the Alps, had grown more and more intimate. Gradually there came into
being a sort of hybrid Low Latin, the father of modern French and
the other Romance languages, which in many cases expressed Celtic
notions and feelings in Latin forms. So it was that new life came to
be breathed into some of the dead abstractions of Roman mythology;
but it was a very different life from the old one. Thus, the old
Roman deity Sors (Chance) had long ago developed for the Romans
into a purely abstract idea, referring to the drawing of lots. But
up in the north, far away from the capital, the ‘sortiarius’ became
a mysterious teller of fortunes by that means. As the years went
on, the syllables softened and smoothed and shortened themselves,
until they became the old French ‘sorcier’ from which ‘sorcerie’ was
formed, and so our English _sorcery_. It is strange to think how far
this word has travelled from its origin; and in the work of a modern
poet we find it travelling even farther, changing from a process into
a sort of mysterious realm:

      Heart-sick of his journey was the Wanderer;
        Foot-sore and sad was he;
      And a Witch who long had lurked by the wayside,
        Looked out of sorcery....

It was much the same with ‘Fata’. For the Romans themselves the
old goddesses called the Fata, or _Fates_, turned quickly into an
abstracted notion of destiny. But contact with the dreamy Celts
breathed new life into their nostrils, and ‘Fata’ in Late Latin
became spiritual once more. The sharp sounds were softened and
abraded until they slipped imperceptibly into Old French ‘fée’
(Modern English _fay_), and so _fa-ery_ and _fairy_. _Demon_ is the
result of a similar metamorphosis.

Now in dealing with mythology nothing is more misleading than to
compare the gods of different nations, assuming that those who
have etymologically similar names meant the same thing to their
worshippers. For instance, it has been pointed out that the name
Tiu descends from a word which also developed elsewhere into Dyaus
and Zeus, but to suggest that Tiu was the “same god” as Zeus would
be quite meaningless. And it is the same with the other persons of
northern mythology, such as Thor, the thunder-god, from whom we
have _Thursday_, or Wotan (Odin) who taught men language and gave
up his eye in order to possess his beloved Fricka (_Wednesday_ and
_Friday_). There are many external resemblances, etymological and
otherwise, between this Teutonic mythology and the mythology of
Greece, but for the historical study of human consciousness it is the
differences between them which are really significant. Here there
is no room to consider either the resemblances or the differences,
except in so far as they are preserved for us in the words we use.
And we notice at once how small is the number of our words which
refer to the Teutonic myths. Where relics still remain they seem to
be either—like _elf_, _goblin_, _pixy_, _puck_, _troll_—the names of
the creatures themselves, still used but no longer felt to exist, or
else—like _cobalt_ and _nickel_, the names given by German miners to
demoniac spirits—they have lost all memory of their original meaning.

There are, of course, exceptions, such as _Easter_, from an old
Teutonic goddess of the spring, _Old Nick_ from ‘nicor’, a fabulous
sea-monster, and _nightmare_ from the demon Mara, while the concepts
_earth_ and _lie_ (untruth) may possibly have been brought to birth
in men’s minds by the divinities Erda and Loki. But compared with the
number of derivations from older myths these examples are practically
negligible. There is an accidental quality about them, and few have
entered very deeply into our language. The Aryan family was now
growing older and more firmly knit. While Slavs, Teutons, and Celts
were still uncivilized, their cousins, the Greeks and Romans, had
already developed an elaborate culture. Had the former been left
alone like the latter, their mythology, too, might in time have grown
down into the language. But that was not to be. The great Aryan
family did not lose touch long enough. When Rome came, and with her
Christianity, the missionaries naturally assured the believers in
Thor and Wotan that Thor and Wotan were not. And coming, as they
did, from a developed civilization, they not only ousted the old
Teutonic gods from the language, but brought with them a supply of
ready-made Greek and Latin words, many of which—did they but know
it—drew their peculiar shades of meaning from a pagan mythology which
they held in equal abhorrence. The classical gods and goddesses faded
so slowly into the thin air of abstract thought that the process was
hardly perceived, but the Nibelungs and Valkyries, the Siegfrieds and
Fafnirs of Teutonic myth, were doomed while they were still alive.
Thus our fathers beheld the death of Baldur with their own eyes, and
were awake during the twilight of the gods.

Of course, where the events of Teutonic myth and legend were
associated with a particular locality, they have left their mark in
the names of places. These, naturally enough, are found for the most
part in Germany. In Great Britain—apart from _Asgardby_, _Aysgarth_,
_Wayland Smith_, _Wansdyke_, _Wednesbury_, and some others—the
place-names that have come to us from pre-Christian religion are
principally Celtic, and are usually found—like _Cader Idris_, _Cader
Arthur_, _Arthur’s Seat_, _Kynance Cove_, ...—in Scotland, Wales,
and Cornwall. Apart from place-names, _galahad_ is a relic of Celtic
legend which has found a permanent place and a modern usage in the
language; and there may be one or two others. But not many. In
England the whole Celtic nation and language died early out of the
common consciousness, and it died even more suddenly than the persons
of Teutonic myth. This explains the freshness and delight which many
young writers of the last generation found in the language and legend
of Irish antiquity. To resuscitate, as Keats did, the invisible
beings of classical mythology was to dig down into the roots of our
present everyday outlook; to take part in the Celtic revival was to
feel that you were looking out on the world through an entirely new
window—or at any rate through one which had not been cleaned for
centuries.

We only owe one English word to the Slavonic myths, and that is
the unpleasant _vampire_, which was brought back from the East by
travellers in the eighteenth century.

The general relation between language and myth is, as the word
_myth_ (Greek ‘muthos’—word) suggests, almost unfathomable; but
before leaving the limited Aryan aspect, which is all we have had
space to touch on here, one interesting etymology ought to be
mentioned, which has sometimes been taken to conceal the whole root
and purpose of Aryan culture in the history of mankind. The Hindoos
look back to a great teacher called Manu. Whether this individual
himself, or his name, is historical or mythical is not particularly
important. Hindoo sacred language and literature reveal at any rate
a prehistoric _belief_ among certain classes of society that Manu
was the originator of their culture and religion. Now ‘manu’ is also
their word for _man_; and about this word, as it appears in the
different Aryan languages, there are two interesting points. The
first is that wherever it crops up it bears the double meaning of
‘human being’ and ‘member of the male sex’; the second that it is
thought to be cognate with the root ‘men’, implying ‘to think’, which
appears also in English _mind_, Latin ‘mens’,... We have seen that to
the external view one of the most remarkable characteristics in which
Aryans differed from the races they supplanted was their patriarchal
system. The etymology of the word _man_ suggests the inner reason for
this, for it hints at a dim consciousness among the Aryans that the
essential function of the human being—at any rate of the Aryan human
being—is to think.

Side by side with the conception of the human being as a “thinker”,
we find an instinctive feeling that the human race is especially
represented by its male portion. To the Aryan outlook, wherever we
find it, the human being is _man_, and God is God the Father. What
exotic matriarchies may have held sway before humanity began to
worship logic and masculinity we cannot say, for our language throws
light only on that tiny portion of humanity’s inner and outer history
which is the peculiar contribution of the Aryan races; and, in doing
so, it suggests that, in spite of their tendency towards monogamy
and a rigid family organization, the “subjection” of women has its
roots very deep in Aryan psychology. In this respect Greece and Rome
differed but little in essence from India and Persia. The impulse
towards a different conception of women, both in their own minds and
in the minds of men, which has been giving an increasing amount of
trouble to the European races for the last two thousand years, was
really, as we shall see, implanted in the Aryan outlook by foreign
religions.

CHAPTER VI

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

_Paper._ _Mystery._ _Idea._ _Analogy._ _Analysis._ _Logic._
_Quantity._ _Heresy._

The difference between Greek and Roman character, which is marked
so plainly by the way in which Aryan myths developed among the two
peoples and moulded the finer meanings of their languages, is evident
in many other English words besides those which we can actually
trace back to such myths. For instance, the Greek ‘scandalizein’
and the Latin ‘offendere’ both meant to ‘cause to stumble’, but for
us there is a subtle difference between _scandalize_ and _offend_;
for while _scandalize_ and _scandal_ merely hint at the liveliness
of an emotion, _offend_ and _offence_ convey a sober warning of its
probable results. ‘Discere’ in Latin and ‘mathein’ in Greek both
meant to ‘learn’; but the substantives which are derived from these
verbs have come down into our language, the one as _discipline_
and the other as _mathematics_. Rome turned instinctively to the
external, Greece to the inner world as a vehicle for the expression
of her impulses. And just as ‘learning’ for the Roman gradually
came to mean ‘learning to be a soldier’, so the ordinary Latin word
for ‘teacher’ (doctor) is now applied most commonly to a teacher
of physical health. And these two are not the only Latin words
which have hurried out of school in this way. ‘Magister’, for
instance, has exchanged the class-room for the police-court and
left behind the Greek ‘paidagόgos’ (pedagogue) to express the most
schoolmasterish kind of schoolmaster that can be imagined. Perhaps
the most significant of all is _school_ itself. Words for ‘teaching’
and ‘learning’ among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic
ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had
to borrow it, like ‘schola’, from Greece. Yet, curiously enough,
the original meaning of ‘schole’ in Greek was not _school_ at all.
What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and
disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to
us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin ‘schola’, from which
we have taken _school_. But to a Greek all this had been merely the
natural way of spending his spare time. ‘Scholē’ was the common Greek
word for ‘leisure.’

Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and
philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as
sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on
the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century
B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a
developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and
thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own
tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in
the night. And in their writings the Greek philosophers themselves
allude to sources from which they may well have taken the seeds of
abstract thought. References are made as early as Pythagoras and as
late as Plato to the priestly wisdom of Egypt; and when we remember
that the time which elapsed between the rise of Egyptian civilization
and the birth of Homer is about as long as the period between
Homer’s day and our own, we need not be surprised. Moreover, we
find some evidence of the debt to Egypt in our language. Two almost
indispensable prerequisites for the development of philosophy are
the art of writing and something to write upon. It is interesting,
therefore, to observe that our word _alphabet_ comes to us, through
Latin, from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet—‘alpha’ and
‘beta’—which are themselves in the first place Phoenician words.
Greek mythology looked back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, as the founder
of the alphabet, and it is now believed that the Semitic Phoenicians
did indeed bring writing into Greece, and that they themselves took
it from the ‘hieratic script’ or priestly writing of Egypt. _Jot_,
in the phrase ‘jot or tittle’, is an English form invented by the
translators of the Authorised Version for the Greek letter ‘iota’,
which is also of Phoenician origin. _Bible_, on the other hand,
is from the Greek ‘biblos’, which meant ‘the inner bark of the
papyrus’, and so ‘a book’; and _paper_ was borrowed by the Angles
and Saxons from Latin ‘papyrus’, itself a transliteration of the
Greek ‘papuros’, meaning an Egyptian rush or flag, of which writing
material was made. Both these words are thought to be of Egyptian
origin.

External evidence tells us that already, a thousand years before
the Aryans began to move, Egypt had mapped out the stars in
constellations and divided the zodiac into twelve signs, and we are
told by Aristotle that the Egyptians “excelled in mathematics”.
But if there was among the priests a “philosophy” in our sense of
the word, we know little of it—perhaps because truth, unadorned by
myth, was regarded in those days as something dangerous, to be kept
religiously secret from all save those who were specially prepared
to receive it. This idea of inner religious teachings, guarded
carefully from the ignorant and impure, survived in great force
among the Greeks themselves, and we come across references in their
philosophy to institutions called _Mysteries_, which were evidently
felt by them to lie at the core of their national and intellectual
life. Thus that hard-worked little English trisyllable, without
which minor poetry and sensational journalism could barely eke out a
miserable existence, has a long and dignified history, into which we
must pry a little farther if we wish to understand how Greek thought
and feeling have passed over into our language.

