seems never to have roused a momentary pity in any philanthropist. Had that boy been blind, or dumb, or idiotic, or incurably diseased, how many benevolent hearts would have yearned over him! How many luxurious homes, standing in stately gardens amid glorious scenery, would have opened their doors to take him in ! On his behalf the preachers would have preached, and the purse-proud would have loosed their purse-strings. But because, instead of being blind, he saw too well, saw the beauty and the wonder of the world, and would have told of them, philanthropy turned its back on him, and humanity would not suffer him to live. Poe, himself the most gifted and the most wretched of his kind, has declared that the laudation of the unworthy is to the worthy the bitterest of all wrong. The Riddle 1 5 But what, then, of the rewards of the unworthy? and the rewards of literature are too often in inverse ratio to its worth. The author of a successful farce destined to three or four years' life could afford to look down on the Nobel prize. The writer who faithfully reflects every prejudice in the public mind can never stand in need of charity. But what of Dante and Milton, of Villon and Verlaine? The man of genius, above all the man of original genius, must generally look for bread to some other pursuit than his own. The exceptions are those whom robust health, or some strong talent auxiliary to their inspiration, has enabled to overcome the public prejudice of their own day. And too often the vic- tory has been won at some cost to the abiding value of their work. Happy is he who, like Spinoza, has been able to make out a livelihood by grinding lenses, instead of demeaning himself to the tasks that humanity offers him through its agents the book- sellers and editors. Unhappy, who must echo the mournful cry of Shakespeare — " My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." And yet the title of genius to protection and relief is hardly other than that of the idiot, the epileptic and the paralytic. Science has told us that the lunatic, the poet and the criminal are compact of one clay. The lives of the poets reveal them as sufferers from strange infirmities often jjeyond the 1 6 The New Word reach of medical lore. The most precious posses- sions of literature are verily pearls, the glorious dis- guisement of some inward sore. Literature is the chref ornament of humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead, and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel. There is in England a thing called a Royal Lit- erary Fund, for the pretended purpose of showing charity to men of letters. By the published rules of this institution its alms are only to be bestowed on those whose lives and writings are alike free from reproach on the score of religion and morality. What a clause for the charter of a hospital I It is evident that those responsible for this public insult to literature are inspired, not by compassion for genius, but by fear and hatred of genius. They know well that it is as hard for a great poet to be a regular churchgoer and a respectable father of a family, as it is for themselves to write a great poem. Their true object is to give alms in the name of literature to the enemies of literature. And so they have built an asylum for well-behaved dunces, and have written over the door: "No admittance for Shakespeare and Goethe." Ill If Nobel had only made a bequest to literature, he would have done a brave thing. As it is, he has done a far braver. The Riddle 17 The word Literature is not an exact term, bedause literature is not an exact art. It is a term wide enough to cover every kind of communication by means of words, from the Song of Songs to the least newspaper advertisement. Nobel has manifestly used the word in a broad sense. He was not thinking of literature from the literary standpoint, nor has he laid the stress upon artistic merit. Instead of offering this prize for the best work of literature, he has offered it for the best work of idealism, coming within the field of literature. That such is his intention seems to be fully recog- nised by a provision in the statutes drawn up since the Testator's death to govern his Trustees: — "The term 'literature', used in: the Will, shall be understood to embrace not only works falling under the category of Polite Literature, but also other writings which may claim to possess literary merit by reason of their form or their mode of exposition." The spirit which breathes in this bequest is the same which breathes in the others. The Testator has kept one end steadily in sight, the increase of human happiness. His method is to encourage those whose work is, in his opinion, most beneficial to mankind, the work of the inventor, the work of the idealist, the work of the peacemaker. In this bequest the word idealist is mightier than the word literature, and must prevail over It. This is not an endowment of the author, but of some one greater than the author. 1 8 The New Word IV Nobel died, and the publication of his Will brought about a significant discovery. No one could tell the meaning of the word idealist, or idealistic. The history of the world is glanced at in the fol- lowing inquiry. Here it will be enough to say that while it was in use in all the leading languages of Europe in the Testator's lifetime, his Will revealed it as a riddle. In what astonishing senses the Testator's word was understood appears from the list of the explana- tions given me by educated men in various walks of hfe, soon after I had launched in this investigation. " Something to do with the imaginative powers." " Fanatical." " Altruistic." " Not practical." " Exact." " Poetical." " Intangible." " Sentimental." "True." "That which cannot be proved." " The opposite to materialistic." The Riddle 19 The mood of humanity towards the poet is that of the schoolboy towards the butterfly — withoxit pity but without malice. Towards the prophet it is that of the spoilt child towards the physician — one of angry resistance. There is no more pitiful sight than this; mankind suffers under no such curse; it is the tragedy of the world, the stoning of the messenger of good tidings. "Ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them." Alas ! it is in sacrifice to the dead prophet that the living prophet is offered up. There is no instinct much more deeply rooted in the heart of man than this old cannibal one that the suffering of the best man is for the benefit of man- kind. " I exiled Dante," exults proud Florence, " and lo ! the Divine Comedy." " I hounded forth Mo- hammed," boasts Mecca, " and here is Islam." It needs a Diagoras to ask where are the votive offer- ings of those who were wrecked. It takes a Nobel ta discern the difference to mankind between the labours of Hercules and the agony of the Meriah. The instinct of hatred is stronger than reason. It is not to be baffled by etymologies. Whatever the uncertainty belonging to the Testator's language, his fourth bequest was taken very differently from the remainder of the Will. It drew to itself the prompt hostility of the two great schools of thought which 20 The New Word divide between them the intellectual government of the world. Pharisee land Sadducee both scented danger in the unknown word. Both felt themselves threatened by something more formidable than a literary competition. The antagonism of both was summed up in the scornful criticism that Nobel had offered a prize for a new religion. Nobel himself was branded as a dreamer. There were those ready to insinuate that he had not been in his right mind. In the present age more than a hundred millions are paid every year for the repetition of old texts; in England alone there are several custodians of prophecy who each receive every year a sum greater than that here proposed as the life's wage of the prophet. Nobel wished to give eight thousand pounds a year among the writers of new texts. That was his dream. His madness lay there. Humanity is not mad to spend one hundred millions a year on phonographs. Nobel was mad to offer these few thousands for a living voice. VI On the whole the feeling aroused most by this bequest was incredulity. It was regarded as a chal- lenge to materialism, a word not really better under- stood than idealism, but taken to signify the spirit of modern science, triumphant in so many depart- ments of life. The Riddle 21 And in these days material science is very great, so that the very word idealist is in some discredit. There is an opinion abroad that while Idealism has been talking, Materialism has been doing. Mater- ialist science has conferred endless benefits on man- kind. It has given us new medicines and tools and carriages, and all manner of useful and pleasant things. It has opened up the history of the world and man, and bidden him recast all his beliefs and habits. Inch by inch it has invaded every province of human knowledge; and now it is carrying the war into the very citadel of Idealism, and beginning to measure nerves and brain cells instead of arguing about mind. Now this bequest does indeed come as a challenge, but not to those very materialists to whom the Testa- tor has given the chief place among his legatees. The challenge is a challenge to the idealists, to show that they also are contributing to benefit mankind. Because of that it marks an era in the history of philosophy. Three hundred years ago a challenge was addressed by Bacon to the physical sciences, under the name of natural philosophy. His famous substitution of inductive for deductive reasoning amounted to no more than this advice : Learn from the things themselves, instead of from the words about the things. But in asking for fruits he pro- posed to the philosopher the same end that Nobel has proposed — the benefit of mankind. It is since that date that the physical sciences have 22 The New Word arisen out of their sleep and marched to victory. Height after height has been scaled, and all the glory of creation has burst on our eyes. But still our eyes remain dim eyes. The march of reason has not kept pace with that of knowledge. Men stand before the wonders of the scientific revelation as they formerly stood before the sculptured stones of Egypt, unable to decipher them, and half afraid to try. Nobel, it seems, has hoped for a ChampoUion. He has asked for interpretations. Like the Babylonian king of old, he has sent for the magicians and the astrologers, the Chaldeans and the soothsayers, and has bidden them expound anew the meaning of that dream which is called Life. For thousands of years the metaphysicians and moral philosophers, the . theologians and logicians, have been muttering the words of their mystery in corners, — now at last a brave man has flung down this bag of gold in the midst of them, and has said : Let us see what it all really comes to. Let us see if you can help men to live. VII In the field of Literature the academy and the idealist meet as natural foes. The academy is, by its constitution, the judge of literature, and not of truth. The idealist is only a man of letters by acci- dent — ^there are no accidents ! — ^by necessity. Of the, The Riddle 23 very greatest teachers of mankind, only two are known to have written anything, and only of Moham- med can it be said that his book affords any measure of himself. To the perfect Idealist, Lao, is attributed the saying — " Those who know do not tell ; those who tell do not know." When the idealist enters the field of Literature he does so from the opposite side to that of the academy. For him the spirit is everything, for the academy the form is everything. It would seem easier for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for the idealist to find grace with the academy. Yet the Testator has placed this endowment in the hands of the illustrious body styled the Swedish Academy. In doing so he has shown himself not less inspired than in the rest of the Will. For he is not concerned with idealism as an end, but as a means. The end is still the benefit of mankind. To this end the idealist is called upon to choose speech rather than silence. When he speaks, he Is to be judged by his words. :'. '■; ■■'!-'^ Had the Testator done otherwise, had he directed that the idealist was to be judged by his ideals, he would have done what he has been ignorantly accused of doing; he would have founded a new Catholic Church. As it is, he has founded a Forum. By giving the prize to eloquence and not to truth, he has done what is best for the idealist, and best for mankind, and in the long run best for truth. He has secured the freedom of thought by the bondage of ±4 The New Word expression. This golden fetter is placed on the right foot. At the same time he has given back to literature by the word " marklig " all that is taken from it by the words " idealist tendency." I cannot render it by the official translator's word " distinguished," be- cause that has now become cant. By a distinguished man, we mean a man who has distinguished himself in a frock coat and tall hat and kid gloves; by a dis- tinguished writer one who has daintily picked his words out of a dictionary of synonyms, and made a delicate mosaic, rather than one in whose mind strong emotion has melted the element of language and cast down the diamond of literature. What the Testator has asked for is the most glorious work. VIII Nobel was an idealist who was not a man of letters. The great subtlety with which this Will is drawn is not that of the grammarian or the lawyer, but that of a sincere mind thoroughly possessed of its purpose, and wresting words to that purpose. Has he not given this very legacy to the "idealist" who shall contribute most "materially" to benefit mankind ? The words of such a Testator must be approached in the spirit in which lawyers pretend to approach all testaments. The object must be not to explain The Riddle 25 the Words by themselves, but to gather from them what the Testator wished to be done. It is in. that spirit that I have tried to shape the following inquiry. The question I have asked myself is not, what is the meaning of the word Idealist, but, what did the Testator mean by it ? How I was tempted to undertake the task is here beside the question. I need only saj that I began it just after the official publication of the Will, in the year 1901, and when it was the subject of discus- sion as a matter of public interest. It is as a member of the public, of that great Public designated by the Testator, under the name of mankind, as his ultimate heirs, that I am interested in this Will, and that, no one else coming forward, I have been bold to vindi- cate it. The six years that have elapsed since that time have not materially changed the situation. Striking works of an idealist tendency are not being 'written at the rate of one every year, or, if they are, they have not been brought to the notice of the Trustees of this bequest. In the dearth of such works the Trustees have done doubtless what the Testator might have consented to, if not what he has directed, in awarding this Prize as a testimonial to distinguished men of letters, at the close of their careers. But inasmuch as they have framed no authoritative interpretation of the governing word in the bequest, they seem to be in the position of a Court which has not yet de- livered judgment, and therefore may be addressed 26 The New Word without impertinence by any counsel interested in the case.* I lay thesie imperfect suggestions before the public in the hope that they may be found of some interest, apart from their exciting cause; and in the further hope that, if they do not increase, at any rate they cannot lessen, the public gratitude for a high and unique example of benevolence. For addressing them more directly to the illustrious body charged with the execution of the Trust I have no real excuse except that there would have been a certain affectation in doing otherwise. I make no claim to speak as an idealist. I am a scientist, and my science is ontology, commonly called truth: — now this bequest is not in favour of works of a true tendency, nor even of the truest works of an idealist tendency. Nevertheless, I think, perhaps, that Nobel might have pardoned what I do, and let me lay this little essay in interpretation as a wreath upon his tomb. * See introductory note. SECOND HEAD THE PERSONAL EQUATION Descartes and the Sorbonne. — i. Useless Literature. — 2. — A Personal Explanation. — 3. The Blockade of the Schoolmasters. — 4. Scientific Philosophy. — 5. Truth and Verihood., — 6. The White Mind. A S the astronomer, in order to tell fairly the time ■^ *■ kept by a star in heaven, must first record the time taken by his own thought, and thereby correct his reckoning; and as Descartes did not deem it beside the purpose to tell the Sorbonne that he was in his dressing-gown when he sat down to prove the existence of God; so it will not be vain for me to describe with what bias I approached my present task. I An eloquent writer upon Art, in a work called The Seven Lamps of Architecture, has chosen Truth to be his second Lamp, and thereby shown that it was not his first wish to tell the truth about archi- tecture. Accordingly it is no surprise to see him begin by defining architecture as useless building, and end, in a preface written long aferwards, by complaining 27 28 The New Word that this very book had proved useless for its pur- pose. For if architecture be useless building, literature must be useless writing. It is significant, and it will not be found beside the question, that neither in this book, nor in other books treating of Gothic architecture, is there the least allusion to the architecture of the Goths. The origin of the Gothic church, like the origin of everything else in Europe, has been sought on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. No one has asked why the Italian masons, when they crossed the Alps, as they are still crossing them to-day, in search of work, left off building like the Romans, and began building otherwise. No one seems to know that the Gothic church, in its essential features, features that have been copied In St. Peter's, is a copy of the Gothic hall as it was built in Iceland in the days of Charlemagne, and as It was built in Gothland in the days of Herod. To say that truth had been my first lamp In this Inquiry would be only to say that I was a Gothic writer, or, as men write it in my native land, a Jute. I have approached the word Idealist In the spirit of a Goth seeking to understand a Mediter- ranean word. I have approached It in the spirit of a child seeking to understand a schoolmaster's word. I have been like a sleeper, waking out of an enchanted sleep, and seeking to understand an enchanter's word. My first, and, to the best of my endeavour, my only, light in this Inquiry has been the light of veri- hood. Psychology: The Personal Equation 29 II The foreword of this Letter was really written thirty years ago, when a mere schoolboy, hardly knowing what he did, chose Truth as being, for him the one sacred Name. Afterwards, when I had read the book in which Darwin reminded us clearly of a fact dimly familiar to our forefathers, I laid it down with the reflection that most other books would have to be re-written in the light of that forgotten fact. — The question was how to begin. I spent the next twenty years in exploring the human mind as it is revealed in literature, and as it is revealed in life. I have not passed the time shut up in libraries. I have been a speaker and a writer; I have been a lawyer and a soldier; I have been a ruler and a judge. I have taught children, and learned from them. I have talked with the learned in their colleges, and talked with the Black men in their own land beside the Black River, in the oldest and most catholic speech, the language of Signs. In a place where no White man had been before me, I found a Black king and his folk withheld by an old curse from planting a medicinal tree; and I broke the curse by showing to them a stone