We have adopted from Latin the word _initiate_, which meant ‘to admit
a person to these Mysteries’, and the importance attached to secrecy
is shown by the fact that ‘muein’, the Greek for ‘to _initiate_‘,
meant originally ‘to keep silent’. From it the substantive
‘mu-sterion’ was developed, thence the Latin ‘mysterium’, and so
the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded
so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very
little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas
attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they
revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances,
and secondly, that the “initiate” attained immortality in a sense
different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through
symbolized dying in order to be “born again”, and when it was over,
he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what
had risen again was immortal and eternal. Such were the associations
which St. Paul had in mind, and which he called to the imaginations
of his hearers, when he made use of the impressive words: “Behold,
I tell you a mystery!” And it is the same whenever the word occurs
elsewhere in the New Testament and in writings of that period, for
it retained its technical meaning and associations well on into the
Christian era.[26]

The first man—as far as we know—to call himself a ‘philosophos’, or
lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras, who applied the label to himself and
his followers. _Philosophy_ among the Pythagoreans, with its emphasis
on astronomy, geometry, and number, was still decidedly Egyptian;
but gradually, from these starry beginnings, the Greek mind built
up a vast, independent edifice of thought and language. The words
that have come into our language directly from Greek philosophy are
numerous enough, but if we were to add those which have reached us in
Latinized form, and finally those words which are actually Latin, but
which take their whole meaning from the Greek thought they were used
to translate, we should fill several pages with the mere enumeration
of them. The list would spread itself all over the dictionary,
varying from such highly technical terms as _homonym_ and _noumena_
to common ones like _individual_, _method_, and _subject_.

Perhaps a more accurate term than Greek philosophy would be “Greek
thought”, for Greek thinkers took some time to arrive at the
distinction, so familiar to us, between philosophy and other branches
of study such as history. The Greek word ‘historia’ meant at first
simply ‘knowledge gained by inquiry’, and some of the words which
follow are first found in the works of Hesiod and Herodotus.

Among the words which have come to us from earlier Greek thought are
_cosmos_[27]—the name applied by the Pythagoreans to the universe,
which they perceived as a “shapely” and harmonious whole—geometrical
terms such as _pyramid_ (probably of Egyptian origin), _hypotenuse_
and _isosceles_; many of the technical terms of music, as _chord_,
_harmony_, _melody_, _tone_; of literature: _hyperbole_, _metaphor_,
_rhetoric_, _syntax_, _trope_; and a host of common words of
wider significance, such as _academy_, _analogy_, _aristocracy_,
_astronomy_, _cosmogony_, _critic_, _democracy_, _eclipse_,
_economic_, _enthusiasm_, _ethical_, _genesis_, _grammatical_,
_hypothesis_, _mathematical_, _method_, _phenomenon_, _physical_,
_poetic_, _politics_, _rhythm_, _theology_, _theory_. Of those
which were translated into Latin by Cicero and other Latin writers,
and possibly by Greek schoolmasters in Rome, we may mention _air_,
_element_, _essence_, _ideal_, _individual_, _quality_, _question_,
_science_, _species_, and _vacuum_, together with most of the
terminology of grammar, such as _adjective_, _case_, _gender_,
_noun_, _number_, _verb_,... _Type_ comes from ‘tupos’, the name of
the preliminary sketch made by a Greek painter before he started on
the work itself.

In a sense, the thought of the earlier Greek philosophers may be said
to have reached its consummation, its very fullest expression, in
the writings of Plato. Among the words which are first found in his
works are the Greek originals of _analogy_, _antipodes_, _dialectic_,
_enthusiasm_, _mathematical_, _synthesis_, and _system_; while he
imparted a new and special meaning to many others like _method_,
_musical_, _philosopher_, _sophist_, _theory_, _type_, _irony_ (the
name he gave to Socrates’s peculiar method of simulating ignorance
in order to impart knowledge), and, of course, _idea_ and _ideal_.
Before Plato used it, the word ἰδέα meant simply the form or
semblance of anything. It is connected with ‘idein’, ‘to see’[28],
and when Cicero came to translate it, he had to use the Latin
word ‘species’, which had a similar meaning, being connected with
‘specere’, ‘to see’ and ‘speculum’, ‘a mirror’. To-day _idea_ does
not mean to us quite what ἰδέα did to Plato; but tracing the whole
history of the word, we can see how it was Plato who, by his creative
use of these four letters, began to make it possible for us to get
outside our thoughts and look at them, to separate our “ideas” about
things from the things themselves.

Thus, it was not only Greek words of which he was to alter the
meanings, nor only Greek and Latin words. _Love_ and _good_, for
instance, are neither Greek nor Latin, and _beauty_ is only Latin
remotely, yet the spirit of Plato really works more amply in them,
and in a thousand others bearing on the presence or absence of
these qualities, than it does in such specifically Platonic terms
as _idea_ and _dialectic_. Let us try and trace the origin of some
of the meanings which are commonly attached to the word _love_. As
in the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two
fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid
behind external phenomena. Out of this Plato’s lucid mind brought
to the surface of Europe’s consciousness the stupendous conception
that all matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual “types” or
“ideas”—eternal principles which, so far from being abstractions,
are the only real Beings, which were in their place before matter
came into existence, and which will remain after it has passed away.
The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality.
The two were complementary. Just as it was only the immortal part
of man which could get into touch with the eternal secret behind
the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving to
contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part
of himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question
of how to rise from the contemplation of the transient to the
contemplation of the eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates
evolved that other great conception—perhaps even more far-reaching in
its historical effects—that love for a sensual and temporal object
is capable of gradual metamorphosis into love for the invisible and
eternal. It is not only in the New Testament and the Prayer Book, in
the _Divine Comedy_, Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_, and all great Romantic
poetry that the results of this thinking are to be seen. Through the
Church and the poets to the dramatist and the novelist, and through
them to the common people—there is no soulful drawing-room ballad,
no cinema-plot, no day-dream novelette or genteel text on the wall
of a cottage parlour through which, every time the hackneyed word is
brought into play, the authentic spirit of Plato does not peep for a
moment forlornly out upon us.

In the latter days of Plato’s life there came to the “Academy” where
he taught a young man from Stagira, in Macedonia. His name was
Aristotle, and after he left Plato he became for a time the tutor of
Alexander the Great. In spite of their proximity in time and space,
the difference between Plato’s method of thought and the Aristotelian
or _peripatetic_ system can hardly be exaggerated. While Plato had
concentrated his intellectual effort on mapping out what we should
now call the “inner” world of human consciousness; starting from the
point of view of ancient tradition and myth, and working outward;
relating his thoughts to one another in accordance, as it were, with
their own inherent qualities; and deducing the sense-world from the
spiritual world; Aristotle turned to the acquisition of knowledge
about the outer world of matter and energy—that is to say, that
part of the world which can be apprehended by the five senses and
the brain. The two philosophers were alike in their emphasis on the
importance of cultivating immortality—or rather of “immortalling”
(for they used a special verb which we have lost), but otherwise
there were few resemblances indeed. To Plato the soul of the universe
had seemed inseparable from his own soul, and natural phenomena
such as the revolutions of the planets had interested him rather as
tangible, outward pictures of the life within that soul. To Aristotle
the world outside himself was interesting more for its own sake.
Plato had looked up to “Ideas”—real Beings with an existence of their
own, which stood behind physical phenomena rather than within them.
Aristotle deliberately attacked this doctrine, maintaining that the
Ideas were immanent; they could not have existed before visible
Nature, nor could they have any being apart from it; and they could
only be arrived at, he said, by investigating Nature itself. When
Aristotle laid down his pen after writing the _Metaphysics_, the
word _idea_ had taken a long step towards its present meaning.

Thus in Aristotle’s imagination the two worlds, outer and inner, met
and came into contact in quite a new way. The mind was, as it were,
put at the absolute disposal of matter; it ceased to brood on what
arose from within, and turned its attention outwards. The result of
this was, of course, an enormous increase in the amount of knowledge
concerning the material processes of the outer world. But that was
not the first result. For, curiously enough, the first result was
a pronounced hardening and sharpening of the mind’s own outlines.
Struggling to fit herself, as into a glove, to the processes of cause
and effect observed in physical phenomena, the mind became suddenly
conscious of her own shape. She was astonished and delighted. She had
discovered _logic_. The actual Greek word ‘logic’ (ή λογική τέχνη) is
first found with its present meaning in Cicero, but he is speaking
of Aristotle; the thing itself and the technique of it was the
invention of Aristotle, and it was Aristotle who first used the word
_syllogism_ in its modern sense.

Perhaps the most significant of all those words which are first
found in Aristotle’s treatise on _Logic_ is _analytic_. Here is
indeed a new word made to express a new kind of thinking. _Energy_,
_entelechy_, _ethics_, _physiology_, and _synonym_, are further
examples of words which, as far as we know, were actually created
by Aristotle, while we owe _metaphysics_ to the accident of his
having treated that subject after (‘meta’) his treatise on _Physics_.
_Axiom_, _category_, _mechanics_, _organic_, _physics_, and
_synthesis_ are Greek words which take their modern meanings chiefly
from Aristotle; but his emphasis on the concrete and his constant
gravitation towards a kind of knowledge which might turn out to be
practically useful evidently made him a favourite with the Roman
mind. Consequently many of his words have come down to us translated
into Latin. Among those which we can actually trace are _absolute_,
_actual_, _definition_, _equivocal_, _induction_, _instance_,
_moral_, _potential_, _property_, _quintessence_, _subject_,[29]
_substance_, _virtual_, and the grammatical term _particle_; of the
plentiful number which have flown more indirectly from his mind we
may mention _conceit_ and _concept_, _deduction_, _difference_,
_experiment_, _principle_, and _universal_. In _quantity_ (a
translation of the Greek ‘posotes’—‘how-muchness’—and seemingly
formed by Aristotle on the analogy of Plato’s ‘poiotēs’, from which
we have _quality_) we can perhaps see the beginning of that interest
in the _calculable_ aspect of the objects of the visible world from
which the exact sciences have arisen. The human mind had now begun
to weigh and measure, to examine and compare; and that weighing and
measuring has gone on—with intervals—for twenty-three centuries.

Thus, Platonic philosophy fades from our view in the person of
Socrates, proving by _analogy_ the immortality of the soul of man and
the soul of the world; and the fatal chill has scarcely risen to his
heart when Aristotelian philosophy comes over the horizon, vigorously
investigating by _analysis_ the structure and composition of the
body of man and the body of the world. Thanks to his friendship with
Alexander, Aristotle himself had hitherto unparalleled opportunities
for collecting information on every conceivable subject. Knowledge,
often inaccurate enough, was garnered from the four quarters of the
civilized world, old manuscripts were edited and compared, and, above
all, Nature herself was observed in a way which was quite new. After
his death his followers went on putting his methods into practice.
Side by side with the weighing and measuring went naming. And so to
the three or four hundred years which followed we owe a good deal
of the technical terminology of our arts and sciences. It was at
this time, for instance, that botany first developed into a science.
Many of the names of our commonest wildflowers can be traced back
to writings of the period, and the following examples are all taken
from the first half of the alphabet: _aconite_, _amaranth_, _balsam_,
_balm_, _box_, _calamint_, _celandine_, _cherry_, _chestnut_,
_chicory_, _germander_, _heliotrope_, _marjoram_, _melilot_.
Moreover, nearly all the technical terms of botany are Greek, and
though most of them, including the word _botany_ itself, were created
later, writers of this period may be said to have given the lead with
such learned labels as _calyx_, _perianth_, and _gymnosperm_.

When we are “dating” a word in this way, however, we must remember
that only a fragment of the whole of Greek literature has come down
to us. Thus we cannot be sure, because a flower-name first occurs
in a writer of the Alexandrian period, that it was actually created
by him or his contemporaries. _Anemone_, _asparagus_, _bugloss_,
_celery_, _centaury_, _clematis_, _coriander_, _crocus_, _lily_,
_medlar_, and _mint_ all go right back to Classical Greek, while
_petal_ and possibly _spore_ are botanical terms which were already
in use. On the whole, the Alexandrians probably collected, arranged,
and renewed the meanings of more words than they actually created.

This is even truer in the case of medicine. The _analytical_ method
of thought led naturally in Alexandria to the actual dissection of
bodies, living and dead. Aristotle himself is still regarded as the
founder of comparative _anatomy_ (cutting up), and it was he who
first used this word in its medical sense. The peculiar meaning of
the word _empirical_, moreover, derives from a set of physicians
who held that practice was the one thing necessary in their art. It
might be thought that with this foreshadowing of modern “methods”
there would have been a great influx of new information and new
terminology. In actual fact we find that the Greek words (and their
name is legion) in the terminology of medical science were either
created later by the different European peoples, or else they
appear in the works of Hippocrates, a physician who had a large
practice in Attica before Plato was born. Among the words found in
Hippocrates are the Greek originals of _arthritis_, _bronchial_,
_catalepsy_, _catarrh_, _diarrhoea_, _dropsy_, _dysentery_,
_epidemic_, _erysipelas_, _haemorrhage_, _hypochondriac_, _hysteria_,
_nephritis_, _ophthalmia_, _paregoric_, _phlebotomy_, _phthisis_,
_quinsy_, _rheum_, _sciatica_, and _hypochondriac_; while _apoplexy_
is particularly interesting because its Latin translation,
‘sideratio’, shows that it originally had the sense of ‘star-struck’
or ‘planet-struck’. _Crisis_ is Hippocrates’s name for the crucial
point at which a disease takes a turn for the worse or the better.
It came to England with this meaning in the sixteenth century, and
was gradually extended to cover first “the conjunction of stars on
which this ‘crisis’ depended”, and then “any critical situation”.
_Anaemia_, however, and possibly _enteric_, seem to have been first
used by Aristotle.

The centre of all this furious intellectual activity was the city
of Alexandria. Nor was it confined to scientific spheres; for the
results of religious and philosophical developments which now took
place in and around the cosmopolitan city in the north of Egypt were,
if anything, more far-reaching than those of empirical science.
Indeed, it was from this point in history that theology and science
first[30] began to be two separate studies, science following
eagerly in the footsteps of Aristotle and religion brooding over the
profundities of Platonic philosophy and saturating them with feeling.
Between Aristotle and Plato is the great divide from which flowed in
two different directions two separate streams, as it were, of human
outlook; and just as the modern European, whether or no he possesses
any genuine scientific knowledge, can trace the general shape and
method of his thinking back to the former, so, whether or no he calls
himself a Christian, he must trace much of what he regards as his
ordinary “feelings” back to the latter.

For the stream of Platonic thought was now to join itself with
other influences coming, for the most part, from farther East. One
of the few Egyptian words which have come down into our language
is _ammonia_. It is the name of an alkali which was said to have
been found near a certain spot in the Libyan desert, where there
was an Egyptian temple to Zeus Ammon, and it will serve to remind
us that Alexander the Great was deeply under the influence of the
Egyptian priesthood when, in 332 B.C., after his brilliant career
of conquests, he visited this temple to pay his devotions before
founding the city of Alexandria. We find, therefore—as might be
expected—a strong Egyptian element blending with what was Greek
in the thoughts and feelings that began to ferment in the more
enterprising Alexandrian bosoms. And that is not all. A third
influence was added. In the third century B.C. a certain capable
ruler of Alexandria invited a body of Egyptian Jews to translate
the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The Septuagint, as it was called,
was so successful that Greek soon became the official language of
the Hebrew religion. Thus, the Greek version found its way into the
synagogues of Palestine, and it must have been the Greek version
which was read by Jesus of Nazareth.

Without making a study of the Septuagint, it is easy to perceive how
passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold
and clear-cut Greek words, until classical Greek had grown slowly
into the “Hellenistic” Greek of the New Testament. Seeking for words
to convey such notions as ‘sin’, ‘righteousness’, ‘defilement’,
‘abomination’, ‘ungodly’, the Jewish translators had to do the best
they could with vocables which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied
something more like ‘folly’, ‘integrity’, ‘dirt’, ‘objectionable
practice’, ‘ignorant’. Any number of such examples could be found.
The harmless Greek word ‘eidōlon’ (_idol_), which had formerly meant
any sort of mental image, including a mere mental fancy, suddenly
found itself selected from its fellows to be spit upon and cast into
outer darkness. ‘Paradeisos’, on the other hand—the park of a Persian
nobleman—was spirited away, as though by the four Djinns of Arabian
legend, first to the Garden of Eden and then to the heavens. It may
well be that in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, more
than anywhere else, is crystallized out for us that process which
went on in and about Alexandria for three or four hundred years, and
which remained almost unaffected by the inclusion of the city within
the Roman Empire. Language never ceases growing, but an important
document such as this is like a cross-section of its stem. In it we
can see clearly what an enormous part that Alexandrian mingling of
Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek conceptions of the Almighty has played
in determining the subtler part of the words we use every day—in
building up those delicate associations of which few of us ever
become fully conscious, but which we all instinctively bring into
play when we are speaking under the influence of emotion.

And later, in the work of a writer like Philo the Jew, who lived and
wrote about A.D. 50, we can discern some of the religious activities
which had followed the translation of the Septuagint; how the Jew,
with his expectation of the Messiah, the Egyptian devotee, with his
reverence for Horus—the child of a virgin mother, Isis—who died and
rose again as the sun-god Osiris, and the Greek, with his elaborated
Platonic doctrine, met together, speaking Greek; how innumerable
sects, ascetic and licentious, philosophical and superstitious,
wise and foolish, had been springing up and dying down all over
the Alexandrian world—all of them, to whatever extravagant lengths
they may have carried their philosophies and their dreams, working
unconsciously at the long task of altering the meaning, the emotional
colour, the evocative power of common Greek words. Concepts such as
‘God’, ‘world’, ‘love’, ‘soul’, ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘spirit’, ‘self’,
and a hundred others were first resolved by the chemical action upon
them of similar concepts from the minds of other nations and races,
and then they began to be built up anew and to take on the form
in which they are presented, as he learns to speak, to the modern
European child.

Greek philosophy had developed in many directions since Plato’s day.
We hear of _Cynics_, _Sceptics_, _Epicureans_, _Stoics_, all of which
words originated as the names of different schools of philosophy.
The last two, whose doctrines were to take such a firm hold on the
educated classes of imperial Rome, have given us one or two important
words. Apart from their moral teachings, they appear to have directed
their philosophical inquiries more especially to the point of
contact between thoughts and things or, as we should say, between
objective and subjective. ‘Phantasia’, from which we have _fantasy_
and _fancy_, was a popular word with the Stoics, who gave it much
of its modern meaning; _notion_ and _comprehension_ are Cicero’s
translations of Stoic terms; while _image_ in the sense of ‘mental
image’ and _spectre_ are Latin renderings of Epicurean expressions.
Epicurus had founded his doctrines on those of Democritus, and
these last two words were employed by Cicero and one of his friends
in discussing that philosopher’s odd theory of perception. He had
held that the surfaces of all objects are continually throwing off
‘images’—a kind of films or husks which float about in space and at
last penetrate to the mind through the pores of the body. Both the
Stoic ‘phantasia’ and this Democritan word ‘eidōlon’, which Cicero
translated by ‘imago’, seem to have contributed a part of their
meaning to the later ‘imaginatio’, from which, of course, we have
taken our _imagination_.

It was the Stoics, too, who gradually burdened the little Greek
word ‘logos’ with the weight of a whole metaphysical theory of the
relation between spirit and matter. ‘Logos’ in Greek had always
meant both ‘word’ and the creative faculty in human beings—‘Reason’,
as it is often translated—which expresses itself by making and using
words. The Stoics were the first to identify this human faculty
with that divine Mind (Nous) which earlier Greek philosophers had
perceived as pervading the visible universe. They were the first
to make the progressive incarnation of thought in audible sound a
part of the creative working of God in the world; and it is to them
accordingly, with their deep sense of the divine significance of
words and their origin, that we owe the word _etymology_, the first
half of which is composed of a poetical Greek adjective meaning
‘true’. Though he had never heard of Christianity, Philo, importing
into the theory a certain Semitic awfulness, actually called this
mysterious ‘logos’ the ‘only-begotten-son’.

It must not be imagined that the majority of Alexandrian citizens
were interested in these matters. Israel and Egypt resembled Greece
in this, that they had in the first place their inner religious
traditions, and in the second their stock of popular myth and
legend. And just as, in Athens, the average citizen had accepted
the teachings of ordinary Greek mythology, without knowing anything
at all about the thoughts of contemporary philosophy, so was it in
Alexandria, where the majority lived a life of easy-going frivolity
and dissipation, paying to the gods the regular outward observances
demanded by the calendar, and otherwise not bothering to think much
about them until they were frightened or ill. Throughout the course
of history the many have accepted, as far as they were able, the
thoughts which have been, made for them by the few in the past, and
the few have gone on constructing the opinion of the future.

In Palestine Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died. As the
years passed by, an increasing number of sages and religious teachers
began to agree among themselves that recently something had actually
occurred which had before only been talked about or erroneously
believed to have occurred. Certain of the Jews, for instance,
admitted that their Messiah had now come and gone. Egyptians and
followers of the Egyptian cults were persuaded that a real Horus
had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris. Some
of the more forward-looking among those who had been initiated into
the Mysteries felt that what had so often been enacted dramatically
within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way
on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for
all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal
life. Thus, those who had not been initiated—the poorer classes,
most of the women, and the slaves—had a joyous feeling that at last
the Mysteries had been revealed, that “many things which were hid
had been made plain”. And some students of Platonic philosophy could
admit that this might be true, that henceforth those who could not
rise to the contemplation of the eternal in Nature might yet win
immortality by contemplating the life and death of Jesus. For they
could see in Christ one who had first taught in a new and simpler
way, and had then Himself demonstrated, a truth which nearly every
one of the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, had been trying
to say all their lives—that, in order to achieve immortality, it is
necessary to “die” to this world of the senses and the appetites,
and that he who thus “dies” is already living in eternity during
his bodily life and will continue to do so after his bodily death.
“Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it.” Lastly, followers of
Philo and his school saw in the Christ the Logos itself incarnate in
human form, the Word made Flesh.

Such were some of the numerous ideas and emotions which had become
embedded in the Greek language by the time that, somewhere about a
hundred years after His death, the life of Christ was written by the
four Evangelists and others. Out of these ideas and emotions arose,
in the first place, the dogma and ritual of the Catholic Church,
and in the second place a great part of the ordinary thoughts and
feelings and impulses of will which flourish in the bosoms of modern
Europeans and Americans.