whereon a Greek of long ago had Carved the figure of his God. — In such ways I have learned somewhat of the nature of words. At the same time I have learned somewhat of the 30 The New Word feelings that words express, and found the same feeling underlying many different words; as if all men, in all ages, and in all lands, were trying to say much the same thing. And hardly knowing whether I had found anything worth saying, nor how far the words that were right for me would be right for others, I doubted whether I should speak. In our time there are many honourable men and women who share my doubt. They have been put to sleep in childhood with certain words, most true and beautiful to those who spoke them first; and they have awakened out of that sleep with great pain, and as those who are bereft of hope. Now such a man as I speak of, a Materialist, came to me one day, and told me he had been consulted by a mother, who was also a Materialist, about the education of her child, a child who will one day occupy a great place in the world, and influence the lives of many other children. And, both being Mjaterialists, he had given her the advice, and she had taken it, that the child's mind should be put to sleep by the words which they themselves both believed to be untrue. The following day I found in the organ of my trades-union as an author the announcement of Nobel's Testament. On reading the Fourth Bequest my first reflection was the sad one that such a Trust was not likely to be carried out. Then I asked myself why? What books did the Testator wish to be written ; why were they not being written; and why, if they should be Psychology: The Personal Equation 31 written, must they nevertheless fail of their reward? The answer seemed to lie in the meaning of the word Idealist. — What was its meaning? or rather what was its meaning for other minds than my own? — I turned to the dictionary; what I found led me further; I began to make notes, and presently saw they were the book I had waited for so long to begin. The natural shape of this inquiry, therefore, is that of a train of thought, and I have not striven to give it any other. As, when the chemical salts are held in solution in the glass, the introduction of some foreign body will cause them to encircle it with crys- tals, so have the floating thoughts of half a lifetime come together in answer to a single question, and settled into shape. Ill Literature, from the lyric's pure cry of pain or joy down to the pill-seller's advertisement, is a com- munication. There is a personal equation of the reader as well as of the writer, and the fairest lan- guage is a bargain between two minds. The coun- sel's speech to the jury is not as his speech to the judge. The greatest of playwrights has written for the gallery as well as for the boxes. It is the second equation in which the difficulty lies. It is that equation the thought of which caused the perfect Idealist to condemn speech. It is that which stands in the way of Nobel's Fourth Bequest. 32 The New Word My gallery is a gallery of judges ; by which I mean that I speak in the hearing of those with whom I am called on to quarrel, whose minds are so much fixed on their own study as to be unable to think freely about that or any other. The ontologist claims all the provinces of knowledge as his fatherland, and he is treated as a trespasser in each. On every frontier the specialist with his fixed bayonet keeps watch and ward, as though he dreaded to give or to receive. The free trader in knowledge bears the smuggler's brand. But it once made my holiday to take food through the midst of six great navies to starving men on a Mediterranean isle; and shall I now fear to run the blockade of the schoolmasters, if I believe they are keeping children from the bread of life? The man of letters will need no explanation of why I have found the dogma of philology to be the devil's leading counsel in this debate. To the philol- ogist, whose history — for I cannot yet call it science — has helped and hindered me by turns, I owe an honourable salute before the foils are crossed. The sciences fall roughly into two groups, accord- ing to whether they come before or after man. The human sciences begin with folk-lore, and Darwin's book has given them a natural starting-point. The anthropologist holds the key to the position, and without his light all other students of the arts of man arc wandering at random in the dark, and letting themselves be thwarted needlessly. Psychology: The Personal Equation 33 In his broad-minded treatise on the Kalevala, Comparetti has brought together much learning to elucidate the name and nature of the Sampa, the mystic lucky-box whose making a;nd carrying off are main links in the poem. But the Sampa contains no puzzle for the folk-learner. There is just such a lucky-box in every West African hut. The serious- minded Black would no more think of setting up house without it than the Christian without his family Bible, or the scientist without his drain. You can buy a Sampa at any wizard's for a few cowrie- shells. The wizard makes it while you wait. He takes a bit of clay, and a feather, and a twig of straw, and whatever else strikes his fancy, and sticks them together in a calabash; and the householder puts it in his house to conjure away the spirits of misfortune and disease — one of whotn science has now identified with the anopheles mosquito. That is the Sampa, and it is a prayer, written in the old magic letters which the spirits, or the mosquitoes, are most likely to understand; a language in which the wizard is a specialist, — and the philologist not even a smatterer. Philology needs the light of folklore more than any other study nieeds it, because words are the most elusive work of man. They are the birds and butterflies of man's creation, and the philologist shows his love for tliem by trying to transfix them on Grimm's pin; by tearing them out of the sky with his Aryan shotgun, and giving them glass beads for eyes, and souls of cotton-wool. He is bitten by 34 The New Word the mania for exactness, and his study is the one study in which exactness must almost certainly be wrong. When he rules out the guesses of the un- trained mind, he is ruling out the mind that shaped those very words of his ; he is contemning what ought to be his fundamental law. The wild man's mind ran wild, and it was volatile to catch the most fanciful resemblances between words, as his tongue was volatile to rhyme their sounds. His words were spelt, like Mr. Weller's name, according to the taste and fancy of the speller. The Athenian crowd that checked Demosthenes for a wrong accent was no more like the group before a Tartar tent that hung upon the earliest Tale of Troy than a first-night audience in a London theatre Is like the ring of naked Blacks who look on at their native pantomime in the Australian scrub. I am now interpreting a Will, and not writing an encyclopaedia ; though I should like to persuade some living Nobel to organise the writing of an encyclo- paedia on scientific lines, to replace the alphabetical chaos on the shelves of the Free Library; one who would recognise, as this Will recognises, that the books are more important than the shelves, and the Librarian more important than the Library. Here I can only so far suggest scientific canons of philol- ogy as to justify the interpretation that follows, and to show that what otherwise might seem my careless handling of words is founded on greater care. Psychology: The Personal Equation 35 IV If we should judge the mind of Europe by the work in various fields of learners like Retzius and Sergi and Massey and Montelius, we should think it had recovered from that disease of word-lore re- membered as the Aryan Myth. But all philologists have by no means recovered. I have before me the latest and best work on English etymologies; and Professor Skeat must be the whipping-boy of worser men. By way of groundwork he has a list of imaginary Aryan roots, as though the Aryans were a historic nation, dwelling in some country called Aryana, whose literary remains were before him. That is not so, and the buried cities of Bokhara, perhaps, hold many surprises in store for the philologist. But even if it were so, Aryan would not be the last word on English etymology. These roots were invented by men who had not read Darwin, or, like Max Miiller, did not believe in him ; and if they are any- thing but fancies, they are not roots but stems cut off from their roots. The study of words from such a beginning is no more scientific than a young lady's album of dried leaves is scientific botany. There are only two sound starting-points for the history of a word; one is where the word itself begins, in the wild man's cry, or the technical coinage which is manifest in Nobel's dynamite; the other Is where 36 The New Word our knowledge of it begins, in the dead manuscript and in the living mouth. The first starting-point is the philologist's, the second is the lexicographer's. The imaginary Aryan stem is a mere generalisation of comparative lexicography. Not only has the author ignored anthropology, but he has ignored geology, geography and history. He has ignored the Ice-Cap, and with it the fact that Europe must have been colonised from Africa long before it was conquered from Asia (if it Was con- quered). The Black man crossed the strait of Gibraltar, if even there were a strait, in his canoe, ages before the White man drove his wagon across the snow-bound steppes of Russia. The English language has more sources than the English philol- ogist has dreamed of. Only the other day an astronomer, measuring Stonehenge after measuring the Great Pyramid, learned what Massey had long before learned from folk-lore, that Pharaoh has left his mark in Britain. He deals with words as though they were all under a vow of celibacy, like the monkish writers who have done so much to disfigure and disguise them. Whereas one half of English words are in their present shape the offspring of Dutch mothers and Latin fathers, or Latin mothers and Dutch fathers, whose features may be still discerned in them; to say nothing of the French and Scandinavian strains. For instance, the remarkable word very or tverry — for Mr. Weller followed Piers Plowman in spelling Psychology: The Personal Equation 37 It with twiQ rs — is labelled as being the French vrd, from the Low Latin veracus. Whereas vrai, which the Provencal Mr. Weller spells yverai, as I have ascertained on the spot, has no more to do with veracus in form than with very in meaning. This strong word which stands out in modem French like a rock against the tide of verite, verifier, veritable and veridique, emerging from the monkish effort to write it verai, as a rock emerges from the waves is, like its brother vrac, a Frankish word, and its Eng- lish and Latin representatives are (w) right and rectus. (We meet it letter for letter in the English htwray, and catch the counter-sense in awry.) The sense underlying it, which is a scientific root, is the strength of the wrist, as in wringing or wreaking (Skeat has seen that the brother word vrac is wreck) , in short it is the strength of working. The sense underlying verus and veracus, and the Dutch waar, and, to whatever extent, the English very, is the strength of the ear, in being ware, and wary, in short it is the strength of hearing. And these are not imaginary Aryan roots, but sensible human ones ; and if they do not please the philologist, perhaps they will please the psychologist. The common term of vrcA and verus, I suspect, is not veracus but vir, as man is the common term of working and hearing. And that is the sense which I catch faintly breathing in very, like the scent of a flower lingering in a jar. For very is not an adverb, nor an adjective, as 38 The New Word Skeat carelessly reckons it; neither does it mean " true " and " truly " as he pretends, to support his derivation from veracus. We cannot say that a man is very, nor that he speaks very. It is an intensitive particle, unique in the language, and serving the office of a declension before adverbs and adjectives. Such a word must have a complex pedigree, and I tell only half the truth ,in saying that its story is the story of vrai inside out. For just as vrai is a Prankish word which has absorbed a Roman mean^- ing, that of "true," so very has accepted a partly Roman spelling while preserving an Anglo-Saxon meaning. And that meaning is very nearly the original one of vrtii. For not only does very mean " right " rather than " true " or " truly," as may be seen at a glance in such uses as "yours very truly," "the very man for the post" and "Very Reverend," but it has displaced "right" in those very uses. It is, however, inferior to right in strength, as the dean is inferior to the bishop; and without pretending to give a thorough account of it, I think the clue may be found in Mr. Weller's and Piers Plowman's double r, and that it may be either a composition or a confusion of wtiar and right. Verrey suggests to my car much more an imaginary Latin verrectus, than any Low Latin veracus. \ |, ' ,, ^ The English philologist has not got beyond the state of mind of the Australian Black, who has not yet found out the father's share in child-begetting. Psychology: The Personal Equation 39 and believes children to be ancestral spirits who have entered the mother's womb when she was walk- ing past a grave. He has not got so far as the Black, because even the Black sees the features of the an- cestor in the child, and the philologist does not see the Gothic features in many a dog-latin word that has crept like a cuckoo into an Anglo-Saxon nest. He has accepted with childlike trust the story of the monk who, writing with the Book of Joshua for his model, has described the Angles and Saxons as sweeping over the island like a swarm of locusts, and leaving no British man, woman or child alive to be their thralls or wives. And that was not so. The Roman chesters did not all go down like Jericho, leaving not one stone upon another, as soon as Hen- gist landed in the Isle of Thanet ; neither did all the Welsh flee into Wales. The differences between English and Swedish are some of them Welsh differ- ences and Finnish differences, as the differences be- tween Spanish and Italian are Iberian differences. The philologist seems never to have heard any one speaking English, but to believe that his own learned dialect is the speech used in the nursery and on the farmstead. And that is not so. What Skeat rarely and unwillingly refers to as " provincial English " Is very English, and many words that he refers to as English are provincial Latin. Thus the word verity has never been acclimatised, but is a lexicographer's exotic. As soon as it is written verihood, to match the Dutch waarheid and the German wahrheit, it 40 The New Word rhymes with falsehood, and sounds h'ke am English word. The philologist sits in his library, and cons the dusty manuscripts in which Roman missionaries and Latin scholars have quaintly travestied the native speech, while underneath his windows the children playing in the street are pouring out better information from the well of English undefiled. As soon as the English get awiay from their Latin colleges into some wild land that Caesar never knew, their own words bubble up like a natural spring, and the Aryan root is found budding and blossoming again. Because these old-new blossoms are not in his specimen book, the philologist calls them weeds. The last great struggle of all those that have gone to make English took place in and around London, and the chief antagonists were the Low Dutcii dialects of the East coast, as the spoken language, and provincial Latin as the written one. The com- promise has been drawn up in spelling, and as the spelling was in the hands of the writers, the record is a one-sided one, and by that one-sided record English philology has long been led astray. It is an encouraging sign that Skeat should be the first to allow that the Netherland dialects may have had some influence on English, though he characteristic- ally does not look deeper than such historical in- cidents as the treaties of Edward III and the ex- peditions of Elizabeth. Were be aware that within living memory the Yarmouth fisherman understood Psychology: The Personal Equation 41 his Rotterdam neighbour almost better than his Plymouth countrymen, the philologist might be brought to see that the Dutch work-book is likely to be a safer guide than most mmikish manuscripts to "provincial English." In the meanwhile I hope he will accept these sug- gestions in the spirit in which they are uttered, as those of a provincial Englishman. Since I first wrote this Letter there has come into my hands a work by B'real entitled L» Semantique, which an English professor of philology treats as the first recognition of the need for a science, or at least a history, of the meaning of words. That seems to be the science the need for which was recog- nised by Socrates in the market place of Athens, and that is the science I have had to piece out for myself as best as I could in this inquiary; and which I call verihood, instead of truth. Truth is the merit of the speaker rather than of the speech. The speaker may be truthful, and yet his story may not be true. The witness who is sworn to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," is only sworn to tell what happened as he saw it. He does not swear that he saw righdy, and that his story is the correct one. The correct story has to be put together by the jury, who are 42 The New Word sworn to give " a true verdict acco^rdlng to the evi- dence." The verdict is the collected and corrected truth. No imaginary Aryan root has been found for truth. But its sensible root underlies words like try and utter, in short it is the strength of the tongue. The im- aginary Aryan root, offered by Skeat with a " per- haps," for verihood, is war, one of four imaginary wars, and said to mean "to choose," and thence "to believe." For a sensible root we have only to go out into the play-ground. Ware! is the cry that can still be heard on the lips of the English schoolboy. It is found in written English in such words as aware and wary. The word wary calls up a picture of the wild man of the woods, crouched with one ear to the ground, his fingers tightening on his knife, and his whole soul astrain to catch the first faint rustle that shall bewray the hidden foe. Such a cry as Ware! is worth a library of manuscript. We need no imaginary Aryan root to help us to its meaning. It means "Hear with all your might!" It is the strength of the ear at its highest pitch. If there be any root in word-lore this cry must be it. It is perhaps the one word in English that has come straight down without a change from the real Aryans ; — and it is not to be found in the Etymological Dictionary I On these lines truth and verihood explain each other. Both w*ords imply a speaker and a listener. Psychology: The Personal Equation 43 What the one tries to tell is truth, and what the other yearns to hear is verihood. Of these two the important standpoint is the listener's, because it is for his sake that the speech is made, and what he hears is all that has been really and effectually said. The imptession matters more than the expression. The gist of the speech is what is left in the mind of the listener, and by his understanding of it it must be judged. Hence verihood is a greater word than truth, as the verdict is greater than the evidence. Verihood is the bull's eye that truth aims at, and falsehood the inner or outer it must so often be content to hit. And that is to say, in other words, that verihood's opposite pole is truth, and its circumference falsehood. The science of semantics is thus revealed as a branch of physical mathematics. The semantolog- ical specialist will now be able to define the word Idealist for himself. My story is meant to be read by the untrained mind. VI It has been well said that all the stories