Very early in its career the leaders of the infant Church must have
realized two things—firstly, that those who, like the Gnostics, were
passionately interested in philosophical and mystical interpretations
of the life of Christ, not only differed very widely among
themselves, but also often paid little attention to that personal
life of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, whose sweetness was
beginning to bind men together with marvellous new ties; secondly,
that the simple and ignorant people to whom, according to the
Gospels, Jesus addressed Himself almost exclusively, would be quite
incapable of grasping these interpretations. If Christianity was to
spread, it must be simplified. For these reasons the leading spirits
gradually set their faces more and more rigidly against those long
and laboriously evolved ideas which had actually created the language
of the Gospels. And no doubt there were other reasons too: the most
shocking immorality was rampant everywhere, and in those days opinion
and behaviour were more closely bound up with one another. Moreover,
in all but the strongest natures an extreme love of moral purity is
often accompanied by an extreme love of exerting authority.

Therefore incredibly industrious Fathers busied themselves in editing
and selecting from the literature and traditions of a hundred
semi-Christian sects. Doctrines which had taken a very strong hold
on many imaginations were accepted, given the orthodox stamp, and
incorporated in the canon; others were rejected, and, being pursued
at first with a mixture of genuine logic, misrepresentation, and
invective, and, as the Church grew stronger, with active persecution,
gradually vanished away or dwindled down to obscure apocryphal
manuscripts, some of which have only been partially translated within
the last twenty-five years. Thus, for more than ten centuries,
creeds and dogmas, to the accompaniment of immense intellectual and
physical struggles, were petrified into ever clearer and harder
forms. Christianity became identified with Catholic doctrine,
and, soon after the Church’s authority was backed by that of the
Roman Empire, any other form of it might be punished by death amid
excruciating tortures. The stigma which still attaches to the
ordinary Greek word for ‘choosing’ (_heresy_) is a fair indication of
the zeal with which the early Popes and Bishops set about expunging
from the consciousness of Christendom all memory of its history and
all understanding of its external connections; while their success
may be judged from the fact that as late as the last century an
Englishman of public position who should have openly interpreted the
Old Testament as Origen, for instance, interpreted it in the third
century, would have incurred serious disabilities.

Consequently it is not surprising if we have found ourselves digging
in somewhat unfamiliar places. Later on, the Catholic outlook spanned
the whole imagination of the Middle Ages like the vaulted nave of
a vast cathedral. By laying bare some of the foundations of that
outlook and applying to them a little knowledge of the histories of
words and their meanings, we can do something which we could hardly
do else but by a long and difficult study of the arcana of the Dark
Ages, their Neoplatonism, their monastic traditions, their Schools,
and their cults of the Virgin. We can, in some degree, be present
with our own imaginations at the building of the cathedral. And this
is worth while, not only for its own sake, but because, as that huge
edifice slowly ruined, we filched its worn but shapely stones and
began to build up with them those bridges of feeling which join us
to-day to our husbands and our wives, our children, our lovers, our
friends.

CHAPTER VII

DEVOTION

_Passion._ _Lady._ _Love-longing._ _Conscience._ _Inquisition._
_Authority._ _Individual._ _Influence._

  Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught
  also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at
  once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus
  Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these
  views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became
  the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry
  and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations
  with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the
  figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions.
  The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes
  included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or
  religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself
  a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal
  and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great
  part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the
  consequences of these events.

  ... The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love
  became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
  It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
  with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers;
  so that the earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner
  world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became
  wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the
  wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its
  creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art:
  _Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse._—SHELLEY: _A Defence of
  Poetry_.

Apuleius and other imperial writers have left us a picture, gaudy and
fascinating enough, of the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire. In
their works the pomps and frivolities of that decaying world pass in
procession before our eyes; the tenuous old Roman gods and goddesses
rub shoulders in the popular imagination, on the one hand, with
powerful relics of the Egyptian Mysteries, and on the other—already
in the second century—with full-blooded medieval witches and demons;
while the polite scepticism and graceful dissipation of the educated
raises its eyebrows and shrugs its shoulders at the credulous
fervours of Christians and their numerous fellow-cranks. There are
only one or two common English words which throw any direct light
on this period. _Martyr_, the Greek word for a ‘witness’, and so ‘a
witness to the truth’, tells its story of the earlier days of the
Church, as _heresy_ of the later. The name _Constantinople_ has a
double historical significance. It bears the name of the first Roman
emperor who recognized Christianity as the established religion of
the empire, and it marks the removal in A.D. 330 of the imperial
capital from Italy to the shores of the Bosphorus. That removal
foreshadowed the inevitable splitting up of the Roman Empire into an
eastern and a western half, a schism which survives formally to-day
in the difference between the Greek and the Catholic Church. It may
be called the starting-point of European history.

For Christian Rome we can go to Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ and
Kingsley’s _Hypatia_, while Merejkowski, in his _Death of the Gods_,
has attempted to paint, in addition, something of the _inner_ surface
of that world, to depict the huge shadowy movements that were taking
place deep down in the wills and imaginations of men. Powerful
movements they must have been. For now the meanings and associations
of all those Latin words which were subsequently to come into our
language in the various ways described in Chapter III were being
built up or altered, not only by outstanding figures such as St.
Jerome and St. Augustine, and the lawyer Emperor Justinian, but also
by insignificant Roman legionaries and barbarian private soldiers,
by outlandish scholars and studious, dreaming monks. In particular,
an increasing number of the profound and manifold concepts which
had been laboriously worked into the Greek language in the manner
suggested in the last chapter were gradually decanted, either by
actual translation or by more indirect methods, into Latin syllables.
Thus, side by side with the Septuagint, there came into being the
Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, finished
by St. Jerome in A.D. 405, and still the received text of the Roman
Catholic Church. But it did not stand alone like the Septuagint.
Many volumes of ecclesiastical literature are extant through which
we could trace the gradual importation into the Latin language of
the new meanings. For example, at the end of the second century—no
doubt with the object of distinguishing the Christian Mystery of
incarnation, death, and rebirth from its many rivals—Tertullian fixed
the Latin ‘sacramentum’ as the proper translation of ‘musterion’
instead of ‘mysterium’, which would probably have disappeared
altogether had not Jerome restored it to partial use. Thus one word,
as is often the case, split up into two, _sacrament_ remaining
within the Church to express, among other things, part of the old
technical meaning of _mystery_, while _mystery_ itself, freed
from one half of its associations, moved outside and quickly grew
wider and vaguer. ‘Passio’, the Latin word for _suffering_, used
in ecclesiastical literature for the death of Jesus on the cross,
gradually extended in a similar way the scope of its pregnant new
meaning, and we find already in Tertullian a derivative ‘compassio’.
From Latin, largely through French, such new meanings found their way
into English, and it was these, as we shall see, more than anything
else which transformed the country between the Norman Conquest and
the fifteenth century into something like the England which we know
to-day.

For if we omit the Dark Ages, and, turning suddenly from the
civilization of classical Greece and Rome, raise the curtain on,
say, thirteenth-century England, we are struck by a remarkable
transformation. An attempt has been made in previous chapters to
trace the general changes of meaning in certain key-words of human
thought and feeling, such as _God_ and _love_, _life_ and _death_,
_heaven_ and _hell_,... When we reach medieval Europe, it is
necessary to add a new class of key-word altogether. Let us look at a
fifteenth-century English carol:

      I sing of a maiden
        That is makeless;[31]
      King of all kings
        To her son she ches.[32]

      He came al so still
        There his mother was,
      As dew in April
        That falleth on the grass.

      He came al so still
        To his mother’s bour,
      As dew in April
        That falleth on the flour.

      He came al so still
        There his mother lay,
      As dew in April
        That falleth on the spray.

      Mother and maiden
        Was never none but she;
      Well may such a lady
        Goddes mother be.

In such a poem we have once more a kind of cross-section of the
growth of European outlook. Between its lines we seem to be able to
hear, as in a dream, the monotonous intonings of Egyptian priests,
the quiet words of Socrates in the Academy, and the alert speculative
hum of the Alexandrian world. It is so graceful that for the moment
it seems as though all these things, with all the pillages and
massacres and crucifixions and vast imperial achievements of Rome,
had been conspiring together merely to load the homely old Teutonic
word ‘loaf-kneader’ with new semantic significance, to transform it
into that mystery and symbol in the imaginations of men, a _lady_.

The medieval lyric, as it gradually loses its exclusive preoccupation
with ecclesiastical subjects, becomes more and more concerned with
woman, and concerned with her in a new way. Through the poetry of
Italy, where the Renaissance was already stirring, the troubadour
literature of France, and that strange “Rose” tradition which is
preserved to us in Chaucer’s translation of the _Roman de la Rose_,
there grew up during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a small
special vocabulary defining the landmarks in that new region of the
imagination which the poets, and even the scholars, of Europe were
just discovering; we might call it the region of devotional love.
Indeed, it was more than a vocabulary; it developed at one time
into a sort of miniature mythology, for the various conflicting
elements in a lady’s disposition which the lover had to meet with and
overcome were actually personified, ‘Danger’ being a kind of mixture
of modesty and haughtiness—an ill-omened creature whom ‘Pity’ or
‘Mercy’, if the lover was fortunate, finally put to rout:

      Al founde they Daunger for a tyme a lord,
      Yet Pitee, thurgh his stronge gentle might
      Foryaf[33] and made Mercy passen Ryght.

In these three lines from Chaucer’s _Legend of Good Women_ the four
Anglo-French words _Danger_, _Pity_, _Gentle_, and _Mercy_ are all
Latin terms whose forms had altered, and whose meanings had received
the Christian stamp during the Dark Ages. _Pity_ comes from ‘pietas’
(compare _piety_); _gentle_ from ‘gentilis’ meaning ‘of the same
family’ and later ‘of noble birth’; and _mercy_ from ‘merces’, ‘a
reward’, then ‘a reward in heaven for kindness displayed on earth’.
None of them—with the exception of _mercy_ in its theological
sense—are known to have been used in English before the thirteenth
century. _Anguish_, _beauty_, _bounty_, _charity_, _comfort_,
_compassion_, _courtesy_, _delicate_, _devotion_, _grace_, _honour_,
_humble_, _passion_, _patience_, _peace_, _purity_, _tender_ are
further examples of this new vocabulary of tenderness which came to
us from Latin through Early French. Some of them, such as _charity_,
_delicate_, and _passion_, were probably brought to England by the
preaching friars before the Conquest; others came with the devout
Normans, and did not develop a secular meaning until after they had
reached our shores (_devotion_ remaining purely theological until as
late as the sixteenth century); while yet a third class had already
been secularized by nimble spirits like Petrarch and Ronsard a
century or two before they reached us by the Norman route along with
more frivolous terms, _amorous_, _dainty_, _dalliance_, _debonair_,
_delight_, _pleasure_, _pleasance_, and the like, in which there is
no particular reason to perceive a strong ecclesiastical influence.
All of them, apart from the last group, are alike in that they
started with a theological meaning and subsequently developed an
affectionate one alongside of it. We may think of them as gifts
presented to the lyric lover by the Bride of Christ—well-chosen
gifts; for were they not the ardent creations of her own early
passion?

Thus, side by side with such lyrics as the carol quoted above,
we find in the Middle Ages charming little secular poems almost
indistinguishable from them in tone and manner:

      Sweet rose of vertew and of gentilness,
      Delightsome lily of everie lustyness,
        Richest in bountie and in bewtie clear,
        And everie vertew that is wened dear,
      Except onlie that ye are mercyless.

      Into your garth this day I did pursew;
      There saw I flowris that fresh were of hew;
        Both white and red most lusty were to seene
        And halesome herbis upon stalkis greene;
      Yet leaf nor flowr find could I none of rew.

      I doubt that Merche, with his cauld blastis keene,
      Has slain this gentil herb, that I of mene;
        Whose piteous death does to my heart such paine
        That I would make to plant his root againe,—
      So comforting his leavis unto me bene.

And along with the influx of Anglo-French words further semantic
changes were, of course, taking place in the more important Old
English words. If there are occasions when a single word seems to
throw more light on the workings of men’s minds than a whole volume
of history or a whole page of contemporary literature, the Middle
English _love-longing_ is certainly one of them.

A new element had entered into human relationships, for which perhaps
the best name that can be found is ‘tenderness’. And so—at any rate
in the world of imagination—children as well as women gradually
became the objects of a new solicitude. We do not find in all
literature prior to the Middle Ages quite that _pathetic_ sense of
childhood which Chaucer has expressed so delicately in the story of
Ugolino of Pisa in his _Monk’s Tale_:

      But litel out of Pize stant[34] a tour
      In whiche tour in prisoun put was he,
      And with hym been his litel children three,
      The eldest scarsly fyf yeer was of age.
      Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee
      Swiche briddes[35] for to put in swiche a cage!

Quotations are scarcely needed to intimate how such colourless
words as _little_—here sentimentally repeated—_children_, and even
_cruelty_, had gradually been laden with fresh emotional significance
by the Roman Church’s worship of the baby Jesus and its popular
expression in carol and drama. We still have a few examples of these
old Nativity Plays, from the individual scenes of which we take the
word _pageant_, and about the same time that Chaucer wrote we know
that the tailors of Coventry composed and sang the beautiful carol
which begins:

      Lully, lullay, thou little tiny Child,
      By by lully, lullay.
        Herod the King
        In his raging
      Charged he hath this day
        His men of might
        In his own sight
      All young children to slay....

Thus, when Tindale and Coverdale came to make their translations of
the Bible in the sixteenth century, they found ready to their hand a
vocabulary of feeling which had indeed been drawn in the first place
from the austerities of the religious life, but which had in many
cases acquired warmer and more human echoes by having been applied to
secular uses. And just as lyrical devotion to the Virgin Mary and to
the infant Jesus had evolved a vocabulary which could express, and
thus partly create, a sentiment of tenderness towards all women and
young children, so we seem to feel the warmth of human affection,
as it were, reflected back into religious emotion in such creations
as Coverdale’s _lovingkindness_ and _tender mercy_, Tindale’s
_long-suffering_, _mercifulness_, _peacemaker_, and _beautiful_ (for
it was he who brought this word into general use), and in many of the
majestically simple phrases of the Authorised Version.

In tracing the elements of modern consciousness through the history
of words in this way, there is one mistake which it is especially
important to avoid, and that is the mistake of over-simplification.
For instance, just as it is true that the shade of feeling which
we call ‘tenderness’ can be traced back to the literature of the
Middle Ages, and that from there we can trace it farther back still,
through the Mariolatry of the Roman Church to the opening chapters
of the Luke Gospel, and so to the old Egyptian Isis-worship and the
philosophy of Plato, so it is also true that it can be understood
more perfectly and felt more fully when we have thus unravelled it.
But not to realize that with the appearance of a poetic tradition
which can give rise to such a poem as “I sing of a maiden” something
quite new, something with no perceptible historical origin, enters
into humanity, is to cultivate a deaf ear to literature, and to
mistake quite as grievously both the method and the object of
understanding history.

If medieval Europe is cut off from Greece and Rome by her imaginative
conception of women, she is cut off even more completely by her
abstention from slavery. Of this development, thus negatively stated,
there are few, if any, signs in our language; but traces are by no
means wanting of a certain deeper and more interior change which must
have underlain the other two. Perhaps it can best be expressed as a
new consciousness of the individual human soul. On the one hand the
sense of its independent _being_ and activity, of bottomless depths
and soaring heights within it, to be explored in fear and trembling
or with hope and joy—with _delight_ and _mirth_, or with _agony_,
_anguish_, _despair_, _repentance_—and on the other hand that feeling
of its being an _inner_ world, which has since developed so fully
that this book, for example, has fallen naturally into two halves.

In this connection it is particularly interesting to note the
appearance of _conscience_ in the thirteenth century. In classical
times the Latin ‘conscientia’ seems to have meant something more
like ‘consciousness’ or ‘knowledge’; it was generally qualified by
some other word (‘virtutum, vitiorum’—‘consciousness of virtues, of
vices,’ ...), and its termination, similar to that of _science_,
_intelligence_, ... suggests that it was conceived of by the Romans
more as a general, _abstract_ quality, which one would partake of,
but not actually possess—just as one has knowledge or happiness, but
not “a knowledge” or “a happiness”. Used in ecclesiastical Latin and
later in English, _conscience_ seems to have grown more and more
real, until at last it became that semi-personified and perfectly
private mentor whom we are inclined to mean to-day when we speak of
“my _conscience_” or “his _conscience_”.

The movement towards “individualism”, like many other phenomena of
modern civilization, has long ago shifted its centre of gravity
outside the walls of the Church. Once it was felt as the peculiar
glory of the Christian religion. In the Dark Ages heresies which
attempted to explain away the significant paradox of Christ’s
simultaneous divinity and humanity were hunted down with the utmost
rigour, and it is probable that a vivid sense of the dignity of the
individual human soul was at the bottom of a good many actions which
now seem to us like the very stultification of such a conviction.
This great inner world of consciousness, we may suppose, which each
individual was now felt to control in some measure for himself, was
a thing to fear as well as to respect. It gave to every single soul
almost infinite potentialities, for evil as well as good; and even
the wisest heads seem to have felt that civilization could only
be held together as long as all these souls maintained a certain
uniformity of pattern. Thus, while the influence of Christianity
had ensured to all men—not merely to a small slave-owning class—a
modicum of personal liberty, it deprived them in the same breath
of that dearest of all possessions, freedom of thought. The grim
meaning gradually acquired by the Latin word _Inquisition_, meaning
an ‘inquiry’, still signifies to us the ruthless pains that were now
taken, for the first time in the world’s history, to pry into and
endeavour to control that private thinking life of men which had
suddenly acquired such a vast importance in their eyes. The still
grimmer _auto-da-fé_ began life as a Spanish phrase meaning simply an
‘act of faith’.

It seems remarkable to us that, in spite of this active
discouragement of independent thinking, the Dark and Middle Ages
were, beyond dispute, the cradle of European philosophy. Perhaps this
was because men did not yet feel the need for such independence.
The leading quality of medieval thought was its receptiveness, and
towards the end of its life it seems to have become almost conscious
of this itself; for it is hardly possible to open a volume of Chaucer
without lighting on some half-respectful, half-ironical reference to
“olde clerkes” or “olde bokes”. But the profound respect in which the
written word had been held throughout the Middle Ages survives in
many other curious ways as well. We still use the word _authority_
in its two separate meanings of ‘a quotation from a book’ and ‘the
power of controlling’. Of these the first meaning is the older, and
from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries it may almost be said to
have included the latter within it. Again, our word _glamour_, a
later form of _gramarye_, suggests an almost mystical reverence for
the ‘grammar’ which—along with most of the other branches of medieval
learning—was derived entirely from the works of Aristotle. The
popularity and general use of _term_, which began life as a subtle
technicality of Aristotelian logic, reminds us again of the universal
study of that writer in the Middle Ages, and _spice_—a corrupted form
of ‘species’—is but another indication of the way in which the jargon
of classical philosophy crept into their everyday thought.

The change from Greek and Roman civilization to the civilization of
modern Europe is often represented as having been more abrupt than
it really was. We have deduced some of the intermediate stages in
the alterations of feeling. In the world of thought there are actual
written documents for our information, philosophical treatises and
counter-treatises, which, by revealing to us the very moment of
impact, enable us to trace more easily the reverberation of thought
from mind to mind. Very soon after the break up of Rome, when the
Empire was being partially re-organized under Teutonic dynasties and
the defunct Latin _Caesar_ rising again as the Germanic _Kaiser_,
the great medieval “Schools”, of which the most famous was at Paris,
began to arise out of the traditions of monastic learning. Their
classical library apparently consisted of one Platonic dialogue and
two or three works of Aristotle, all of them translated; but the
authority of these translations was absolute. At first Plato was
considered the greater “authority”, but from the beginning of the
thirteenth century it seems to have been accepted almost as a matter
of course that the one great object of all philosophy for all time
was the harmonization of Aristotelian logic and Catholic dogma.
But though the Aristotelian method (as they understood it) was all
in all, the actual Platonic system, with the help of Neoplatonism
and the Mystics, lingered in sufficient strength to divide medieval
philosophy for several hundred years into two rival camps. The one
party, known as “Realists”, held with Plato that “ideas”—now usually
called _universals_—had existed before, and could exist quite apart
from, things; while the “Nominalists” held that universals had no
separate or previous existence. But as time passed, many of the
Nominalists went farther still, maintaining that these universals
did not exist at all, that they were mere intellectual abstractions
or classifications made by the human mind—in fact “ideas” in the
sense in which, owing to them, we use the word to-day. One of the
reasons—perhaps the chief reason—why so many Schoolmen carried
Aristotle beyond himself in this way is a particularly interesting
one.

Reference has already been made to the wave of Arabic civilization
which surged into Europe early in the Dark Ages. It was a
civilization in every sense of the word; for in the ninth century
learning had developed under the Caliphs of Baghdad to a degree
unparalleled elsewhere in the world, and _rapprochements_ between the
two races and civilizations, which had already begun in the world
of philosophy, were soon strengthened and increased by those great
medieval experiments, the Crusades.[36] Now Arabic scholars were,
if anything, more enthusiastic Aristotelians than the scholars of
Europe. The curious word _arabesque_, and the fact that words like
_algebra_, _cipher_, _zero_, and some others to be mentioned in
the next chapter are among the few Arabic words which reached our
language before the fourteenth century, are both symptomatic of a
certain peculiarity of the Arabic mind which we may perhaps call the
tendency to abstraction. The Arab seems to have possessed something
of that combination of materialism on the one hand and excessive
intellectual abstraction on the other which we have already noticed
in the later stages of Roman mythology. Just as he made Mohammedanism
out of the Jewish sacred traditions, so he made Nominalism out of
Greek philosophy. The influence upon Christian thought of great
Arabic philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna is one of the most
astonishing chapters in its history. But it is not difficult to
see how it occurred. The learning of the Middle Ages was founded
entirely on translations, and this was an activity in which, as far
as Aristotle’s works were concerned, the Arabs had got in first.
According to Renan, some of the current versions of Aristotle were
“Latin translations from a Hebrew translation of a Commentary of
Averroes made on an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a
Greek text”.

To the Popes and those who had the power and interest of the Church
most at heart the problem appeared in quite a different light. It
was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla
of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical
conclusion, scepticism. Thus, throughout the history of Scholasticism
we have to do with a sort of triangle of intellectual forces: Realism
and Nominalism fighting a five hundred years’ war, and the Church,
in its official capacity, anxiously endeavouring to hold the balance
between them. One wonders whether the three parties to this ancient
dispute may not have found symbolic expression in Tweedledum,
Tweedledee, and the “Monstrous Crow” of nursery legend. But it is no
disparagement of the intellects of that day to say that to us the
chief interest of their polemics lies in the many new and accurate
instruments of thought with which they provided us. The common word
_accident_ is an excellent example. We use it every day without
realizing that it was only imported from Latin by the indefatigable
efforts of the Schoolmen to reconcile the doctrine of Realism with
the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. The _accidents_, when
they first came into the English language, meant that part of the
sacred bread and wine which remained after the _substance_ had been
transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.