in the world have only forty plots between them, and all the words have not many more sensible roots. We are indebted to Erdmann for the hint that the name Goth meant brave, much as Frank meant free, — the aut of the Icelandic Gautar being one with the aud 44 The New Word of the Latin audax, or audacious — ^which Mrs. Gamp, with nicer scholarship than that of Oxford, sounded owdacious. Be that as it may, an outspoken work calls for a brave reader; and I am writing to the Gothic mind, that is to say, to the White mind rather than the Black. For the ontologist there are no coincidences, but only Rhymes. I will not think it is for nothing that in the queen city of the Baltic, in the homeland of the Goths, from which, as from the citadel of the White race, went forth those armies that struck down the Rome of Caesar, and once again scared back the Roman eagle from Pomerania to the Dan- ube ; I will not think it is in vain that a countryman of Alaric and Gustav Adolf has given it in charge to a Court that represents the White mind in its pre- eminence, to draw up by its decisions the canon of the scriptures of the new age. The mathematician has a greater license than the poet to ignore reality in working out his problems. I shall be forgiven if I have sometimes lost sight of the Academy of to-day in that White City of the North; if I have sometimes forgotten a thousand years and written to the Academy that shall sit hereafter, in the new Asgard, in the Hall of the Aesir ; — forgiven if I have sometimes lifted up my eyes, and written as in the sight of the White Gods. To understand, says the French poet, is to forgive. Yet which of us can hope wholly to understand Psychology: The Personal Equation 45 another, or to be understood? Which of us can thoroughly pierce, from within or from without — The shell we slaves of time drag with us ever, Through which our souls, as if immured in glass, Become distorted, and we peer and strain, But find each other's real features never; A fateful screen that friendship cannot pass. And love beats his soft wings against in vain. THIRD HEAD THE CASTLE IN THE AIR A Gulden Talisman i. The Babu Speech. — 2. Bad Language. — 3. "Dynamite." — ^4. The Science of Shells. — 5. Idol and Ideal. — 6. An Algebraical Expression. WJ HAT is the meaning of the word Idealist, ' '^ or Idealist, as used by Nobel in this Testa- ment? The question is not — ^What is Idealism? It is — what kind of books did the Testator wish to receive this Prize? It will be seen at once that the second of these questions is very much easier to answer than the first. No one has ever succeeded in defining poetry to any one else's satisfaction — a chemist might define it as the crystal of prose — ^but universities and academies award prizes every year for poems, and no difficulty is felt as to what works are eligible for the prize. Again, an able writer named Austin once set himself to determine the province of jurispru- dence. He died leaving his work unfinished; and the extensive fragment that remains is an endless chain of definitions, not one of them complete. He attempts to define a law, a right, and so on, and the more he toils, the more endless his task becomes. 46 Etymology: The Castle in the Air 47 Yet the Courts never sit for a day without using the words law and right in some practical application; and Austin was himself professor of jurisprudence. The diiference between a legal argument and a logical one is that the former is concerned with some practical issue, such as the disposal of a sum of money, and is determined by the judgment of a Court. That is the difference which Nobel has made by this bequest. This bag of gold of his has seemed to me a talisman, trusting in which we may adventure in the enchanted wood of words ; by means of which we may conjure the demons that infest it, and compel the sorcerer's victims to resume their natural shape. As well as a talisman, we are provided with a compass, by the words which are the governing clause of the whole Testment — " the benefit of mankind." Should we be tempted to stray into devious paths, should we find ourselves wandering round and round without advancing from our start- ing-point, we have only to glance at this compass, and it will point us forward in the right direction, towards the enchanted castle of the ogre. So armed, so guided, the White Knight Errant ought to reach his bourn. Ideal, Idealism, Idealist — these words are current in most of the languages of America and Europe, but they are not natives of any. They appear in the 48 The New Word same form in Swedish and in English, but they are not of Swedish nor of English growth. They wear a look of ancient Greece, but yet they are not gen- uine Greek words. Plato never heard of them; the Greek lexicon knows them not. They belong to a large and increasing class of words which I can best characterise by naming them Babu. The English in India, whether to make the task of government easier, or in the belief that our civili- sation must be better for the Hindus than their own, have set .up schools to train the natives in our ways, and, to begin with, in our speech. There is a large class of natives called Babus who learn very readily up to a certain point, that is to say, they spell our words correctly, and they have some notion of what the words mean; but English has not replaced their native speech, and hence it fits them like a borrowed garment, and they are betrayed into awkward and laughable mistakes in using it, which have given rise to the term Babu English. Now that is just the process from which a great part of Europe, and especially England itself, has been suffering for many hundreds of years. Our speech bewrays us to be the freedmen of Rome. Our schools are Roman schools set up by missionaries from the Mediterranean in whose minds it was the very aim and end of education to tame the young barbarian of the North into an obedient provincial of the great Roman Raj. Saint Ninian, it is candidly Etymology : The Castle in the Air 49 recorded, went to convert the Picts to Christianity in the hope of putting an end to their attacks upon their Christian neighbours. The work of the monks has remained practically untouched ever since. Our schools are still called grammar schools, which means Latin-grammar schools, and Latin is the chief thing taught in them. Latin is the official language of our universities, and by an educated man we mean a man who has been taught Latin. The whole theory of our education still is that the young Eng- lishman should make-believe to be an ancient Roman. The king who still writes himself on his coins Britannorum Rex is doing homage for his crown to Pope and Caesar. After the Normans came in aid of the monks England seemed to hang in doubt between the Gothic and Romance dialects. The result of this is seen in our vocabulary. We have, in a more marked degree than any other European people, two sets of words, folk words and book words. The first we learn at home, and use most in talking; the second we learn at school, and use most in writing. The folk words come to us as the wrappings of our earliest thoughts and feelings, and form, as it were, the mind's natural skin. The book words follow after the brain has began to harden, and are more like clothing which the mind puts on. We use them as children who walk in wooden shoes, — not with the same sure and elastic tread as they who go barefoot. Let it not be thought that all this is beside the 50 The New Word question. It goes to the heart of the question. That schoolmaster's Latin should be a Latin which would make Cicero stare and laugh is a little evil. But that men should go through life talking to one an- other in words which they only half understand is a great evil. And that children should have their minds beaten and bent out of shape by such words has long seemed to me the most frightful evil in the world. There is a word which we spell quack, and our Dutch kinsfolk kwak. With us it means a false pre- tender to knowledge; in Holland it is the nickname for a Latin-school pupil. The little Dutch street boy in the Middle Ages, listening outside the door of the Latin school, heard the boys inside repeating their hie hoec hoc, and it sounded to him like the gabbling of ducks. I share the feeling of that little street boy. I also stand ouside the door of the Latin school, and listen to the patter that goes on inside, without any reverence. I should like to break open the door of the Latin school, and take that dusty, dog-eared grammar-book out of the schoolmaster's hand, and put an end for ever to that miserable gabble. Somehow I think that the work of the Idealist will have to begin here. II Unhappily the priests of science have shown them- selves not less prone than other priesthoods to im- Etymology : The Castle in the Air 51 pose on the mind of man by means of bad language. To the medieval plague of dog-latin there has suc- ceeded in these latter days the plague of Babu Greek. The apologists for this vice of science tell us that it is merely a kind of shorthand. I am sorry I do not find that it is really quicker to write dolichocephal than longhead, or ichthyosauros than eft. But in any case the number of readers who carry at their tongue's end all the words found in the extant remains of Hellenic literature is very small. So that whatever trouble the specialist may save to himself by writing chaemoprosopic for broad-faced, he causes to his readers, who have to turn the short- hand into longhand as they go along. Hence a modern scientific work is not truly a book. It is more and more a manual in which the text is helped out by technical signs. It is not so much literature as algebra. Ill Nevertheless if the use of these bastard Mediter- ranean words were confined to the naming of things- like rocks and plants and animals the quarrel with them might be left to the man of letters. Words like amoeba and neolithic are ugly and tiresome, but they are not false and mischievous. There is even a subtle elegance in naming fossils in a fossil tongue. It is a very different matter when such words are 52 The New Word caught hold of to name thoughts instead of things; and when men make-believe that they have said something in shorthand which they could not say in longhand. The difference cannot be illustrated better than by two words which are peculiarly associated with the name of Nobel — dynamite and idealist. Dynamite is the name of a mixture which Nobel made, and as long as we have the mixture itself the name is of no consequence. The mixture might as well have been named strongness or starkhet, or X, or nobelite; even if it had been labelled by the Greek word for weakness instead of strength it still would not have mattered. 'Because if we want to know what dynamite is We need not go to the Greek lexi- con ; we can go to the mixture itself. Now that is just what we cannot do in the case of the word idealist. If Nobel had pointed out any book, for instance Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia, or Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, or Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, as the kind of book he meant to receive the prize, we should have had something in the nature of a mixture. As it is, " idealist " remains the name of a thought in Nobel's mind. Instead of being able to look past the name of the thing, we have to guess, if we can, the thought from the name. It is just here that the harmfulness of Babu makes itself manifest. It is when we pass from the outer world of things to the inner world of thoughts that we need to be most careful of the words we use; Etymology: The Castle in the Air 53 it is then that the Mediterranean words are apt to serve us like ill-made panes of glass through which the light comes crookedly; and the spirit of man, bound in these borrowed cerements, ceases to soar and grow. It was not by accident that the Protestant Refor- mation began with the translation of the Bible, and ended with the translation of the Mass Book, The great reformers disagreed about many other things, but a common instinct made them teach men to pray in their native tongue. They reformed the churches — the pity of it is that they did not reform the schools. IV The word before us, then, is not a label, the sort of word that the old Mediterranean grammar-books call a noun. It is what they ignorantly call an adjec- tive; it is the expression of a feeling, like those unshapen cries in which speech began. It is the expression of a wish ; perhaps a wish not quite dis- tinct in the Testator's own mind; perhaps a hope rather than a wish. It seems to me that he may have used an indis- tinct word because his wish was indistinct. He may have hoped that he could say in shorthand what he could not say in longhand, that B'abu could say what Swedish could not say. I think, on the other hand, that if he had cast about to find a Swedish word it 54 The New Word would have helped us to understand his wish. I think that to translate his word would be almost to interpret it. The mind may be likened to a tree whose roots are feelings and whose leaves are words. Some words leave off where they begin, they are emotions expressed in sound, like musical notes — such as the old grammar-books call interjections. But most words have taken shape by coming into touch with outside sounds, and with the sights and scents, the tastes and touches, that go together with the sounds. Whether the word thing or think comes first in his- tory, a thought is a feeling outlined by means of things. In this way there is in every word a native element of feeling, or a mark set on it by the word of sense, which cleaves to it through whatever uses it may pass and change. The word may be abstracted and refined away, till it appears like a balloon in the air; but still it will be a captive balloon, attached by some root meaning, as by a cord, to the firm earth beneath. Philology is busy with the changes in the forms of words. Our lexicons have long teen cabinets of shells. Yet the morphology of words is but a drudg- ery unless it helps us towards their physiology. — The word Idealist is such a shell. Let us see what its outward form can tell us of the life within. Etymology: The Castle in the Air 55 Idealist is a Babu formation from the Greek Idea. Idea, my Greek lexicon reports, is the appearance of a thing, as opposed to its reality. And it is un- fortunately the case that some such sense as that of opposition to reality does haunt the word Idealist, and discredit it. No one is likely to believe that works of an apparent or unreal tendency are of much benefit to mankind. We must dig deeper. Idea can be traced to ido, or eido, ( for there were more Greeks than those who corrected Demosthenes) — meaning to look or see. It is the Aryan word which has become in English though. " It is as though" means "it looks like." And so the word idea, in its first sense, may be rendered pretty closely by the English look, in such uses as — " the look of the thing," " there is a look of his father about him." The passage from the idea to the ideal was not made by the Greeks. But it seems that idea is the Ionian form of the word which meets us in other Greek dialects as eidos, and although the Greeks did not add the important letter / to Idea, they did add it to eidos; and their eidolon is spelt by us idol. What is the difference between the ideal and the idol? The idol is the idea embodied in wood or stone. It seems to have grown solid by degrees. There was first the mere look, or likeness, and next the ghost. 56 The New Word We catch the shade of meaning in passing from " appearance " to " apparition." Lastly there came the marble likeness of the ghost; as it were, the materialised idea. Now whatever else the ideal may be, it is not a marble image. Bacon, it is true, uses the word idol in a sense not far removed from ideal. He uses it as a Christian metaphor for thoughts that receive honour not their due, as the images of Jupiter and Venus received honour due to Christ. But if we should take ideal as meaning a thought that received too much honour, it is clear that a work of an idealist tendency would be harmful, rather than beneficial, to mankind. Nevertheless Bacon's usage gives us a useful hint. The ideal is evidently a thought rather than a statue, and to that extent it may be called a metaphorical idol. In what, then, does it differ from an idea? The Greek lexicon has not half done its work in telling us that idea meant appearance. Even in Plato's time it had got farther than that. Aquinas, who wrote in Latin, and translates it by the Latin forma, explains idea as being the builder's plan of a not- yet-built house. Now my Dutch word-book renders "idea" (as an English word) by ontwerp, which is to say, out-throw — that which the mind throws out, and not what it takes in. And in Holland a builder's plan Is called an ontwerp. When the mind of a great Roman theologian jumps with the common mind of a Dutch folk, we ought to be able to take Etymology : The Castle in the Air 57 the result with some security. And it is the opposite pole of the meaning given us by the lexicon. The idea is not the appearance of a thing already there, but rather the imagination of a thing not yet there. It is not the look of a thing, it is a looking forward to a thing. Here, then, is the difference between the ideal and the idol. The ideal is not the realisation in brick and mortar of the builder's plan, as the idol is the realisation in marble of the sculptor's plan. The ideal is not a house made with hands; it is a castle in the air. VI The word ideal first appears in English as an adjec- tive. The added / has much the same force in Greek and English, the force of -ly or like, the Swedish lik. It is hard not to see in this like a connection with look, such as that between idea and ido. Eng- lish philology, however, speaking by the latest of its interpreters, traces it to the old English lie, mean- ing a body, like another Swedish lik (corpse). If that were so, the ideal would be again the embodied idea, in short the idol. It would be the house, and not the castle in the air. Of course it is not so. It puts the cart before the horse. Philology has made its favourite mistake of thinking the noun is older than the adjective. The name of an outward shape is never the first form 58 The New Word of any word, unless it be a word like cuckoo, or the French word teuf-teuf. We must dig deeper. When we come down to such a word as lick, the Swedish slika, the very sound of the tongue in licking, we cannot go much farther; and we may be sure that we have got the root of the word, and all words naturally springing out of it. We do not need to look in Beowulf or the Saxon Chronicle for the meaning of such a word. English philology has gone blind through too much poring over manu- scripts. The Old English manuscripts that have come down to us are few, and they are not very old. There are more fish in the sea than in the fisherman's net. The early man was a poet before he was a philol- ogist, and perhaps it takes a poet to understand those words of his, which were not dead shells, but living cells, growing and changing with his growing and changing moods. What the tongue does in licking is what the eye does in looking, it feels-forth, reaching outward from the man. The words look and see contain between them the whole secret of metaphysics. To look is to search forth for what may be there; to see is to take in what the look finds. Looking is the question, and sight the an- swer. Sight is materialistic, perhaps looking may turn out to be idealistic. If, then, the mysterious / does not add a body to the idea, what does it add? It is, in its root- meaning, the same with idea. We seem to be dealing Etymology: The Castle in the Air 59 with an algebraical expression. Ideal is idea to the second power. We might as well write it idea,^. The knot remains unpicked. For this powerful idea seems very much like an idol of the mind. The writer who has given the