On the whole it is a safe rule to assume that those who speak most
contemptuously of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are
the nearest modern representatives of their own idea of what these
Schoolmen were; that is to say, they are those whose imaginations
are most completely imprisoned within the intellectual horizon of
the passing age. Much fun has been made of medieval philosophy for
discussing such matters as how many angels can stand on the point
of a needle, and whether Christ could have performed His cosmic
mission equally well if He had been incarnated as a pea instead of
as a man. The growth of a rudimentary historical sense has, it is
true, made it fashionable lately to take these ancient thinkers a
little more seriously, but it is still the rarest thing to find
a philosopher or a psychologist who fully comprehends that he is
consuming the fruits of this long, agonizing struggle to state the
exact relation between spirit and matter, every time he uses such
key-words of thought as _absolute_, _actual_, _attribute_, _cause_,
_concept_, _deduction_, _essence_, _existence_, _intellect_,
_intelligence_, _intention_, _intuition_, _motive_, _potential_,
_predicate_, _substance_, _tendency_, _transcend_; _abstract_ and
_concrete_, _entity_ and _identity_, _matter_ and _form_, _quality_
and _quantity_, _objective_ and _subjective_, _real_ and _ideal_,
_general_, _special_, and _species_, _particular_, _individual_, and
_universal_. ‘Free will’ is the translation of a Latin phrase first
used by a Church Father, and ‘argumentum ad hominem’ is an example
of a scholastic idiom which has remained untranslated. Many of these
words, it is true, are in the first instance Latin translations
of Greek terms introduced by pagan writers before the days of the
Schoolmen; some, like _quality_ and _species_, by Cicero himself,
and others, like _accident_, _actual_, and _essence_, by later Latin
writers such as Quintilian or Macrobius. But it must be remembered
that, even in these cases, the words, as we use them to-day, are not
_mere_ translations. By their earnest and lengthy discussions the
Schoolmen were all the time defining more strictly the meanings of
these and of many other words already in use, and so adapting them to
the European brain that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
it was an easy matter for the lawyers and for popular writers like
Chaucer and Wyclif to stamp them with the authentic genius of the
English language and turn them into current coin.[37] Nobody who
understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation
of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the
philosophy of the Middle Ages.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of
Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought
of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a
single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations
of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor
and interpreter, Galen. But the way in which its terms have entered
right into the heart of our language is proof enough that this
medieval science arose, not merely from blind subservience to
tradition, but also from an actual survival of the kind of feeling,
the kind of outlook which, ages ago, had created the tradition. In
spite of that strong and growing sense of the individual soul, man
was not yet felt, either physically or psychically, to be isolated
from his surroundings in the way that he is to-day. Conversely his
mind and soul were not felt to be imprisoned within, and dependent
upon, his body. Intellectual classifications were accordingly less
dry and clear, and science—that general speculative activity which a
later age has split up into such categories as astronomy, physics,
chemistry, physiology, psychology, ...—was as yet almost an undivided
whole. Common words like _ascendant_, _aspect_, _atmosphere_,
_choleric_, _common sense_, _complexion_, _consider_, _cordial_,
_disaster_, _disposition_, _distemper_, _ether_, _hearty_, _humour_,
_humorous_, _indisposed_, _influence_, _jovial_, _lunatic_,
_melancholy_, _mercurial_, _phlegmatic_, _predominant_, _sanguine_,
_saturnine_, _spirited_, _temper_, _temperament_, with _heart_,
_liver_, _spleen_, and _stomach_ in their psychological sense, most
of which retained their original and literal meanings down to the
fourteenth century, give us more than a glimpse into the relations
between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the medieval
scientist.

Thus, the physical body was said to contain four _humours_ (Latin
‘humor’, ‘moisture’)—_blood_, _phlegm_, _bile_ or _choler_,
and _black bile_ (melancholy)—which last had its seat in the
_hypochondria_. Not only diseases, or _distempers_, but qualities of
character were intimately connected with the proper ‘mixture’ (Latin
‘temperamentum’) of these humours, just as modern medical theory sees
a connection between the character and the glands. Thus, a man might
be good _humoured_ or bad _humoured_; he might have a good _temper_
or a bad _temper_; and according to which _humour_ predominated in
his _temperament_ or _complexion_, he was _choleric_, _melancholy_,
_phlegmatic_, or _sanguine_. His character depended on other things
as well; for the medieval scientist believed with Hippocrates that
the _arteries_ (Greek ‘aēr’, ‘air’) were ducts through which there
flowed, not blood, but three different kinds of _ether_ (Greek
‘aithēr’, ‘the upper air’) or _spirits_ (Latin ‘spiritus’, ‘breath’,
‘life’), viz. the _animal_[38] (Latin ‘anima’, ‘soul’), the _vital_,
and the _natural_. But the stars and the planets were also living
bodies; they were composed of that ‘fifth essence’ or _quintessence_,
which was likewise latent in all terrestrial things, so that the
character and the fate of men were determined by the _influences_
(Latin ‘influere’, ‘to flow in’) which came from them. The Earth had
its _atmosphere_ (a kind of breath which it exhaled from itself); the
Moon, which was regarded as a planet, had a special connection with
_lunacy_, and according as the planet Jupiter, or Saturn, or Mercury
was _predominant_ or in the _ascendant_ in the general _disposition_
of stars at a man’s birth, he would be _jovial_, _saturnine_, or
_mercurial_. Finally, things or persons which were susceptible to the
same _influences_, or which _influenced_ each other in this occult
way, were said to be in _sympathy_ or _sympathetic_.

_Test_ is an alchemist’s word, coming from the Latin ‘testa’, an
earthen pot in which the alchemist made his alloys. The same word
was once used as a slang term for ‘head’, and in its French form,
‘tête’, still retains that meaning. The phrase _hermetically sealed_
reminds us that alchemy, known as the ‘hermetic art’, was traced back
by its exponents to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, who himself
took his name from the Greek messenger-god Hermes. Other alchemists’
words are _amalgam_, _alcohol_, _alembic_, _alkali_, _arsenic_, and
_tartar_. The last five, together with the word _alchemy_ itself, all
come to us from Arabic, and are evidence of the fact that the Arabs
of the Dark Ages, besides being philosophers, were the fathers of
modern chemistry. It was, indeed, they who first joined the study of
chemistry to the practice of medicine, and thus initiated a science
of drugs. Moreover, that old ‘humoral’ pathology which has shaped so
many of our conceptions of human character—in so far as it was based
on ancient authority and tradition—came from Hippocrates to Europe,
for the most part not directly, but by way of Baghdad and Spain.

The more intimate and indispensable such conceptions are, the more
effort does it require from the twentieth-century imagination to
realize how they have grown up. It is so difficult, even when we are
reading contemporary literature, to blot out from our consciousness
the different meanings which have since gathered round the words.
If, however, we can succeed in doing this, we cannot but be struck
by the odd nature of the change which they have all undergone. When
we reflect on the history of such notions as _humour_, _influence_,
_melancholy_, _temper_, and the rest, it seems for the moment as
though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all inside
ourselves—sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside
world, away from our own warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy
realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrology
has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; to-day the cold stars
glitter unapproachable overhead, and with a naïve detachment mind
watches matter moving incomprehensibly in the void. At last, after
four centuries, thought has shaken herself free.

CHAPTER VIII

EXPERIMENT

_Zenith._ _Law._ _Investigate._ _Conceit._ _Gentleman._ _Love._
_Protestant._

Philosophy, alchemy, and mathematics were not the only branches of
learning in which the Arabs had excelled. The appearance in English
of such words as _azimuth_, _nadir_, and _zenith_ towards the end of
the fourteenth century suggests among other things that the thinking
of this Syrian race contributed in no small degree to the rise in
Europe of the new astronomy. These three Arabic words (two of them
for the first time in English) are to be found in Chaucer’s _Treatise
on the Astrolabe_, written in 1391 for the instruction of his little
son, “Lowis”; and this interesting document contains many other words
also for which the _Oxford Dictionary_ does not give any earlier
quotation, such as _almanac_, _ecliptic_, _equinox_, _equator_,
_horizon_, _latitude_, _longitude_, _meridian_, _minute_ (meaning
one-sixtieth of a degree), while _zodiac_ was used by Gower a few
years before.

Such words show us that the Europe of the Dark Ages had been
experiencing once more what the ancient scientists had known. Its
learned men had been marking down recurrences of natural phenomena
and orientating themselves on the earth by dividing its face up
into imaginary rings and segments. For such purposes they had found
Latin and Greek terms ready to their hand, and the survival of
the Greek _zodiac_ reminds us that they had, moreover, adopted the
ancient system of mapping out the heavens into twelve “signs.”
When, therefore, we find three Arabic words among these relics of
classical wisdom, we need not be surprised to see that they express
something which the ancients had, apparently, never felt the need of
expressing—that is, an abstracted geometrical way of mapping out the
visible heavens. These are conceived of as a vast sphere encircling
the earth; the _zenith_ and the _nadir_ are its poles, while the
_azimuths_ are meridians of celestial longitude.

It is probable that, with the use of these words, there came for the
first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing
himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects. Of
course, the Arab astronomer of the Dark and Middle Ages still saw
the earth as the centre round which the universe revolved, and he
would no more have dreamed of doubting the “astral” quality of the
planets than the schoolmaster of to-day who instructs his pupils to
write down “Let _x_ = 20 oranges” doubts whether oranges have any
taste. Nevertheless we may feel pretty sure that those minds which
were apparently the first to think of cutting up the sky without
reference to the constellations, and which could, moreover, develop
so fully the great and novel system of abstraction which they called
_algebra_, did their part in bringing about that extraordinary
revolution in astronomical thought which is associated with the
name of Copernicus. It is true that the astronomy of Plato’s time
had been intimately connected with arithmetic and geometry; but
Plato’s “number” and his geometry do not appear to have been quite
the abstract sciences which these things are to-day. What we call
their “laws” seem to have been felt, not as intellectual deductions,
but rather as real activities of soul—that human soul which, as we
saw, the philosopher could not yet feel to be wholly separate from
a larger world Soul, or planetary Soul. The Zodiacal signs, for
instance, had been as much, if not more, classifications of this Soul
as they had been sections of space. The word comes from the Greek
‘zōdion’, a little animal, and not only was every sign distinguished
by a constellation, of which the majority were associated with some
beast, but human character and human destiny were believed to be
bound up inextricably with the position of the sun and the planets
among these signs.

If, therefore, there is any truth in the belief of the old Greek
philosophers and of some modern historians that the study of
mathematics has its origin in the observed movements of the stars,
the progress is of the same nature as that which we noticed at the
end of the last chapter. Is it too fanciful to picture to ourselves
how, drawn into the minds of a few men, the relative positions
and movements of the stars gradually developed a more and more
independent life there until, with the rise in Europe first of
trigonometry and then of algebra, they detached themselves from
the outside world altogether? And then by a few great men like
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, these abstract mathematics were
re-fitted to the stars which had given them birth, and the result
was that cosmogony of infinite spaces and a tiny earth in which our
imaginations roam to-day? When the Aryan imagination had at last
succeeded in so detaching its “ideas” about the phenomena of the
universe that these could be “played with,” as mathematicians say, in
the form of an equation, then, no doubt, it was a fairly easy matter
to turn them inside out.

The alterations wrought in the meanings of many of our common words
by this revolution of physical outlook are not difficult to perceive
and yet not easy to realize. As the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo
slowly filtered through to the popular consciousness, first of all
simple words like _atmosphere_, _down_, _earth_, _planet_, _sky_,
_space_, _sphere_, _star_, _up_, ... underwent a profound yet subtle
semantic change. And then, in the eighteenth century, as Newton’s
discoveries became more widely known, further alterations took place.
_Weight_,[39] for instance, acquired a new significance, differing
from _mass_, which also changed, having formerly meant simply a lump
of matter.[40] _Gravity_,[41] (from the Latin ‘gravitas’ ‘heaviness’)
took on its great new meaning, and the new words _gravitation_ and
_gravitate_ were formed, the later being soon adapted to metaphorical
uses. If we cared to examine them closely enough, we should probably
find that from this point a certain change of meaning gradually
spread over all words containing the notion of attraction, or
ideas closely related to it. The twin phenomena of gravitation and
magnetism, contemplated by most of us at an early age, and impalpably
present in the meanings of so many of the words we hear spoken around
us, make the conception of one lifeless body acting on another from
a distance easy and familiar.[42] But the very word _attraction_
(from the Latin ‘ad-trahere’, ‘to draw’ or ‘drag towards’) may well
serve to remind us that until the discovery of gravitation this
conception must have been practically beyond the range of human
intellection. There was formerly no half-way house in the imagination
between actual dragging or pushing and forces emanating from a living
being, such as love or hate, human or divine, or those “influences”
of the stars which have already been mentioned.

A good illustration of this fact—and one which takes us back again to
the seventeenth century—is the word _law_. The Latin ‘lex’ was first
applied to natural phenomena by Bacon. Later in the century _law_ was
used in the same sense, but it did not then mean quite what it does
to-day. The “laws of Nature” were conceived of by those who first
spoke of them as present commands of God. It is noticeable that we
still speak of Nature “obeying” these laws, though we really think of
them now rather as abstract principles—logical deductions of our own
which we have arrived at by observation and experiment.

Some account of Francis Bacon’s general influence, as a writer, on
our language has already been given in Chapter IV. His influence on
thought was far greater, for he was in some sense the moving spirit
of that intellectual revolution which began to sweep over Europe in
the sixteenth century. It was a revolution comparable in many ways
to the change inaugurated by Aristotle twenty centuries earlier, and
there is accordingly much in Bacon’s work that reminds us of the
Greek philosopher. To begin with, he was thoroughly dissatisfied with
the whole _method_ of thought as he found it in his day, and, like
Aristotle, he strove first of all to effect a reformation in this.
Aristotle had written the _Organum_—that is to say, the “Instrument”
(of Thought)—and Bacon intended his _Novum Organum_ to go one step
farther. He proclaimed himself satisfied with Aristotle’s legacy—the
prevailing logical system of syllogism and deduction—as far as it
went. Given the “premises,” it was the correct line of further
discovery. What he questioned was the Scholastic premises themselves,
and he propounded accordingly a new and surer method of establishing
fresh ones. It is known as the “inductive method.” This is not the
place to expound Bacon’s logical system, and it will suffice that it
was based on an extensive and, above all, a systematic observation of
Nature herself. Aristotle had indeed (though the Schoolmen had nearly
forgotten it) pointed the way to such an observation, but it was left
for Bacon to try and construct a prejudice-proof system of arranging
and classifying the results. These _instances_, as they were called,
were, on the one hand, to be manufactured by means of _experiment_,
and on the other to be arranged and weeded out according to their
significance. The word _crucial_ comes to us from Bacon’s Latin
phrase ‘instantia crucis’—the _crucial instance_—which, like a
sign-post, decided between two rival hypotheses by proving one and
disproving the other; and it may be said that he endeavoured, but
failed, to alter the meaning of _axiom_ itself from “a self-evident
proposition” to “a proposition established by the method of
experimental induction”.

Once more men turned the light of their curiosity upon the stubborn
phenomena of the outside world, and as it was Aristotle’s works in
which we first found the Greek _anatomy_, ‘cutting up’, so it is
Bacon who first uses _dissection_ (from the Latin for the same thing)
in its modern technical meaning. After an interval of about 1,500
years, the weighing, measuring, examining, and cutting up had now
begun again, and they have gone on ever since. How far Francis Bacon
was responsible for the form subsequently taken by scientific thought
will probably remain a matter of dispute. His views on ecclesiastical
authority, on Scholastic philosophy, on Aristotle, on the Alchemists,
certainly suggest that he possessed what the nineteenth century has
called the “scientific attitude” to an extent which distinguishes
him startlingly from any previous or contemporary writer; _acid_,
_hydraulic_, and _suction_ are among the words first found in his
pages; but, above all, his consciousness of greater changes afoot
is manifested linguistically in such things as his use of the words
_progressive_ and _retrograde_ in an historical sense unknown, as
we shall see, to the majority of thinkers until the middle of the
eighteenth century, or his equally innovating distinction between
_ancient_ and _modern_. A marked increase over the second quarter
of the seventeenth century in the number of words expressing the
notion of doubt, such as _dubious_ (used of opinions), _dubiousness_,
_dubitable, ceptic_, _sceptical_, _sceptically_, _scepticism_,
_scepticity_, _scepticize_, compares with an increase of only one or
two during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And at about the
same time the words _curious_, _curiosity_, and _inquisitive_ seem
to have lost the air of pious disapproval which they had previously
carried with them when used to express the love of inquiry. How much
of this is due to novel combinations, such as “a natural _curiosity_
and _inquisitive_ appetite”, which we find in Bacon’s _Advancement
of Learning_? We cannot say. There are symptoms of the coming
metamorphosis already, before his time, in the appearance in English
of the sixteenth century of such significant new terms as _analyse_,
_distinguish_, _investigate_, together with the semantic change of
_observe_ from “to obey a rule”, or “to inspect auguries” into its
modern meaning, and similar changes in the case of _experiment_ and
_experimental_. It is impossible to prove these things. As with
Aristotle, so with Bacon, it is impossible to say whether his own
intellectual volume displaced the great wave or whether he merely
rose upon its early crest.

There are other influences, too, that must be taken into
account. _Discovery_ (it was a new word) was in the very air of
sixteenth-century England. From the West came tidings of a new
world; from the East news yet more marvellous of an old one; and
the rebirth of Science was, in its infancy, but a single aspect
of that larger Renaissance which played such an important part
in moulding the subsequent life and outlook of Europe. Italy had
felt the shock first, and we have a special group of words in our
language to remind us of the visual arts in which the new impulse
drove her to excel. _Cameo_, _cupola_, _fresco_, and _model_ all
reached us in the sixteenth century from or through the Italian,
and the next saw the arrival of _attitude_, _bust_, _chiaroscuro_,
_dado_, _dome_, _filigree_, _intaglio_, _mezzotinto_, and _pastel_.
If these are of a somewhat technical nature, words like _antic_,
_canto_, _capriole_, _galligaskins_, _sonnet_, and _stanza_ build a
bridge in the imagination from Renaissance Italy to Tudor England,
and _ducat_, _incarnadine_, and _madonna_ are three Italian words
with pleasant Shakespearian associations. They remind us, too,
that by the time the Renaissance reached England it was already in
full swing. No wonder the literary world was swept off its feet.
First-hand acquaintance with the works of Classical writers gradually
substituted an affectionate, an almost passionate, familiarity for
that religious awe with which the Middle Ages had honoured their
garbled translations. One of the first results—an immediate and
violent intellectual revolt against the Schoolmen and all things
connected with them—is faithfully preserved to us in the unenviable
immortality achieved about this time by the luckless Duns Scotus,
whose patronymic has given us _dunce_. The history of the word
_conceit_, which in Chaucer merely meant ‘anything conceived’, tells
its tale of the wild, undiscriminating rush after elegance of thought
and diction. By Shakespeare’s time the tasteless habit of piling
fanciful conceit upon conceit had already become a thing to parody,
the merest affectation of wit, and so the word lives to-day chiefly
as a synonym for personal vanity, the language having been obliged by
its degradation to re-borrow the Latin original ‘conceptus’ in the
more exact form of _concept_.

It can readily be imagined that the restless activity which these
little symptoms betoken had a remarkable effect in altering,
developing, and indeed modernizing, the English vocabulary. The
genius of the language sprouted and burgeoned in the genial warmth
of Elizabethan and Jacobean fancy, and—most effective of all—it
passed through the fire of Shakespeare’s imagination. There is an
unobtrusiveness about Shakespeare’s enormous influence on his native
tongue which sometimes recalls the records of his private life. This
is no doubt partly due to the very popularity of his plays, which has
preserved the direct influence in every age. Where the word which he
employs is a new one, it has usually become so common in the course
of years that we find it hard to conceive of the time when it was
not. Where it is a meaning or a shade of meaning which he has added,
as likely as not that very shade was the one most familiar to our
own childhood before we had ever read a line of his poetry. Phrases
and whole lines from the plays and sonnets are as much a part of the
English vocabulary as individual words. Such are _pitched battle_,
_play on words_, _give him his due_, _well on your way_, _too much
of a good thing_, _to the manner born_, _the glass of fashion_,
_snapper-up of unconsidered trifles_, _more honoured in the breach
than the observance_,... The influence of such a mind on the language
in which it expresses itself can only be compared to the effect of
high temperatures on solid matter. As imagination bodies forth the
forms of things unknown, each molecule of suggestiveness contained
in each word gains a mysterious freedom from its neighbours; the old
images move to and fro distinctly in the listener’s fancy, and when
the sound has died away, not merely the shape, but what seemed to be
the very substance of the word has been readjusted.

Examples are found readily enough with the help of a volume of
Shakespeare and the _Oxford Dictionary_. As to new words themselves,
it has been said that there are more in Shakespeare’s plays than
in all the rest of the English poets put together. _Advantageous_,
_amazement_, _critic_ and _critical_, _dishearten_, _dwindle_,
_generous_, _invulnerable_, _majestic_, _obscene_, _pedant_, _pious_,
_radiance_, _reliance_, and _sanctimonious_ are a few examples,
but it is still more interesting to trace the subtler part of his
influence. As an instance of what we may call his literary alertness
let us take the word _propagate_. It is not found in English before
1570, and is thus a new word in Shakespeare’s time. Yet he handles
it four times, now literally, now figuratively, with as much ease
and grace as if it had been one of the oldest words in the language.
Listen to Romeo:

      Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
      Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest
      With more of thine.

Again, the figurative—that is to say, the only modern use of
_influence_—is first quoted from his works, and we can watch
him gradually taking the meaning of the word sphere through its
historical developments of planetary ‘_sphere_’, high social rank,
any sort of category. A certain curious intransitive use of the verb
_take_, as when a doctor says “the vaccination _took_ very well,” can
also be traced back to Shakespeare, and a few more of the innumerable
new uses of words which appear to have begun from him are _sequence_
and _creed_, with purely secular meanings; _real_, in its ordinary
modern sense of ‘actual’; _magic_, _magical_, and _charm_[43], used
figuratively; _apology_ as the personal and verbal expression of
compunction; _positive_ in its psychological sense; _function_, used
biologically; _fashion_ and _fashionable_ with their modern meanings;
and _action_, meaning a battle. The fact that the first examples
of these new uses quoted in the _Oxford Dictionary_ are taken from
Shakespeare cannot, of course, be taken as absolute proof that he
introduced them. But there are so many of them, and the _Dictionary_
is so thorough, that there can be no doubt of his being the first in
most cases and among the first in every case.