word most currency in English is Carlyle, and he uses it in very much that sense. He speaks of "low ideals" as well as "high ideals," and of the "ideal of brute strength" as a bad ideal. If there be bad ideals as well as good ideals, a work of an idealist tendency may easily be harmful, instead of beneficial, to mankind. The value of an ideal to mankind must depend on some- thing else besides its power. Even if it should be argued that this bequest is meant for works of a fanatical tendency, yet it will not be argued that it is for all such works, including the fanaticism of the Dominican, and including the fanaticism of the Thug. Thus far the science of shells has brought us. It is time to check Philology by Lexicography. FOURTH HEAD THE PLAY UPON WORDS Johnsons Dictionary. — I. The Missing Word. — 2. Recurring Decimals. — 3. A Puzzle for Atheists. — 4. Plato Refuted by Plato. — 5. Books in Chains. /^ N reading this Will for the first time, and won- ^^ daring what the word Idealistic meant to others than myself, I turned to an English dictionary. The dictiotiary which I found to my hand hap- pened to be the famous work of Doctor Johnson, or, to speak carefully, one founded on that work by Doctor Latham, who' was an esteemed philologist, and professor of the English language. It is in four vast volumes, published just fourteen years be- fore the date of the Testator's death, by nineteen publishers, and it should be fairly representative of the science and art of lexicography in England. The words are taken in the order of their spelling; each one is given a Latin label such as substantive or adjective; if in its sounds or spelling it shows the mark of the Roman mint a Mediterranean word is quoted as its original; then follows the explanation 60 Lexicography: The Play upon Words 6l (the thing I was in search of) — and Johnson's Dic- tionary is renowned for its explanations; and lastly there come extracts from books in which the word is used. These extracts were styled by Johnson his authori- ties. His whole habit of mind withheld him from seeing that the speech of the English folk is a higher authority than any book. "Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people (he writes) , the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable." That is not so. The folk keep their native words much longer and much better than the bookmen. Hundreds of English words long buried under the dust of Dryasdust arc coming to light, and are returning into English literature from the ends of the earth, to-day. Johnson, it is plain, could not rid himself of the old monkish way of looking at it. To him the right English was a barbarous provincial dialect; the language worthy of a scholar's attention was that which came closest to the Roman pattern. He has told us this, by calling his work a dictionary and not a word-book. The same wrongheadedness makes itself manifest in his treatment, and in Latham's treatment, of some words admitted to these volumes. There are many words common to both the Baltic and the Mediterranean; some of them common to every Aryan dialect; some of them older than the Aryan invasion, if there was an Aryan invasion, relics of the old stone-cutting race that crossed from 62 The New Word Africa In the wake of the retreating ice. The Roman missionaries latinised some of these words, much as they christianised the pagan folklore. And so to-day the Johnsons and the Lathams mark as Roman im- portations words that are only Roman in the spelling, words that were rooted in the northern speech before one stone of Rome was laid upon another. Many of the words thus treated dropped out of spoken English, and their place was taken by others whose outline was too stubborn to be effaced by foreign spelling. Thus the English folk, robbed of verihood by the monks, instinctively refused the Roman verity, and took refuge in truth. If a man does not know these things by heart, if he has never caught a true glimpse into the history of words, what can he tell us about their meanings? If he cannot see that even the spellings, the outer shells of words, are often palimpsests in which the writing on the surface hides another and yet another writing underneath — if he cannot see this, how can we hope that his glance will be keener when he comes to consider the meaning which is the life of the word; and that his explanation of it will be anything better than the gabble of the Latin school? I turned to Doctor Latham's volumes with mis- giving, and the first discovery I made was an ominous one. The word used by Nobel was not there. Lexicography : The Play upon Words 63 II Instead I found this entry: — " Idealist substantive. Supporter of the doctrine of idealism." The only inference was that a work of an idealist tendency must be one supporting the same doctrine. I asked Doctor Latham what the doctrine was, and I got this answer: "Idealism. — System of metaphysical philosophy founded upon the doctrine that the objects of the external world are what they are, less on the strength of any material properties of their own, than through the action of the mind, in which they exist as ideas." At the first blush my plight seemed to be worse than Herakles', when he cut off the hydra's head; I had a dozen Babu words to deal with instead of one. I made shift to turn some of them into English. "The stones and trees of the outside world are what they are, less on the strength of any stuff of their own, than through the working of the mind, in which they stand forth as — ideas." Before examining the doctrine further it seemed desirable to know Doctor Latham's meaning for the word idea. Here surely was the key-word. With- 64 The New Word out understanding it, it must be hard to understand Idealist. I looked again, and fotind an explanation as short as the other had been long. " IdeA' — mental image." Good. But the word image is sometimes used in a loose sense by poets. To make more sure I turned it up. " Image — Any corporeal representatio;i : gener- ally used of statues." This time there could be no doubt. The image was not a metaphor, it was a thing of stone and marble. Yet I was struck by the curious result of adding this explanation to the last one. Ideal^mental image. Image=corporeal representation. , Idea=mental corporeal representation. Mental-corporeal? The words seemed to unsay each other. It was like what the logicians call a contradiction in terms. In order to be fair to Doc- tor Latham I went to the word representation. " Representation. — Image, likeness." The reappearance of the image so soon was dis- concerting. It seemed to dog the lexicographer as Lexicography: The Play upon Words 65 the Commander's statue dogged Don Juan. His last two explanations worked out thus : — Image^any corporeal representation. Representation=imagc. Image^any corporear image. This time it was not an unsaying, but a saying over again, like what the logician's call an identical prop- osition. Meanwhile, instead of getting nearer to the mean- ing of idea. Doctor Latham seemed to be going round and round it. He seemed like a squirrel trying to dimb up in a revolving cage : the cage goes round, but the squirrel gets no higher. I began to see there might be books in which the words went round and round, but the author got no further, — ^books not altogether outside the scope of this enquiry. It was all very well to say that the stones and trees were only representations in the mind, but if there were no stones and trees, what did the representa- tions represent? In order to give Doctor Latham every chance, I followed him to the word mind. Here was a word which he confessed to be of Eng- lish growth, no doubt because it happens to be found in some old English book, where it is spelt gemynd. It is indeed a folk word, and almost a cry. " Mind what you do ! " — " I have a great mind to ! " — " He is out of his mind ! " — all these are utterances heard every day. Such a word should be a fair test for a professor of the English language. Doctor Latham explained it In this manner : — 66 The New Word "Mind. i. Intelligent power. 2. Intellectual ca- pacity. 3. Liking; choice; inclination; propension; affection. 4. Quality; disposition. 5. Thoughts; sentiments. 6. Opinion. 7. Memory; remembrance; recollections." I sought further light from two more entries. " Intellectual. — Relating to the understand- ing." " Understanding. — Intellectual powers." It was another recurring decimal in words. Intel- lectual meant relating to the intellectual powers. And yet understanding is one of those words that explain themselves. Like the Swedish forsta, which is still found in some parts of England as forestand, it tells its own story. A picture of Leighton's shows it to the eye. A man is teaching a boy the use of the bow. H'C leans over the boy from behind, grasp- ing the boy's hands in his, and guiding them while the bow is drawn. That boy is understanding how to draw a bow. When we have got as far as that we need go no further. We have got to the mixture. Words of this kind are on the same footing as the names of things outside us. They are the names of actions, — I will call them play words. When we have seen the play, the word has served its office. One more example of lexicography and I must Lexicography: The Play upon Words 67 leave Doctor Latham swimming round and round for ever in his Mediterranean maelstrom. One of his explanations of mind was thoughts. And this was his explanation of thought. "Thought. — Operation of the mind; idea; im- age formed in the mind." And so at the end of my effort to learn from him the meaning of the word idea, he had brought me back to the starting point. I put the two last explanations together, and they gave me an equation, the like of which perhaps is not in human language. Mind^thoughts. Thought^ image formed in the mind. Mind=images formed in the images formed in the images formed in the * III It is time to return to the doctrine of Idealism. "The stones and trees of the outside world are themselves, less on the strength of any stuff of their own than through the play of the mind, in which they stand forth as" — (recurring decimal). That is to say, the stones and trees outside us are really not outside us, but inside us. They are not things, but thoughts. A wit has put it still more 68 The New Word •wittily, — "The universe is a thought, and I am thinking it." This doctrine, or this play upon words, was in- vented by Bishop Berkeley in order to confound the atheists, a class of men who, it may be suspected, are what they are, less on the strength of any ma- terialism of their own than through the working of the reverent mind, in which they exist as bogeys. It is impossible to refuse to Berkeley the admira- tion due to the man who has said the last word in his own department. His doctrine is the perfection of metaphysics, if it be not a parody on metaphysics. Nobody has ever refuted it; and nobody has ever believed it. Berkeley himself of course did not believe it, be- cause it is evidently an inverted pantheism, with oneself as the creator; and Berkeley was a deeply religious man. There Is no record of any atheist who was ever confounded by it. And that Is the only point which we have to consider. We are freed, by the words of the Will, from In- quiring whether this language, or other language like It, is true or false. We have to ask the easier, but much more searching, question, does It materially benefit mankind? Every work that runs counter to our settled habits of thought and speech, driving us to weigh the mean- ings of our words, and question the soundness of our views, is of benefit to mankind. In so far as it Lexicography: The Play upon Words 69 tends to break up those lumps and knots in the mind which are called prejudices, and which hinder us from thinking and speaking truly. In so far as Berkeley's book did that, or does that, it is a good book. But apart from that it seems to have no tendency whatever. It is like the famous English Act of Parliament the only effect of which was to add three words to every conveyance. An idealist, in Doctor Latham's sense of the word, instead of saying to his gardener, — " Gardener, plant that rose-tree in this bed," would have to say, — " Perception of a gardener, plant that perception of a rose-tree in this perception of a bed." The doctrine leaves us where it found us. If some of our thoughts pretend to be stones and trees, and are called stones and trees in consequence, how can it benefit mankind to call them anything else? The question is whether this doctrine has borne fruits. Who has believed it, and been the better for believing it? Berkeley himself refused to be translated from a poor bishoprick to a rich one. If he had been asked if this was because he did not believe in the existence of Matter, he would have answered no, but because he believed in the Gospel. There is an older doctrine of which this idealism seems to be the insubstantial ghost. A greater than Berkeley once taught that all the material world was illusion — Maya. But in the mouth of the Buddha that teaching was not a clever paradox; it was a living truth by seizing on which men might win their 70 The New Word way out of sorrow. It was not a metaphysical doc- trine, but a practical rule of behaviour; — Set not thy heart on the things of this world, for they are vain. And yet I am not sure that even the teaching of the Buddha was of an idealist tendency, within the meaning of this Will. IV Latham, one sees, has faithfully explained the word Idealism, as a technical term in use among meta- physicians and moral philosophers. That the word stood for anything besides the mock scepticism of Berkeley; that it had passed into common use with a meaning almost the opposite of scepticism; he evidently did not know. Indeed, as we have seen, he had never met with it as an adjective at all. What is more strange is that he should have over- looked an older sort of Idealism, familiar in meta- physical and moral-philosophical writing long before Berkeley's day; the Idealism of Plato, father of all such as work in metaphysics, and patentee of the metaphysical Idea. There are two Platos; one the companion of Socrates, walking in the market-place with his master, and showing us as in a stage play how the great truth-seeker pierced his way through cunning webs of words; the other the teacher in the Academy, weaving his own webs, and decorating them with Lexicography : The Play upon Words 71 his master's name. It is to the second Plato that we owe the doctrine of Ideas. Let me see If I can state it in words as homely as those of Socrates. The doctrine of the first Plato, or rather of his master Socrates, the verihood underlying the early dialogues, which they lead towards, even if they do not openly declare it, comes to this. We give ex- pression to our likes and dislikes by such words as nice, nasty, good and evil. When we write such words a little differently, as Niceness, Nastiness, The Good and The Evil, we do not change their nature because we have changed their spelling. They have not ceased to be the names of our own feelings, and become something else, merely because we want to use them as nouns instead of adjectives. We have not created a mixture by creating a name. The words in their new shape are shorthand words, by whose use we can say what we want to say more quickly. By The Good we mean that which all men deem good, or rather that which we think all men ought to deem good, — for all men do not worship the same God. The doctrine of the second Plato is the first doc- trine read backwards, as the Devil-worshippers used to read the Lord's Prayer. It is that the adjectives come from the nouns, and not the nouns from the adjectives. Niceness and Nastiness, The Good and The Evil, are not the names of thoughts Inside us, but of thoughts outside us; perhaps the Thoughts of 72 The New Word an eternal Thinker, of which our thoughts are copies. Here is at least an Idealism of a more idealist tendency than Berkeley's. Perhaps were Plato writing now, he could not fairly be refused the Nobel Prize. Tried by the test of ontology, however, his teaching is imperfect. For the electric current in- duced by a Current outside, goes the other way. And so we find the real Thoughts outside us stir up thoughts within us not in sympathy, but in antag- onism. The cruelty of Nature teaches us, not to be cruel, but to be kind. Her carelessness makes us careful. Her hardship leads us toward luxury. Her riddles give birth to our science. And so through- out life necessity answers to necessity. The Picts draw their conversion on themselves. The king is man's reply to anarchy; Christianity is his reply to Caesar; peace is his reply to war; the Idealist is his reply to Materialism. He turns leaf after leaf of the great Lesson-Book, and the word Finis is not on any one. There is another test, and a very practical and memorable test, under which Plato breaks down. In the year 1474 a remarkable sight was to be seen in all the public libraries of France; the sight of books in chains. A controversy had been carried on between two parties, calling themselves Nominal- Lexicography : The Play upon Words 73 ists and Realists, and now the writings of the Nomi- nalists had been placed in iron chains by order of King Louis XI, at the bidding of Pope John XXIII, to keep them out of the hands of the young student. It seems to me that there can be no much better test than that, of whether a work is of an idealist tendency. When I see a book in chains, and when I know that the chains have been placed on it by a king at the bidding of a pope, that is enough for me. I do not need to open it to be sure that it is worthy of the Nobel Prize. And what was it that these fettered books taught? What was the heresy of the Nominalists? It was that of Socrates over again in another form. It was that names are not things; that shorthand does not say more than longhand, that when, instead of think- ing of men one by one, you think of all of them at once, and call your thought humanity, you have merely added a new word to the dictionary, and not a new thing to the contents of the universe. Such was the doctrine that alarmed a Roman Pope, and not without good reason ; for the Nominalists of that generation became the Reformers of the next. Nor is Pope John XXIII yet dead, neither have all the chains yet been taken off. I have myself found the very harmless essays of the late Professor Huxley under lock and key in a so-called Free Library. Judged by this test a work of an idealist tendency must be a work that some one will want to put in iron chains. FIFTH HEAD THE HOUSE OF CARDS Metaphysics. — i. Direction to the Binder. — 2. Hoax of Andronicus Rhodius. — 3. The Magic Song. — 4. Pure Reason and Practical Reason. — 5. The Annex of, the Universe. TDEALISM, as defined by the dictionary, the Idealism of the schools, the Idealism that is spelt with a capital I, is a system of metaphysical philosophy. Those are the words with which Latham begins his explanation. And the issue that they raise is one that cannot be escaped. Did the Testator use the word idealist in the technical sense of the professors ? Did he intend this Prize for sys- tems of metaphysical philosophy? Berkeleyism did not end with Berkeley. His doc- trine, or his language, was taken up by greater men. It was the greatest of them, Kant, who really stamped the word Idealism with this sense, and gave it cur- rency. Since his time the term has almost replaced the term metaphysical. Among modern metaphysi- cians. Idealism is your only wear. I have already said that Nobel's bequest seems to me a challenge to this sort of idealism, that is to say, a challenge to the science or mystery of Meta- physics. Brought face to face with this word in 74 Metaphysics: The House of Cards 75 Doctor Latham's explanation of idealism, I felt I had no choice but to examine it. I I approached this famous word with not a little dread, arising partly from my want of skill in Medi- terranean languages, and partly from a well-known incident in its recent history. In the last century there was formed in London a private debating club under the name of the Meta- physical Society. Its members were some of the ablest men of their generation, Tennyson the poet, Gladstone the statesman, Spencer the philosopher. Manning the churchman, Huxley the scientist. These distinguished men met and talked together for ten years, and at the end of that time they broke up the society, because, as one of them said, they had not yet agreed on the meaning of the word meta- physics. I was not rash enough to hope I could succeed where such distinguished men had failed, but I was happy in the knowledge that I had not so hard a task as theirs. They had sought for a definition of metaphysics; I wanted merely a working sense, a sense that would enable me to judge if a meta- physical work came within the meaning of the Testator. The word was Greek, to all appearance, but, like 76 The New Word idealist, it turned out to be one of those Greek words which the Greeks themselves were never fortunate enough to know. In the lexicon I could find only its two pieces, meta and phusikos. Phusikos did not seem a word hard to translate. Natural, native, begotten, born — ^such were the mean- ings offered me by the Greek lexicon. But meta, on the other hand, proved to have the most variable meanings of any word I have ever met. It meant al- most everything from inside to outside. With noth- ing but the Greek words to help me I might have groped for ever for the meaning of metaphysics among words like supernatural and unnatural, after- birth and unborn. I do not know how far it is the case in other lan- guages, but in English, words like physical, ma- terial, real, natural and sensible all ring well; they suggest the true and useful. Whereas words like immaterial, unreal, unnatural and senseless all ring badly; they suggest the false and foolish. The prejudice against the study of metaphysics in Eng- lish-speaking countries attaches to the very name of the science, which is, as nearly as I could make out, in the vulgar tongue — nonseme. I was obliged to go once more to Doctor Latham, this time with the most encouraging result. For after explaining the word as " ontology, or the science of the affections of being in general," and adding that the science in question was generally branded as an impossible one, he showed me that Metaphysics: The House of Cards 77 metaphysics is one of the few words whose beginning is known. I shall have written most of the foregoing pages in vain if there is any need for me to insist on the difference this made to me. That the word was a Babu formation would matter no more than it had mattered in the case of dynamite, as soon as I could come to the mixture. I quote Doctor Latham's authority, a distinguished writer on metaphysics, named Mansel. "The term metaphysics, though originally em- ployed to designate a treatise of Aristotle, was prob- ably unknown to the philosopher himself. On the whole the weight of evidence appears to be in favour of the supposition which attributes the inscription ta meta ta phusika to Andronicus Rhodius, the first editor of Aristotle's collected works." Andronicus Rhodius, it appears, like Columbus, added a new continent to the realms of knowledge by accident. "The title, as given to the writings on the first philosophy, probably indicates only their place in the collection as coming after the physical treatises of the author." And thus we see the word came into being as a direction to the binder. — ^The question is whether it has ever become anything more? 78 The New Word II Among the wonderful beliefs of those old heathen men who, guessing where we count and measure, prophesied of all the lore to come, is none more won- derful than that which shines through the magic song of the Finns, the belief in the creative power of the uttered word. What else is the story of Andronikos of Rhodes? He uttered, all un- wittingly, his wizard spell; and lo! Professors of Metaphysics in all the Roman universities of Europe and America. What, then, is the mixture of which Aristotle's editor furnished only the name? What is it that the professors have been professing for two thousand years ? If I turn for an answer to this question to a popu- lar work of reference, like the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica, I find that the official teachers of the science of Andronicus Rhodius have been no more able to agree among themselves than the members of the Metaphysical Society. The history of metaphysics is the history of the attempt to supply a mixture to fit the name. The enchanted squirrels have toiled in the sorcerer's cage. They have written whole learned libraries; the Mediterranean words have gone round and round in imposing procession; but the writers have not gained an inch. Metaphysics: The House of Cards 79 III Wh-ercin lies the mesmeric power of these Babu words ? It is sheer repetition. By dint of saying them over and over again we make ourselves believe in them. Repetition is the secret of all enchant- ment. We find it in the magic spells buried beneath the dust of Akkad. We meet it in the lullaby that puts the child to sleep. The learned Latham can suggest no parent for the word lull. No doubt the monks forgot to latinise it ; — it does not happen to be found in any Anglo- Saxon manuscript. Meanwhile it is a word whose roots go down into the deepest soil of speech. It is, of course, the Swedish lulla, — laulu, the Finland word for song. It is of kin to the word lay, also a song. It looks at us out of the Roman legend. The Greek word lego meant to lull to sleep. It hides in words like logic and religion, — ^nay, in lexicog- raphy ! It is the core of the word language. Per- haps it is the oldest and most widespread word that men have ever framed their lips to say. There is only one way to break the spell, and that is to stop the magic song. We must interrupt the Mediterranean sorcerer, and ask him what he is say- ing. We must translate the Babu words. One thbg is clear already about the word meta- physics. The prime enchanter, Andronicus Rhodius, used meta in the sense of after, and not among. If 8o The New Word physics be the science of nature, then metaphysics should be the science of whatever is outside nature. And so, indeed, the long toil of the metaphysicians has been a struggle to get out of the natural world, by getting inside themselves. And inside themselves they have found what they call The Mind, and in this very mind they have found the objects of the external world, the stones and trees, in short, nature all over again. IV Now there may be a real science of mind. The study of how men think and reason ought to be the crowning study, the last word in any education worth the name, the last chapter of any but a par- rot's grammar-book. But just because it is the crowning study it must rest on all the others. It is as natural as they are. And like them It must fol- low Bacon's rule — Learn from the things, and not from the words about the things. I have likened the mind to a tree whOse roots are feelings and whose leaves are words. The followers of Andronicus Rhodius have tried to learn about it only from the leaves. They have considered the mind (much as the philologists have considered words) as a cut flower, picked from somewhere out- side the universe, and stuck Inside us. They have studied only the leaves, and so they have not thor- oughly understood even the leaves. They have used Metaphysics: The House of Cards 8 1 shorthand by mistake for longhand. They have dealt in names to which there was no mixture. The last great name among the slaves of this en- chantment, the last great fore-Darwinian thinker, is >Kant. His admirers tell us — (I am copying Carlyle) — that the grand characteristic of his philosophy is his distinction between the Understanding and the Reason — Verstand and Vernunft. Reason discerns truth itself, Absolute Truth, while Understanding discerns only relations, Relative Truth. Understand- ing is confined to material knowledge, and the prac- tical issues of daily life ; and it breaks down in the attempt to prove there is a God. That is a task reserved for Reason, which alone is able to deal with spiritual things. Here, then, we have the Andronican science at its best ; this is the grand result of studying the mind upside down. Let us see what the words mean. I will not be too curious about the German, though I have my own doubts as to whether Vernunft has anything to do with Reason. With the Dutch, who spell it vernuft, it stands for wit, skill, genius; while one of my Swedish word-books translates Reason by both of Kant's words — fornuft and forstand. The English words arc fortunately as plain as words can be. We have seen already that under- standing is simply a closer kind of watching; it is to learn by following what is going on, and so keep- ing it in mind. Reason is a book word, it is the French raison, the Latin ratio. But it is only a 82 The New Word glorified counting. The folk word for it is reckon- ing, the Swedish rdkning. What Andronican science has achieved has been to exchange the meanings of these plain words. It is Understanding that discerns things by themselves, the Absolute, and Reason that discerns relations, or, in homelier words, puts two and two together. Shall I confess that I think both words are better used by a forgotten poet writing on the immortality of the soul : — "When she rates things, and moves from ground to ground, ' The name of reason she obtains by this: But when by reason she the truth hath found. And standeth fast, she understanding is." Here is a writer who has stopped to ask himself the meaning of the words he used. He does not talk as though reason were one thing, and under- standing another independent thing. He sees that both are only names for the same inner power, called reason while she does her sum, and understanding while she sets down the amount. And after all, it was Kant who called in Practical Reason to do the very thing that the poor practical Understanding was forbidden to do, and the Pure Reason had failed to do, namely to prove there is a God. The fool who said in his heart. There is no God, would have felt proud if he had lived to read the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Metaphysics: The House of Cards 83 In our time it has become plain that all that kind of thing must go to the scrap-heap whither Des- cartes and Bacon swept the rubbish of the medieval schoolmen. To-day, if we wish to learn anything about the mind, we begin by looking at the brain; we interpret words by feelings, and feelings by words; we watch the savage and the child as they begin to think and talk; we follow what is going on in nature, instead of trying to turn our backs on it; and so we make some little headway. But we no longer call that study metaphysics. We call it Mind-lore, or. In Babu, Psychology. For my part I have never been constrained to enter the revolving cage. I have a shield that shivers the enchanted weapons. It is my ignorance of the Babu tongue. As soon as I look at the An- dronican hieroglyphs they change their shapes, and shrink down into the poor common words of daily life. That sublime pair of twins, subjective and objective, dwindle down to inside and outside; that mysterious consciousness shrivels into mere wakeful- ness; that pompous Ego is nothing better than my- self, — and so the glittering Aladdin's palace melts before my eyes — " And like an unsubstantial pageant faded, Leaves not a rack behind." 84 The New Tfor'd In a French town I once saw a hotel called L'Univers, and over against it a building with the sign — Annexe de I'Univers. I know the architect of that building. His name is Andronikos of Rhodes. And it is a hotise of cards. SIXTH HEAD THE FACE IN THE LOOKING-GLASS Public Opinion. — I. A Disciple of Tolstoy. — 2. Strong Language about Humanity. — 3. Brotherhood and Bombs. — 4. Man his own God. A S soon as I found that I could not learn the ■^^ meaning of the Testator's word from lexicons, I did what lexicographers are too proud to do; I went out into the streets to find out how the word was being used from day to day. I questioned men of many divers minds and occupa- tions, I questioned the poet, the lawyer and the journalist, and from no two did I receive the same explanation. Some answered readily, others hesitat- ingly, but only one was wise enough to use the words — " I do not know." In the light that we have gained already it will be worth while to look again at these replies. And I have not invented them. — " Something to do with the imaginative powers." " Fanatical." "Altruistic." " Not practical." "Exact." " Poetical." "Intangible." 86 The New Word " Sentimental." "True." "That which cannot be proved." "The opposite to materialistic." The only one who showed confidence in his answer was the altruist. Partly on that account, and partly because I had heard of altruism before, and did not know that it might not be what the Testator had in mind, I set myself to look into this word. It must not be supposed that the friend who gave me this explanation was one of those ignorant fanatics who mask their envy of the rich under high-sounding words like Humanity and Brotherhood. My friend was a man of education, in the front rank of his profession as a barrister, with every prospect of becoming a judge. He had a house in a London square, and a villa on the Riviera ; he drove a car- riage and pair, and was a connoisseur in champagne and cigars. Evidently such a man had nothing to gain, and very much to lose, by embracing the re- ligion of unselfishness; so that I was able to learn from him as from one who was transparently sincere in his belief. I began by putting my question in a more practical form. " Suppose I should wish to write a work of an Altruism: The Face in the Looking-Glass 87 idealist tendency, what would such a book have to be like, in your opinion?" " I have told you. It must be of an altruistic tendency. It must preach unselfishness." Here was a word I could not quarrel with. If I do not understand the word self, I shall never under- stand any word. The ground was becoming firm under my feet. I said to my friend, — " I want to be very clear. When you say that, you don't mean that I need write unselfishly, — for instance, against my own opinions?" My friend smiled good-naturedly. "Now you are quibbling. You know very well what I mean. You must write against greed and cruelty and lust — against selfishness in every form." I felt a little disappointed. " I am afraid you will think me very stupid ; but do you mean that any book that writes against these things is altruistic ? " " Certainly, " my friend said ; but it seemed to me that he did not say it as if he felt quite certain. "But, then, let me see if I understand you. I have never read any book that did not write against the things you speak of. The newspapers write against them every day. I have never seen any book that praised greed and cruelty and lust. Do you mean that all literature is of an idealistic tend- ency ? " My friend shook his head. "You go too fast. Altruism is a great principle, 88 The New Word the principle that man is born to serve his fellow men. The question is whether a book asserts that principle. Read Tolstoy's works, and you will under- stand what I mean. He is our greatest idealist to- day." This answer was all that I could have asked for. At last I had got from the name to the mixture. My friend had done what the Testator has failed to do, he had pointed out a work of an idealist tend- ency. The only question left was whether he had pointed out the right one. I tried to recall the tendency of Count Tolstoy's works. " You would say, then, that I must write against war ? and government ? and money ? and reli- gion ? " My friend had nodded his approval so far, but he stopped me at the word religion. " No, no ; it is the Religion of Humanity that Tolstoy preaches. The Service of Man. That is altruism." I considered this explanation carefully. "When you say that, do you mean to leave out the animals ? I have read a story of the Buddha giving a piece of his flesh to feed a starving tigress. Should you not call that altruism ? " " That is carrying the thing to absurdity. Tolstoy never does that. Man comes before the beasts." "All men ? Or do white men come before black men ? " Altruism: The Pace In the Looking-Glass 89 This time my friend became eloquent. "AH men. Once you begin to draw distinctions you will end in race-feeling, and the blatant militar- ism of our own day. That is the very thing that Tolstoy fights against. He recognises no distinction between one man and another, from the Tsar on his throne to the lowest creature with the form of man." It was an ungrateful task to resist my friend's enthusiasm, but I ventured to put another question. " I am almost ashamed to ask ; but when you say ' no distinction,' perhaps you don't mean that Tolstoy draws no distinction between good men and bad?" " Of course not. But he shows that we must love them all alike." The word love always sounds to me a little vague. I was obliged to press my friend still further. " Well, but suppose the Tsar were a bad man, who wanted to oppress the Russian people, would not Tolstoy be on their side rather than on his ? " " Certainly. Oppression is just what he is opposed to most, — the oppression of one man by another, whether he be Tsar or peasant." "Then if the peasants should want to oppress anybody, Tolstoy would be opposed to them ? " " That is what I have said." "Then let me see if I follow you rightly. Sup- pose the peasants should cease paying taxes, and thereby throw the taxgatherers out of work, or refuse 90 The New Word to fire on the enemy, and thereby expose their officers to disgrace and capture, would th^t be oppression ? " "No, because those classes have no moral right to do what they are doing. Their work does not benefit mankind." "But are not the taxgatherers and officers a part of mankind ? Does not the Religion of Humanity require us to serve them ? " " Not in that way. You are confusing the princi- ple. Altruism is the service of man as a whole, not of any one class. If a particular class is doing harm instead of good, we ought not to support it. By doing so we should injure mankind." " I think I see what you mean. We ought to serve those who are serving mankind, rather than those who are injuring mankind ? " "Yes, that is the whole point." " By ' we ' do you mean everybody ? All man- kind ? " " What else could I mean ? " " Then let me see if I have got it right. Altruism is the principle that mankind ought to serve those who are serving it, but not those who are not serv- ing it." " If you like to put it that way, yes." " It is the principle of the vulgar saying, — ' You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours ' ? " My friend began to be a little vexed with me. " You do not seem to see the difference between the individual and Humanity. Humanity is a whole. Altruism: The Face in the Looking-Glass 91 We cannot divide it. Altruism is the service of the whole by the individual." I had to recall those books that were so highly dis- tinguished by Pope John XXIII. " But is not Humanity made up of individuals ? Does not the altruist have to serve men and wo- men?" " Yes, yes, of course ; but all of them. Not one more than another. The heart of the true altruist overflows with love towards every creatare, the lowest as well as the highest, the greatest criminal as well as the purest saint." "That is very beautiful. I think I quite under- stand that. But you told me that the altruist had not only to love these different kinds of people, but also to serve them. Is that right ? " " Of course. He cannot love them unless he serves them." " Very well ; then all I want to know is how he ought to serve them. Suppose an altruist should see a soldier or a taxgatherer beating a peasant, ought he to stop him, or not to stop him ? " " He ought to remonstrate with him." " But suppose the remonstrance has no effect. Ought he to do nothing more ? " "He can offer to take the beating in the other's place." " But suppose the soldier says he would rather go on beating the peasant ? " " Then he has done all he can." 92 The New Word " Then an altruist ought not to use force ? " "No. Force is no remedy. That is Tolstoy's great lesson." " Then an altruist is one who will not use force, even to defend his money from thieves, or his chil- dren from cruelty ? " "That is the ideal." "And you, if any one should want to steal your money, or to beat your children, would think it wrong to prevent them ? " " In an ideal sense, yes." " Even though you should know that the man who was beating your children was out of his mind ; or that he was a good man who had been hypnotised and made to do wicked things against his will ? " My friend laughed at me. " Now you are trying to make the principle absurd. The Religion of Humanity is reasonable. Every one recognises that a madman should be restrained from doing mischief, whether to himself only, or to others." "Then if a man went mad and wanted to beat you or your children, or to set fire to your house, or do any other wicked thing, you would think it right to restrain him by force ? " " Of course. That is a ridiculous question. It would be for the good of the man himself to restrain him." " But if he were not mad ; if he were only eccen- tric, or were behaving like that out of superstition. Altruism: The Face in the Looking-Glass 93 or spite, you would think it wrong to restrain him by force ? " "All that is a question of degree. The test is a very simple one ; — does the man know what he is doing ? " " Then let me see if I have got it right this time. You mean that if a man is doing wicked things by accident he ought to be prevented, but not if he is doing them on purpose ? And so an altruist is one who restrains good men, and lets wicked men do what they like." "That, " said my friend, " is not putting it fairly. I said that madmen ought to be restrained for their own sake. Surely you ought to be able to see the difference. When we restrain a man for his own good we are serving him. Our action is altruistic." " I think I see what you mean, this time. It is doing good to a madman to save him from doing wicked things which he might afterwards regret ? " My friend smiled, well pleased. " Exactly ! Now you understand me." " But it is not doing good to a man in his right mind to save him from doing wicked things which he might afterwards regret." My friend's face fell. " No man who wants to do wicked things is really in his right mind," he said. "Tolstoy has said so over and over again." "Then I am afraid I don't understand you," I had to confess. "I thought you began by saying 94 The New Word that the altruist ought hot to use force to anybody, and now you seem to be saying that he ought to use force to everybody who is doing what the altruist thinks is wrong." " All that," said my friend, " comes of pushing the principle to extremes. Altruism is an ideal." I was obliged to shake my head regretfully. " I came here to ask you the meaning of the word idealistic," I remarked, " and you told me that it meant altruistic. But now in explaining to me what altruism is, you have three times used the word ideal, and each time in the sense of a foolish extreme to which a good principle ought not to be carried. And altruism itself, as you have explained it, seems to me just such a foolish extreme to which the old- fashioned principle of kindness, or good will towards men, ought not to be carried, — I am afraid that what you have been really telling me all this time is that an idealist work musit be a work of an extravagant tendency." II The Religion of Humanity Is being preached among us to-day by many well-meaning men and women, who unfortunately have never stopped to ask themselves what they mean by the words Religion and Humanity. No one, I think, now remembers the meaning of the word religion ; and I shall have to look for it Altruism: The Face in the Loo king-Glass 95 hereafter. Humanity, of course, is the Babu for Man. It used to be written man, and old-fashioned writers had some rather plain things to say about it. "All men are liars." "There is none that doeth good, no, not one." " The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." " It repented the Lord that he had made man." No one would dare to say such things as that about Humanity. For Humanity no words can be too good. The difference is as great as that between a little girl being scolded by her teacher in the schoolroom, when there is no one by, and the same little girl being praised by the teacher in the parlour, when visitors are present. The reason for the change is not far to seek. Those well-meaning men and women have found out that the language of the theologians is bad language ; that the word God has become an Andronican word to them ; and so, being too honest to go on using a word they do not under- stand, they have crossed it out, and looked for another word to write in its place. And obeying a natural law of the mind, i which the theologians call anthropomorphism, they have written the word Man. I once knew a boy of fourteen who made the same discovery, and went through all his childish poems, crossing out the word God wherever it occurred ; and he, too, wrote words like Man and The People in its place. 96 The New Word In this way they have changed the idol, but, as so often happens, they have not changed the idolatry. All the Andronican words of the theolo- gians have come back again, only this time they are written about Man instead of about God. All the rich, comfortable folks who used to 'go to church and call themselves miserable sinners, now go to lec- ture halls and call themselves Lovers of Humanity. I think a Lover of Humanity is the very last person to whom, if I were In distress, I should go to borrow a few dollars. Ill Humanity is a deceitful word, because they who use it are apt, like Pope John XXIII, and like my altruistic friend, to forget that it is only another way of saying men and women. And like most other words of the same class, it is a dangerous word, be- cause it puts the mind to sleep, and steels those who use it to do all kinds of cruel things they would otherwise be ashamed to do. In such words Rousseau sowed the seed that sprang up in the Reign of Terror. It is like that word Brotherhood, on behalf of which so many bombs have been thrown. In the course of my life I have come across a good many men and women styling them- selves Socialists, Anarchists, Friends of Humanity, and what not, and I am sorry to say that I have found in practice that the more of these sort of Altruism: The Face in the Looking-Glass 97 words they used, and the bigger capitals they spelled them with, the more likely they were to be narrow-minded, bad-tempered people, quarrelling violently among themselves, and yet ready to turn and rend everybody else for not agreeing with the things which they were not yet agreed upon among themselves. It has been my lot to talk with Apostles of Humanity, with the kind of men who get up Pilgrimages of Peace and Purity Crusades. (Fancy a man who does not know the difference between a pilgrim -nd a crusader talking about Humanity !) And when I have ventured to urge upon them mercy towards their victims, I have seen them foam at the mouth. I distrust Humanity when it foams at the mouth. The word Humanity is an Andronican word, because it does not advance us an inch. Every one is agreed that it is doing a kindness to save a man who is not in his right mind from doing wicked things which he would afterwards regret. The questions that remain are these: What things are wicked ; and who is to be the judge ; when is a man not in his right mind ; and who is to be the judge ; how, or with how much force, are we to save him ; and who is to be the judge ; and when, and under what circumstances, is it our busi- ness to step in; and again who is to be the judge? These are questions that the wisest man who ever lived could not answer offhand, nor beforehand ; and the man who thinks he can answer them, and has 98 The New Word answered them, by shouting the word Humanity, Is more out of his mind, and more in need of restraint, than any soldier or taxgatherer or tsar. The moment a question becomes one of degree it Is time for enthusiasm to call in wisdom. The mis- take of my altruistic friend was in leaving wisdom out of his explanation. And it so happens that wisdom has the same imaginary Aryan root as Idealism. Humanity is a false word because, as we have seen, it means that there are, or ought to be, no differences between men. It means, for Instance, that there Is no difference between white men and black, and that If, in any place where they are living side by side, there happen to be more blacks than whites, the blacks ought to rule the whites. That falsehood is enshrined in the political creed of North America. It has cost the Americans a hundred thousand lives. It is still costing them crimes as frightful as the word Catholic cost Europe. And the same men who say that black men ought to rule over white men In the Carollnas will not let a yellow child sit in the same schoolroom with a white child in San Fran- cisco. IV Humanity is least of all an altruistic word. The Religion of Humanity pretends to be the worship of men and women by men and women. And It is not Altruism: The Face in the Looking-Glass 99 even that. Because the idolaters have an ideal man or woman whom they really worship. That idol is their own reflection in the looking-glass, and hence their Service of Humanity is apt to mean an effort to make Man in their own image. So far as I have been able to learn by watching what they do, instead of listening to what they say, their idol is very much like a Unitarian minister ; a man of some information, and of some taste in the arts ; firmly respectful of the inherited tabus of Europe, with leanings toward teetotalism and vegetarianism ; abounding in Mediterranean words of an immaterial tendency ; with not much sense of humour, and still less of his own infirmities ; and with rather a strong sense of the infirmities of others, and a strong disposition to make them better from his point of view, and worse from their point of view. Now this may be the Coming Man. This idol may be destined to grow up and overshadow the world. I do not say that it is a bad idol. Only do not let us call it Humanity. If the whole earth Is to be ruled smooth in its name ; if all the men and women it now holds, from the five hundred millions of Chinese down to the dwarfs who haunt beyond the Mountains of the Moon, are to be ground beneath the car of this new Juggernath, let us know what we are doing ; and do not let us use the word Humanity. The trees of the forest are not all alike, neither lOO The New Word are the stars in heaven. As there is one beauty of the violet, and another beauty of the rose, so there is one manhood of the North, and another man- hood of the South, one manhood of the tsar and another manhood of the peasant, one manhood of the moneyniaker and another manhood of the artist. The most inhuman, because the most false, words ever spoken about man are the words "normal man. " For man himself is an abnormal beast. Is it for the benefit of mankind that man should be his own God ? That is the question which has to be answered yes or no. The Religion of Humanity is not the worship of the best man, nor of the best in man. It is the worship of the middling man. It is the consecra- tion of that instinct which causes men to kill to their own loss the best man, to starve the poet and to stone the prophet, to scourge and crucify the Christ. How can such worship be idealistic ? It is the least idealistic of any. It is the denial of worship, the denial of verihood, and the denial of hope. SEVENTH HEAD THE SHAPE The Counter-Spell. — i. A Work of a Materialist Tendency. — 2. Athanasian Langnage 3. Inventory of the Universe. — ^4. An Idealistic Word. T WENT on asking every one I met his meaning ■*- for the word Idealist, till in the end I came to a wise man who answered, — " I don't know. I should have thought that ideal was the opposite to mate- rial." Every one else had tried to explain idealism by itself. This was the first attempt to explain it by something ebe. The Babu terms, of course, are Absolute and Relative, meaning, as far as I can make out. Untied and Beside. As soon as I had this answer I felt sure it was a clew that would lead me out of the labyrinth. The word Beside I had long since found to be an amulet of strange power against the sorcerers, including those diviners who now write themselves divines. When I was rather young — indeed, before I had learned to translate these Mediterranean words — I was once taken by a Mediterranean-minded friend to be enchanted by a learned and affable diviner of the Society of Jesus. The magician began, using the wisdom of the serpent, by drawing from me that lOI 102 The New Word I had been brought up in the communion called the Plymouth Brethren, whose peculiar tenets he seemed disposed to handle in a spirit of urbane mockery. On my avowing that I had not come to defend those tenets, nor any others, but rather to learn from him, we insensibly changed ground, and, passing from depth to depth, we rested on the discovery that for my courteous entertainer truth was Absolute, while for me it was Relative. There being no oubliette available, I was then suffered to depart unhurt. ^ I It was like that story in the Thousand Nights and a Night, the most wonderful story of the world, in which a princess skilled in the magical art enters into mortal combat with a djinn. The djinn changes by turns into a wolf, a fish and a pomegranate seed ; and the princess pursues him as a dog, a serpent and a cock ; till at the last the djinn is driven to assume his fiery shape, and the two antagonists ap- pear fighting in the air with flames. The wise man's answer was the one towards which I had been groping my way all along, the answer towards which all the other answers pointed more or less distinctly. The great word of Andronicus Rhodius itself might be translated Anti-Material. A work of an idealist tendency, I could doubt no longer, must be one that looked Materialism in the face. What then was Materialism? Materialisni: The Shape 103 I It was with a curious feeling of relief that I exchanged the old question for the new. I felt that I should now be on firm ground. I was about to pass out of the enchanted wood of words into the open field of things. I had been vexed for some time by a gathering suspicion that Materialism must be common sense and Idealism must be nonsense ; that one must be true, and the other false. I even began to fear that the well-meaning folk who call themselves Idealists were at heart Materialists, mak- ing-believe to believe in Idealism, because they wished it were true. The Materialists I envied as men who walked by sight and not by faith, and had no need of make-belief. But, now, where was this common sense teaching to be found ? Where was it set out in sensible words, and not in Andronican ciphers ? I sought out a cunning bookseller, and put the question. " I want a little book of a Materialist tendency." The bookseller looked ever so slightly startled. " Do you mean a book attacking religion ? " he asked me. I was rather taken aback. " No, no ; I don't want a controversial book. I want a book that will give me in a short and simple fashion the Materialist view of life. The sort of 104 The New Word book that could be put into the hands of a school- boy." " I am afraid I don't know of any such book," said the bookseller. "What," I said, "is there no book which tells a child something about the world in which he finds himself ? When I was a child I read a book that told me — ' In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' Now I am told that is only poetry ; and I want to know the facts." The bookseller thought for a moment, and then brightened up. " I think I have the very book you require, — The Story of Creation." Tliis was a good hearing. The name of the book assured me that it had been written to meet the need I felt. I asked for a copy. " I ought to tell you that we consider it a little advanced," the bookseller observed cautiously, as he handed me the book. " By ' advanced, ' you mean ■ ? " "A litrie outspoken." " Outspoken ! But that is just what I am looking for, — struggling for. My trouble is that I cannot find any book that is outspoken enough. You speak as if that were some fault in a book ! " " Well, of course, we have to deal with all classes ; and we find that some people object to a book if it speaks too plainly. They are a little afraid of Materialism, we find." Materialism: The Shape 105 " By afraid, do you mean they are afraid that it is true, or afraid that it is false ? " The bookseller hesitated. "Well, I suppose — of course, I can't say — but I should think they were afraid that it might unsettle their views." " True views, do you mean ; or false views ? " The bookseller shook his head. "I don't ask them that. Our business is to sell people what books we think they will like, without inquiring about their views." " But how can you tell what books they will like, unless you know their views ? " The bookseller smiled. " In our business we can generally tell pretty soon what sort of books people will like." I saw that I was talking with an able man. I could not refrain from asking him the riddle. " What sort of book, should you say, was a work of an idealist tendency ? " My bookseller frowned thoughtfully. Then he slowly shook his head. " I could hardly tell you that, sir. We don't stock many books of that kind. There is no demand for them. People don't much care about idealism in these days. They like something of a practical tendency." And so I had got yet another meaning for the Testator's word. io6 The New Word II Rightly to tell the parable of science, to put the story of the creation into better words than those which have satisfied a hundred generations, were surely as great a task as man could set himself This were indeed a work of an idealist tendency. In what high mood, after what prayers and strivings, with what fear and joy, dare any man sit down to write the first chapter of the new Book of Life ? It was with thoughts like these, and with, I hope, an open mind, that I began to read the Story of Creation. The learned and distinguished author writes as a priest of what he calls the Theory of Evolution. His motive is wholly praiseworthy, for he says in his preface that — ^" complete expositions of the theory are only to be found in bulky volumes with which few readers have the time and courage to grapple." No state of things could be graver and more regrettable. For in so far as the theory is a true interpretation of life it must behove 'every living man to do his best to master it. This, then, is a book for the beginner ; and if I am rightly informed it has been, and is still being, widely read as such. To the beginner the author declares his purpose is to give " a clear idea of the mechanism of the universe." — It disappointed me to find already that Materialism could not get on Materialism: The Shape 107 without the word idea, with which few beginners have the time and courage to grapple. Nor was it less discouraging to learn that, even for the Mate- rialist, there are several " abiding mysteries in the universe," such as the nebula, the crystal, and the cell. Much more disconcerting was it to be told that of the beginnings, and even "of the things themselves" — (those objects of the external world !) — "nothing can be known." I might have been reading the Athanasian Creed. There were further disappointments of the same kind in store for me. Almost in his next sentence I found the writer calling the things themselves " ma- terial phenomena." Of thought and emotion, he added, no material qualities could be predicated. And lastly my teacher with a single sentence laid the whole material world round me in ruin : — " We can- not make the passage from chemistry to conscious- ness." When I had read thus far I seriously feared that I had been imposed upon, and that the Story of Creation was a satire on Materialism, written by one who was secretly a disciple of Andronikos of Rhodes. I had despaired of Materialism too soon, however. All this was but the introductory chapter, a feature dispensed with in the work which this one is de- signed to supersede. On the next page the Story of Creation began in earnest, with the impressive heading, — io8 The New Word " The Universe : Its Contents." There seems to be some contradiction between the author's word Universe, and his other word Evolu- tion. Universe is the Babu way of writing One- ward, whereas there is authority for saying that Evolution is the transformation of an indefinite homo- geneity into a definite heterogeneity, or, as it may be put in English, one turning into many, rather than many into one. It is dangerous to use that other learned name Kosmos, which is to say. Order, because whether the world is orderly is still an open question. One eminent divine found it so orderly that it showed itself to be the handiwork of God; another found it so disorderly that jit showed itself to be in a state of alienation from God. The latter opinion seems to be the orthodox one among the Materialists of all denominations. On this head the words of Huxley are as the words of Newman. There is a consensus of opinion that the universe is lU-behavcd. They only differ as to what the well-behaved man had better do in the cir- cumstances. The cardinal advises him to go to sleep and dream of a universe more to his liking. The professor advises him to stand no nonsense from the universe, but to correct it. " Pull me down these riotous woodlands," he seems to say, " and build me a rectangular boulevard patrolled by the police ; destroy me this shameless dell with all its moss and wild-flowers, and give me in its place a square garden adorned with iron rails and carpet bedding. Materialism: The Shape 109 and a notice forbidding children to run over the grass." World is the old English name, but it is the name for an old universe, when our earth stood fast in the middle, and all the stars went round it. I shall feel safer if I write All-Thing or Everything. Ill "The Universe is made up of Matter and Power. " This sentence assured me that the Story of Cre- ation was the work of a genuine Materialist. There is a habit of mind common to all Material- ists, by whatever name they may describe them- selves. They may choose to be called Positivists or Agnostics, Scientists or Believers, Catholics or Secularists, but however much they may differ in details, their minds all work along certain lines or rules of thought like these: 1. It is easier for there to be shape without strength, than strength without shape. 2. It is easier for things not to be, than for them to be. 3. It is easier for things to keep still than for them to move. 4. It is easier to be dead than living. It is in obedience to this instinct that the author no The New Word of the Story of Creation has made Matter the first item in his inventory of the All-Thing, and Power the second. An older story has it — " In the begin- ning God." Matter, the author deems to be a word needing explanation; and he explains it as a term for " substances that occupy space and affect the senses." It is hard that a Materialist writer should be no more able than Doctor Latham to free himself from the meshes of Mediterranean speech. Substance, I have reason to believe, is a high and mysterious word which plays a great part in the Andronican science. I confess I understand it less well than Matter; and in so far as I do understand it its mean- ing is opposed somehow to that of the author's other Babu word, phenomena. Nay, is it not written in a treatise on Logic by no less a person than Doctor Latham himself, — " It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that substance, as used by logicians, has by no means the sense which so often attaches to it in ordinary conversation, viz., that of Matter or Body." My present business with the Story of Creation is not to find fault with its bad language, but, if I can, to pierce through the words to what the writer is really trying to say. But in a work on Materialism the vord Matter is surely the one on which every- things turns, and if so it is worth while to ask what it stands for. Materialism: The Shape iii IV We know by this time what answer to expect from lexicography. The words — ^"What is the mat- ter?" are almost the first words an English child hears from its nurse. Doctor Latham sleepily murmurs that she is talking French or Latin ; she is trying to say matiere, or materia. (Imagine a French nurse asking "Qu'est-ce que c'est que la matiere ?") A mat is one of the commonest objects in every English cottage, as it was in every cave- dweller's cave. Doctor Latham turns on his side, and mutters, — "Roman — Malta." The latest and best guesser hazards — " Carthaginian-Ma/>/)«." That a word spelt with two ts should come from a word spelt with one, and a word spelt with one t from a word spelt with two ; that four syllables should shrink to two, and two to one, makes no matter to exact philology. Still less does it matter that a French noun should have changed into an English verb ; that a provincial Englishman in Dickens' pages should spell that verb moither or moidher, and use it in the nurse's sense of to worry, or to get into a knot that has to be untied ; still less that every Irishman should say matther, or that the Welsh name for plaited work should be mat, and for a spread of rushes on the floor mathr. But it so happens that my own nurse was a provincial Englishwoman, with the Welsh name of Griffiths, 112 The New Word and was less skilled in French and Latin and in Punic than Doctor Latham and Professor Skeat suppose ; and she was my first authority on the English language, and one much more to be feared than they. Now, that the learned author of the Story of Crea- tion meant to write dog-latin, and hoped that he was writing dog-latin, is very likely indeed. But he has been inspired against his will to use an English word, and I shall pin it to the English meaning. For the difference between materia and matter is almost the difference between materialism and idealism. The old mother-tongue of the White race, into which the first bishop of the Goths, labouring beside the Danube, translated the mightiest of Mediter- ranean books, has left two precious relics of itself. One is a manuscript written in silver letters, and guarded in the university of Upsal ; the other is a living dialect not yet uprooted from two villages in the isle of Gothland. And deeming it part of this inquiry to lea,m somewhat of the speech of my forefathers, I made my way, not to the university of Upsal, but to the isle of Gothland. There I was fortunate, land Sweden and the white face are fortunate, enough to find a teacher in Doctor Klint- berg, who" has given his life to gather, as no dialect has ever yet been gathered, these precious wild flowers of speech before the schoolmaster has had time to root them up. And among the treasures in his col- lection, which English philologists will one day prize Materialism: The Shape 113 above many monkish manuscripts, I came upon this rhyme sung by the children in one of their plays : — " Abbum laikar sat noti gar sundar; Dar n far hul, sa kraupa n under." Or as it might be sung in many English villages : — Perch plays so 'at net goes asunder; There un finds hole, so creeps un under. The word noti gives us the clew to mat and matter. On the one hand it merges into knot, either through a form like ge-not, or by the likeness between a knot and a knob — the kn or en is common to the Gothic and Celtic languages ; on the other hand it merges into the French natte, and so into net and mat. For a mat, as it seems needful to point out to philol- ogists, is a net in which the holes are smaller, and the knots closer together. Now netting or matting or knotting is one of the earliest handicrafts of man ; the Congo dwarfs mat the undergrowth of the forest to entrap the elephant. It is much older than man ; the spider weaves its net, and the bird its nest. It is still older than they are ; when we speak of matted hair and matted weeds, we are thinking of a rough natural entangle- ment, of the network of nature rather than of man. We are not thinking of tht Carthaginians, nor even of the Romans, nor of the Normans ; and though the Norman lady may have trimmed the Saxon 114 The New Word nurse's tongue, she has not trimmed the Saxon sense. No one but a schoolmaster writing a scholastic treatise in technical terms would dream of using the word matter in the sense of substance. Fdr everybody else, and for the schoolmaster himself in his waking hours, it means very much what mat means, a knot or knotwork, a tangle or a net. And so, when the nurse asks, — " What is the matter ? " she is not talking dog-latin, and she does not mean, what is the material substance ; but she is talking English, and she means, what is the trouble ; what has gone wrong ? Perhaps it is because the first use of a net is to stop the elephant, or the perch, from going further, perhaps it is because of its likeness with mud, that the word, or a word like it, has come to mean, in Latin if not in English, that which " occupies space and affects the senses." And yet, (remarkably enough, one of the most eminent workers in physical science. Lord Kelvin, has suggested that what we call Matter began with tangled waves in the ether ; so that science is learning to give the nurse's meaning to the nurse's word. The word substance, of course, has nothing what- ever to do with matter. It means inside, and the folk word for it, the word which this writer him- self uses elsewhere, is stuff, or stuffing. That is the word stop in its materialistic form, — the dentist stops a tooth, and the French write estouper, as well as etoufer. But matter is an ontologist's word ; Materialism: The Shape 115 the knot is verily a mystery ; here is a word of an idealist tendency ; — no wonder that the Story of Creation tried to explain it away. Yet all this time the writer is deceiving himself and us. The word really inside his mind is neither knot nor stop, but Shape. — In my Dutch word-book I have found this curious entry : " Schepping- sgescheidenis, history of the creation." EIGHTH HEAD THE KNOT The Unknowable — i. Ultimate Nature of Matter. — 2. Logical Chemistry^ — 3. The Dustbin of Science. — 4. Story of the Crumb. •TpHE All-Thing being made up of strength and -*■ stuffing, we are naturally curious to learn what the stuffing is made up of. Unhappily the spirit of Athanasius now enters again into the author of the Story of Shaping, with- out driving out that of Andronikos of Rhodes. " The ultimate nature of Matter remains unknown and unknowable." Unknowable has never struck me as a useful word, and it is generally an unlucky one. As soon as any enchanter has declared to us that the path to the sun across the sky is unknowable, some learner is sure to come forward and tell us all about it. As soon as another has affirmed that the number of hairs on a man's head is unknowable, the exact figures are sure to be forthcoming from a statisti- cian. ( Since these words were first written the Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded for the discovery of the ultimate nature of Matter.) It is difficult 116 Physics: The Knot 117 to see what any one thinks he has to gain by holding up a warning hand to posterity in this fashion, with a — Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther ! And consider what it is that remains unknow- able. The ultimate nature of Matter. "Ultimate nature " sounds far too much like t» meta ta phusika. Why does the writer take it for granted that Matter has an ultimate nature ? He goes on to say, — " We can only infer what it is, by learning what it does." Clearly he sees some difference between being and doing, — ^he knows but will not tell. He seems to say in other words, — I see something called Miatter moving about, and hence I infer that there is another something called its Ultimate Nature, keeping still ; which other something is unknowable. — Surely that is like building a bridge you never intend to cross. Yet the author is better than his word, for he goes on to tell us somewhat, if not of the ultimate, at least of the penultimate, nature of Matter. " The actions of bodies, whatever their states, are explicable only on the assumption that the bodies are made up of infinitely small particles which, in their combined state, as mechanical units, are called molecules, and in their free state, as chemical units, are called atoms." "Infinitely" is a big word. When we have reached infinity the ultimate cannot be much farther on. The author, unhappily, was using it only as a sort of swear word, meaning very small, for presently he calculates the size of these infinitely Ii8 The New Word small particles. As many of them (he says) would go into a drop of water as cricket-balls into an Earth. — I have forgotten how many angels could dance upon a needle's point, according to the highest theological authority. But at this point the Story of Creation becomes so knotty, and the writer loses his way so hope- lessly among the terms element, molecule and atom, that I have to put in my own homely words what I have gathered to be the teaching of Materialism on his head. Nor ought the writer to be blamed for his failure, since he has evidently started with the belief that his authorities know what they are saying, whereas I have started with the belief that they most probably do not. II We need a Babu glossary: — Element : Forethought, beginning. Atom : Uncut, uncutable. Molecule : Little heap. By the word element I understand modern chem- ists to mean those webworks in the All-Thing, such as hydrogen and gold, which they have not been able to unweave, as they unweave water into oxygen and hydrogen. Of the elements, which he some- times carelessly calls atoms, the author of the Story of Creation says in his sternest Athanasian vein, — Physics: The Knot 1 19 "Since the present universe had its beginning the elements have undergone no change." In some past universe, perhaps, they were less stubborn. In the meanwhile, of course, they are outside the Theory of Evolution, although my teacher omits to note the fact. Of the atom, its modern discoverer, Dalton, proudly declared, — " No man can split an atom " ; or, in other words, no man can split the unsplitable. The eminent Huxley no less rashly boasted, — " The atom is truly an immortal being." My author, with a diffidence as welcome as it is unexpected, contents himself in saying that the atoms have not yet been split. And even that is not true. I find there are at least three atoms known to science, or at least to Scientology, the arithmetical atom, the physical one, and the logical one. Of these the logical one has been kept intact by un- heard of efforts ; the other two have been split, and are being split every day. The first, or chemical atom, is no more than an arithmetical term, in short it is an item. The chemist has found that when his elements unite with each other they do so always in fixed proportions, and it is the proportion which he is thinking of when he uses the word atom. Thus when he wants to say that in every gallon of water, or steam, there are two pints of hydrogen for one pint of oxygen, he puts it that the " atom " of hydrogen is H2. In hydrochloric acid this atom splits, and we get H^ 120 The New Word or more simply H. It is this atom which is some- times confused with element in the Story of Creation and elsewhere. It appears to have no more to do with the nature of Matter than the figure o has. The atom which has for so long engaged the atten- tion of physicists, or physical chemists, is of course the old atom of Democritus, and is merely a small crumb of Matter, measuring, according to the latest and best of my authorities, a thousand millionth of an inch across. The Story of Creation terms it an assumption, or, shall we say, an image formed in the mind. Of such crumbs, real or imaginary, Matter is at present believed to be made up. When the experiment famous for giving us the Rontgen rays is made, still smaller crumblets, called cor- puscles, are believed to be rent away from the main crumb, and thus the physical atom is split. The molecule may be regarded as a married crumb, and sometimes a polygamous one. Thus in the case of water the oxygen crumb was long believed to take to itself two hydrogen crumbs, and the little heap thus formed was not three crumbs, but one crumb. Such a molecule may be likened to a bronze coin made by melting down together two copper coins and one tin coin. No one, of course, has ever seen or handled any such crurpb. The chemist cannot pick his little heaps out of the real heap, but he can work a sort of earthquake by which the whole heap of bronze coins is rent into two heaps, one of tin coins, and one of copper coins. Every Physics: The Knot 121 coin is to-day called a molecule, but only in a state of celibacy is it also called an atom. All that is plain sailing, when it is explained. The difficulty is with the logical atom which is, as one of my authorities very sagely observes, "by defini- tion, indivisible." Accordingly, as soon as one of the real atoms does divide, the definition is re- defined to meet the altered circumstances. As thus: — Finding that one pint of a gas always unites with one or more full pints of another gas, and never with any odd fraction of a pint, the chemists have concluded that every pint of gas contains the same number of crumbs. But now when the two pints of hydrogen unite with the one pint of oxygen, they do not make three pints of steam, but only two pints. Therefore the chemists choose to say that the num- ber of steam crumbs is the same with that of the original hydrogen crumbs, and double that of the original oxygen crumbs. What, then, has hap- pened ? Each of the oxygen crumbs must have split in two, one half joining each hydrogen crumb. But the atom is " by definition, indivisible." How then can it split ? The answer is that the oxygen crumb must be a double crumb. It is not an atom, but a little heap of two atoms. Instead of being a penny it is two halfpennies stuck together like the Siamese Twins. And each halfpenny is a logical atom. — One is tempted to add Euclid's Q. E. D. By similar reasoning the atoms of hydrogen and 122 The New Word chlorine have also been revealed as twins ; and should occasion arise for it no doubt the twins will become triplets, and the halfpennies farthings. In this way the integrity of the logical atom should always be maintained. Meanwhile I will commend to the attention of all atomists the Chinese definition of a Point. "A point is a thing which has not got division. " Such is the story of the Atom ; and we cannot be surprised if the historian of Creation has been caught tripping in the network of arithmetic, logic and imagination, which I have laboured to unweave, in the belief that what can be said in shorthand can be said in longhand, if we take the pains. Ill The Story of Creation now leaves the crumbs, to bring upon the scene a new item inexcusably omitted from the inventory of the universe. This is an " elas- tic medium " called Ether, something as much finer than air as the crumbs are finer than bricks. So that, ridding my mind of the words " very small " — which can only mean small beside a man — I learn that the All-Thing is a sort of jelly with bricks jostling each other inside it under the stress of that Power which formed the second item in the inventory. The Ether, it seems, is a " necessary assumption " ; it is indeed a sort of dustbin into which Science Physics: The Knot I23 throws her breakages. I understand, however, from other sources of information, that the dustbin is be- coming choked, and that Science has now called for another, and far finer medium, to be called Ethereon, which will trickle through the Ether as that trickles through the air, and as water trickles through a sponge. Nor shall I be surprised to hear later on that even in the Ethereon Science has not got quite to the bottom of Everything, and that finer and finer mediums, Etheroids and Ethereonoids and Ethero- lites, will go on trickling through each other to end- lessness. The world is held up by an elephant, and the elephant is held up by a tortoise, and the tortoise is held up by — what? IV In the meanwhile the story of Matter has not ended with the crumb. The crumb has been guessied by no mean guesser to be made of Ether, to be a sort of ring made by a whirlpool in the Ether, which has somehow got its tail into its mouth like a fried whiting. That guess no longer holds the field. According to the last report I have received from the headquarters of science — a report which has caused much of my language in the first draft of this Letter to take an air of plagiarism — the crumb is made up of electricity, which is to say, amber- 124 The New Word strength. This strength shows two sides, or ways, called yea and nay, and both join to shape the crumb. The crumb is a relatively big ball of yea strength inside which a swarm of lesser balls of nay strength are going round and round, the little balls having between them as much of nay as the bigger ball has of yea. I give the learned words : — "The hydrogen atom consists of a big sphere of uniformly distributed positive electrification, and a thousand negative corpuscles travelling, each in its own orbit, within the positive sphere. The total of positive electrification is equal to the sum of the neg- atives in the thousand corpuscles." Such is the image of Matter formed in the mind of a great scientist, too true a scientist to offer it as anything but a guess. It may not be the right guess. It is not there, perhaps, that pretty Chinese toy, those wheels within a wheel, that dance of moons within the belly of their sun. The pick of Science has gone too deep, and struck the well of poetry. But as it stands it is the last and best guess that science has made in our time about the ultimate nature of Mat- ter. And what else is it but a network — a thousand knots tied up in one knot? The pick of the physicist has chimed against the pick of the psychologist, as in the middle of a tunnel, and wrought a thor- oughfare for light. And that is what I call a Rhyme. Of what is the network made? Let us hear the Physics: The Knot 125 last word of Materialism on itself. — " Matter is electric charge, or electric charge is Matter, which- ever way we like to put it." The ultimate nature of Matter is Power. The inventory of the universe was too long by half. NINTH HEAD THE DEMON IN THE STONE Force and Energy. — I. The Quarrel of the Twins. — 2. Pulling and Pushing. — 3. The Gadarene Swine. — 4. Why a Stone Falls. — 5. Witchcraft. T FIND it harder to write about strength than ■*- about shapes, for the same reason that I find it harder to explain the word idealist than the word dynamite. The author of the Story of Creation, on the other hand, seems to have approached his second topic with peculiar confidence, and as one who had made it his own; for in his preface he has undertaken to give " rigid and definite meanings " to the words Force and Energy; a service so great that he him- self perhaps does not see how great it is. However, his teaching on this head is not wholly his own. He is less an inventor than a legislator, bringing order into the realm of scientific thought. Unlike that other lawgiver, whose Story of Crea- tion still finds readers, the present writer begins his 126 Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone 127 stiff and inclosed explanations of Force and Energy by dropping into a rather unexpected, and surely needless, vein of logic. " If atoms are unchangeable under their present conditions, and changeable only in their relations through combination with other atoms, it follows that all changes are due to motion. " I am sorry to have to say so, but I cannot make sense of that. I should have thought the changes of the unchangeable atoms were their motion. If motion is not change, but something else that brings about change, we ought to be told what motion is. And that is just what we are not told. The author's silence on this head is all the more regrettable inasmuch as the rigid and definite mean- ings given to Force and Energy are hinged on the word motion. " Power. Motion throughout the universe is pro- duced or destroyed, quickened or retarded, increased or lessened, by two indestructible powers of oppo- site nature to each other — (a) Force, and (b) Energy." And so there is not one Power but two Powers, each full-armed and deathless, waging everlasting war with one another, as they have done for so many ages, under other names, in other stories of 128 The New Word creation, — immortal Twins, with an immortal Quarrel. Our author names them in significant disorder, for he means that motion is produced by (b) Energy, and destroyed by (a) Force. One would think that motion must be produced before it can be destroyed, and therefore that Energy was (a) and Force was (b). The author, it is plain, was thinking when he began the sentence, and so he wrote like an Idealist. As soon as he left off thinking he dropped instinc- tively into Materialism. Now what are Energy and Force at strife about ? Motion. Between them they are worrying motion like two dogs worrying a bone. Motion, as we have just read, is hard at work causing the changes in the All-Thing. But these angry powers will not let it alone. They have no work of their own, be- cause motion has got their job, and so they set upon motion as two trades unionists set upon a blackleg. One of them produces motion— out of what we are not told, but I expect out of the Ether ; the other destroys it. One quickens and increases motion ; the other first retards and then lessens it. The discovery that motion can be retarded without being lessened, or lessened without being retarded, is perhaps the greatest feat of scientific terminology, forming as it does the keystone of the famotis Kinetic Molecular Theory of Gases. As it is rather puz- zling to the untrained mind, I shall take pains to ex- plain it later on. Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone 129 II The meanings given to the terms Force and Energy in the Story of Creation may be rigid and definite, but they are a little hard to find. Force, the book says, binds together bits of " pon- derable matter." This was the first hint to me that there were two kinds of Matter, one which had weight, and another which had none. I am sorry to add that neither in this place, not elsewhere in the book, have I been able to glean the least information about the second kind, the imponderable Matter. I only know that there is such a thing, because my teacher says again that — " Force inheres in, and can never be taken from, ponderable Matter." I did not try to understand the learned words Gravitation, Cohesion and Affinity, which my guide used as the names for various forms of what he called attraction. Attraction, I saw at once, was the Mediterranean way of writing puU-towards ; and hence I understood at length that Force must be strength puUing-to, and Energy must be strength pushing-fro. These twain seemed at first to be counterparts of one another, yet the Story of Creation went on to show that they were very much otherwise. To begin with, the Pull strength was bound up in Matter so that it could not be shifted ; whereas the 130 The N'ew Word Push was not so bound up, and you could take it from one bit of Matter, and give it to another bit. Thus, if water were falling under the mere Pull of the earth, as Newton believed, you could not make it turn a mill-wheel, and grind corn ; whereas if it were being pushed uphill, you could. This was worth knowing becausie for thousand of years mil- lers with untrained minds, men for whom the terms Force and Energy have not got rigid and definite meanings, have been making-believe to turn mill- wheels and grind corn in that wrong way, and making what one fears must be ideal bread. Another serious consequence was that, while the Pull always stopped in its own bit of Matter, and so was safe, the Push, through being handled, and carried hither and thither, and slopped about all over the place, so to speak, was gradually getting " dissipated," that is to say, split, in the Ether. And although my teacher rather shirked this alarming feature of the business, he hinted darkly that some- thing might have to be said about it later on, when the Story of Creation drew to its end, or, in his own menacing words, — ^^"when the ultimate destiny of the universe is considered." But by far the most interesting difference between the two Powers was this, that whereas there seemed to be only one kind of Pull, which pulled, there were two kinds of Push, one which pushed, and another which could push if it liked, but did not. I give the writer's words:—- Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone 131 "Energy is of two kinds, active and passive, or in the terms of science, kinetic and potential." I am bound to say that here I disliked my author's terms less than those of science. Kinetic sounds like Greek, and potential sounds like Latin, and I do not see why science should mix up two Mediterranean languages in order to express such simple meanings as going and still. At this point, I am glad to say, my teacher passed from words to things, and gave me some examples of the mysterious unpushing Push. They are a stone lying on the roof of a house, or on a mountain ; a clock wound up but not going; a bed of cOal, and a barrel of gunpowder. "This (he goes on) becomes kinetic when the stone falls, the clock goes, the coal burns, or the gunpowder ex- plodes." I shall take the first of these examples, because it is the simplest, and because I have met with it elsewhere. Of the others, I will only remark in passing, first, that there can be no such thing as a clock wound up but not going — the hands may not be going, but assuredly the spring is being worn out In Its effort to move the hands ; secondly, that there is no more energy, going or otherwise. In a bed of coal than In a feather bed, or a flower bed, or any other kind of bed — indeed the flower bed grows the tree that turns into the coal ; and thirdly, that there Is a far more mysterious energy In a barrel of beer than in a barrel of gunpowder ; for the barrel of 132 The New Word gunpowder can only blow a man to pieces, whereas the barrel of beer can make him see double ; and so we make that "passage from chemistry to con- sciousness " which the author pretended in his pref- ace we could not make. Ill I first met the stone lying on the roof of a house, in a little book on the Conservation of Energy, in which it was credited with Energy of Position. I had never understood very well what that could be, and I understood it no better when it was called Potential Energy. I understood that such a stone had weight ; but that was mere Force, or Pulling strength. What was this Latin energy; and how did the stone get it ; and how was a stone lying on the roof of a house or on a mountain, different from any other stone ? The answer seemed to be that the stone could fall, when its Latin Energy would become Greek. In other words, if you took away the house, or the mountain, the stone would fall, not by its own weight, but because it was being pushed downwards, just as if I should pick up a stone and throw it down. But if that were so, how was I to tell the difference between this Energy that made stones fall from the roofs of houses, and the Force that made you and me fall, and everything fall ? Newton would have Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone 133 been surprised, I fancy, to learn that his famous apple fell because of its energy. But perhaps apples on trees have not got Energy of Position; only apples on the roof of a house. I should have liked to ask these learned and dis- tinguished writers whether a stone lying, not on a roof, but on the ground, had any of this enchanted Energy ; or a stone lying, not on a mountain, but on a plain. And if not, how high must the stone be to get it. I wanted to know where Energy of Posi- tion left off, and Force began. If you should put a stone in a basket, and lower it halfway down a well, would that stone have Energy of Position ? It seemed to me that you might go right down to the middle of the earth, finding nothing but Energy of Position all the way. I was tempted to fear that there must be a mistake in the Story of Creation; and that it was really this Energy that inhered in, and could never be taken from, ponderable Matter. Thus the rigid and definite meaning of Force had turned out to be — Potential Energy. Perhaps the author has written here more truly than he knew. Yet I think it 'evident that to the trained mind there is something peculiar and fascinating about stones lying on the roof of a house ; they have a charm that other stones have not. The magic attri- bute is called by one of my authorities " advantage over a Force," namely the Force of Gravity. But then it seems to the untrained mind that all the tiles of the roof, and the house itself for that matter. 134 The New Word have the same advantage. The real advantage which the stone lying on the roof of a house has over a stone lying on the ground is your advantage, because it is easier for you to throw a stone down- wards than upwards. But in both of those cases it is your energy that moves the stone, with its own weight added in one case, and subtracted in the other. However that is just what science, speaking through the mouth of its priests, will not allow. According to them, when you throw the stone down there is some other power at work besides your push and the earth's pull; there is this mysterious Potential Energy which has been inside the stone all the time. It seems to be a scientific case of demon-possession. The demon of Latin Energy enters into some stones but not others. It prefers stones on the roof of a house if it can get them, but if not, it will take stones on mountains, just as the demons in the gospel, when they were cast out of the man, entered into the swine. It is remarkable that those demons behaved very much like Energetic ones, for they drove the swine violently down a steep place into the sea. I hope it is not irreverent to say that I do not believe in this Gadarene Energy. I do not see why it should be called in to do the work that Force is already doing. It would be just as easy to discover a kind of Force that would do what Energy — the Greek Energy that is energetic — does. Force is Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone 135 pulling things towards the middle of the earth. But everything does not get there. Some bits of Matter get in front and push the others back. And the power by which they do so is not Energy, it is Force of Position. I can even find another magic stone, as an example, a stone falling into a glass of water. As the stone falls down it will push the water up. Here is a plain case of Latin Force, the Force that does what you would expect energy to do. iv; The Story of Creation does not end here, unhap- pily. For its author, not content with his Potential Energy, which does what Force was doing, has gone on to invent yet another kind of energy, which does the whole work over again. He does this very easily. For just as he first divided Power into Force and Energy, and next divided Energy into going and stopping Energy, so now he goes on to divide the going, or, as one might say the Energetic Energy, again into three kinds, one of which does what Force and Unenergetic Energy both do. " Each kind of kinetic Energy has separating, combining and neutral motion. Example of Sep- arative — a stone thrown upwards ; example of Com- bining — a stone falling ; example of Neutral — a top spinning in the same place." 136 The New Word So, therefore, what really makes the stone fall is neither Force nor Latin Energy, but Greek Energy which is going the wrong way ; — shall I call it Anti- energetic Energy ? And I see no reason why the learned writer should not have carried his scientific terms, with their rigid and definite meanings, a good deal farther. For after the stone has fallen it is likely to bound up again, and that will clearly be an example of Redis- tributive, or Ultra-Energetic, Energy. And then it will be almost sure to fall again under the stress of Katasynthetic Energy ; unless it should happen to lodge on the roof of a house, and thereby offer a rare example of Extrapotential, not to say Extrava- gant, Energy. The whole of this laboured nonsense flows from a mistake at starting, the mistake of trying to think of strength as two rigid and definite and indestruc- tible strengths ; whereas strength is like a wave with two faces which are neither rigid nor definite nor indesti^uctible, but are forever changing injto one another, as the wave's crest becomes the trough, and the trough, the crest ; and Force and Energy are not two Powers, but two names for one Power, working To and Fro. The author of the Story of Creation has let his mind be tripped up by bad language. It is not worse language than that of other text-books ; I Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone 137 chose his book because it claimed to be better writ- ten than other books, to be indeed a schoolbook ; and language that would be bad in any book is damnable in a schoolbook. If the teacher's words trip up his own mind, what must they do to the child's mind ? Has not Topelius given us a glimpse in his delightful story of the litde boy fresh from his first geography lesson, trying to talk to the maid- servant in words like oblate spheroid and equator ? As soon as men, however learned and distin- guished, put their minds to sleep with Mediterranean words, they begin to gabble like little Waltei^. While they are talking in Babu, they are thinking like Andronikos of Rhodes. Let us see if we can understand them any better than they understand themselves. What they are really thinking of all this time is not a stone on a mountain, which of course has no more energy than the rest of the mountain, but a loose stone, in other words, a stone that is going to fall. The stone on the house-roof would never have become a scientific problem, unless it had slipped off the roof on to the ground. It is what happens when it reaches the ground that has caused all the trouble. The learned men have noticed that if you drop a glass test-tube on your laboratory floor it is more likely to break than if it had been on the floor all along. They have been struck by this interesting fact, which even children have noticed in connection with their toys ; and they have wanted 138 The New Word to account for it. And finding that they could not account for it, they have done what science in a diffi- culty always does, they have lulled their minds to sleep with spells from the Greek lexicon. Henoe all this demonology and witchcraft. Why does the fallen test-tube break ? Why does the falling stone descend as though it were being sucked downwards in a whirlpool — as perhaps it is ? Why does the stone on the higher slope of the mountain fall more heavily, as if its elastic had been further stretched ? It cannot be mere weight that does all this, because the falling stone is no heavier than any other stone. The answer of science is that there must be a demon in the stone ; and it is that demon who breaks the stone, or makes it bound up again, or, if the stone be flint and fall upon another flint, strikes out a spark — the demon in his fiery shape. If that be so, how did the demon get into the stone ? Here is the riddle they have got to read. Once upon a time a demon used to