Shakespeare’s influence on the personal relations between the sexes,
as they have developed in subsequent periods of English history, is a
matter for the literary and social historian; but it is interesting
to reflect how the meanings of that group of Norman French words
mentioned in the last chapter, and of others which were slowly drawn
into their circle, must have expanded under the warm breath of his
vivacious and human heroines. The ideal atmosphere of gracious
tenderness which was the contribution to humanity of the Middle
Ages was to some extent realized by the Elizabethans. The women
towards whom it was directed became less and less mere ecclesiastical
symbols, existing only in the imagination of the lover, and more and
more creatures of real flesh and blood. Once again it is a case of a
later age striving to live out what an earlier age—or its few best
minds—have dreamed. Thus, the Blessed Virgin is partly supplanted
in men’s hearts by the virgin Queen; the charming figure of
Sidney—personified gentleness and chivalry—actually passes across the
stage of history; the peculiarly English word _gentleman_ appears.
And we can hardly help holding Shakespeare partly responsible for
what is going forward when we find him writing “the devout religion
of mine eye” and making Richard III implore Anne to “let the soul
forth that adoreth thee”—where the words _religion_ and _adore_ are
both applied to humanity for the first time, as far as we know, in
English literature.

Moreover, the new access to the Classics added to all this the
direct influence of the Platonic philosophy which now played,
through Spenser and his circle, upon the thought and feeling of
the Elizabethan age. A careful reading of Spenser’s four hymns to
_Love_, _Beauty_, _Heavenly Love_, and _Heavenly Beauty_ will throw
much light on the subsequent semantic history of the title words and
of many others. We find in them the Platonic antithesis between the
Eternal and its for-ever-changing outward garment:

      For that same goodly hew of white and red,
      With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay,
      And those sweete rosy leaves so fairely spread
      Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away
      To that they were, even to corrupted clay.
      That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright
      Shall turne to dust, and loose their goodly light.

      But that faire lampe, from whose celestial ray
      That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers’ fire,
      Shall never be extinguisht nor decay,
      But when the vitall spirits doe expyre,
      Unto her native planet shall retyre,
      For it is heavenly borne and can not die,
      Being a parcell of the purest skie.

and the conception of contemplation rising, through love, from the
one to the other, as in

      For love is Lord of truth and loialtie,
      Lifting himselfe out of the lowly dust,
      On golden plumes up to the purest skie....

or:

      But they which love indeede, look otherwise,
      With pure regard and spotless true intent,
      Drawing out of the object of their eyes
      A more refyned forme, which they present
      Unto their minde....

until finally, in the _Hymne of Heavenly Beauty_, Spenser reveals the
source of his faith:

      Faire is the heaven, where happy soules have place,
      In full enjoyment of felicitie....

      More faire is that where those _Idees_ on hie,
      Enraunged be, which _Plato_ so admyred,
      And pure _Intelligences_ from God inspyred.

When we recall the great influence which Spenser’s poetry has exerted
on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can
clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism—a direct Platonism, and a
Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions
of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and
Middle Ages—combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is
now contained in such words as _love_ and _beauty_. Let us remember,
then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly,
we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist
or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a
vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual
capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort.

The fact that a great deal of what had formerly been religious
emotion was being secularized in this way does not, however, mean
that the Church had ceased to play an all-important part in the
life of the people. The Reformation seems, with its insistence
on the _inwardness_ of all true grace, to have been but another
manifestation of that steady shifting inwards of the centre of
gravity of human consciousness which we have already observed in
the scientific outlook. That shift is, in a larger sense, the story
told by the whole history of the Aryan languages. Thus _religion_
itself, which had formerly been used only of external observances or
of monastic orders, took on at about this time its modern, subjective
meaning. Now it was that _piety_, differentiating itself from _pity_,
began to acquire its present sense. _Godly_, _godliness_, and
_godless_ are first found in Tindale’s writings, and _evangelical_
and _sincere_ are words which have been noted by a modern writer as
being new at this time and very popular among the Protestants. The
great word _Protestant_ itself was applied formerly to the German
princes who had dissented from the decision of the Diet of Spires in
1529, and together with _Reformation_ it now acquired its new and
special meaning, while the old words, _dissent_ and _disagree_, were
transferred at about the same time from material objects to matters
of opinion.

Another little group of words which appeared in the language at about
this time is interesting in its suggestion that human emotions,
like the forces of Nature, are usually accompanied by their equal
and opposite reactions. The well-known phrases, _odium theologicum_
and _odium philosophicum_, survive to remind us of a new kind of
bitterness and hatred which had slowly been arising in men’s hearts,
and which were also, it would seem, the gifts of Christianity and
the Dark Ages. Very soon after the Reformation we find alongside the
syllables of tenderness and devotion a very pretty little vocabulary
of abuse. _Bigoted, action_, _factious_, _malignant_, _monkish_,
_papistical_, _pernicious_, _popery_ are among the products of the
struggle between Catholic and Protestant; and the terms _Roman_,
_Romanist_, and _Romish_ soon acquired such a vituperative sense
that it became necessary to evolve _Roman Catholic_ in order to
describe the adherents of that faith without giving offence to them.
The later internecine struggles among the Protestants themselves
gave us _Puritan_, _precise_, _libertine_—reminiscent of a time when
“liberty” of thought was assumed as a matter of course to include
licence of behaviour—_credulous_, _superstitious_, _selfish_,
_selfishness_, and the awful Calvinistic word _reprobate_. It
was towards the end of the Puritan ascendancy that _atone_ and
_atonement_ (_at-one-ment_) acquired their present strong suggestion
of legal expiation, and it may not be without significance that the
odious epithet _vindictive_ was then for the first time applied
approvingly to the activities of the Almighty Himself.

As the language grows older, when all the principal tributaries have
met at last in the main stream, it begins, unfortunately, to tell
a less and less coherent tale of the people who speak it. The few
large groups of new words and meanings which we have hitherto been
tracing give way to a much greater number of small groups—or even of
single words—for the vocabulary is now so capacious that important
new movements of thought are likely to find the old terms adaptable
to their use with very slight semantic alterations, or perhaps with
the formal addition of an _-arian_, an _-ism_, or an _-ology_. These
become accordingly harder to trace, and a book of these dimensions is
obliged to select a word here and a word there in almost arbitrary
fashion. It must be remembered, then, in this and the succeeding
chapters that only a few of the tendencies and changes at work have
been picked out for inspection, though it is probable that a study
of words, which should be at the same time subtle and comprehensive
enough, would throw some light on them all.

CHAPTER IX

PERSONALITY AND REASON

_Prig._ _Pressure._ _Period._ _Consciousness._ _Character._
_Amusing._ _Sentimental._ _Arrange._ _Personify._

When Charles II returned from France to an England which had long
been growing more and more sullen under the reproving glances of
a middle-aged Puritanism, the suppressed thoughts and feelings
of fashionable English society evidently lost no time in rising
to the surface. The appearance in the seventeenth century of new
expressions such as to _banter_, to _burlesque_, to _ridicule_, to
_prim_, _travesty_, _badinage_, and, above all, _prig_, helps to
fill in for the imagination the deep gulf between the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ and the _Country Wife_. Even to those totally unacquainted
with the literature of the period this little archipelago of words
might betray with unmistakable solidity the moral geography of the
submerged region. For it marks a cycle of events which has been
repeated over and over again in the history of humanity, in its
families, its societies, its nations. Certain moral qualities gain
respect for themselves; the respect brings with it material benefits;
weaker brethren affect the moral qualities in order to acquire the
material benefits; hypocrisy is detected; all morality is treated as
hypocrisy. The trite little cycle spins like a whirligig round and
round the social history of the world, but this is a good place to
lay a finger on it, for it is a process in which the question of the
meanings of words takes a particularly active part. It is, in fact,
one of the few occasions upon which ordinary men, neither scientists
nor poets, will deliberately attempt to alter the meanings of the
words they must use. “Morality”, said the late Sir Walter Raleigh,
“colours all language and lends to it the most delicate of its powers
of distinction”; and so, when any significant change takes place in
the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a
general shifting of the meanings of common words.

One of the earliest recorded examples of such a shift is analysed
with sharp penetration by Thucydides in his account of the
demoralization of the Greek States during the Peloponnesian War:

  Proper shame [he says] is now termed sheer stupidity:
  shamelessness, on the other hand, is called manliness:
  voluptuousness passes for good tone: haughtiness for good
  education: lawlessness for freedom: honourable dealing is dubbed
  hypocrisy, and dishonesty, good fortune.

Similar, but less conspicuous and rapid, alterations of mood must
have been at work when _silly_ lost its old meaning of ‘blessed’;
when _demure_ changed from ‘grave’ or ‘sober’ to ‘affectedly modest’;
and when the kindly _officious_ acquired its modern sense of bustling
interference. Trench regards it as a tribute to the Roman character
that theirs is the only civilized language in which the word for
‘simple’ never acquired a contemptuous signification alongside of
its ordinary one. And at the opposite pole from Thucydides we have
another Aryan historian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, good-humouredly
suggesting what might be called a semantic method of slipping off a
Semitic incubus:

  As for sin, let us call it folly and have done with it, for until
  we call it folly we never shall have done with it. The conception
  of sin flatters us grossly. There is something grandiose in it that
  cannot but appeal to the child in every man. That we infinitesimal
  creatures, scrambling like ants over the face of this minor planet
  in pursuit of our personal aims—that we have it in our power
  to affront the majesty of the universe is a most preposterous,
  delightful fancy....

It may be remarked in passing that there is no surer or more
illuminating way of reading a man’s character, and perhaps a little
of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he
prefers to use certain words. Each of us would no doubt choose his
own list of test words—and the lists themselves, if we were foolish
enough to reveal them, would probably present a fairly accurate
diagram of our own leading propensities. Fortunately the subject is
too long to elaborate.

_Ogle_ is another new word which appeared soon after the Restoration;
and at the same time _intrigue_, which had come into the language
earlier in the century in the general sense of ‘intricacy’, was
seized upon to express an illicit love-affair. The steady growth of
“polite” society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is also—curiously enough—indicated by the gradual appearance of
_bearish_, _countrified_, _fatuous_, _flippant_, _gawky_, _mawkish_,
_prude_, and other such terms. _Hoyden_ was first used of a girl by
Wycherley in 1676.

But outside the limelit circle this period was one of rapid
intellectual development. That the novel interest in the external
world, typified in the sixteenth century by such new words as
_analyse_, _distinguish_, _investigate_[44], expanded continuously
during the next hundred years is suggested by the addition to
our vocabulary of _inspect_, _remark_, and _scrutinize_, together
with the modern meanings of _perception_ and _scrutiny_, which had
meant up till then respectively ‘the collection of rents’ and ‘the
taking of a vote.’ We also find a group of new words to describe
the inherent conditions and qualities of external objects, such as
_acid_, _astringency_, _cohesion_, _elasticity_, _equilibrium_,
_fluid_ (as a noun), _intensity_, _polarity_, _pressure_,
_spontaneous_, _static_, _temperature_, _tendency_, _tension_,
_volatile_, besides the physical and impersonal meanings of _energy_
and _force_. The old verb to _discover_, which originally signified
simply to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal,’[45] was used attributively in the
sixteenth century of travellers ‘discovering’ foreign lands and
customs. Shortly after the Restoration the new metaphor, so it
would seem, was itself applied metaphorically to the results of a
chemical experiment, and in this way the ordinary modern meaning
arose. The creation of the new word _gas_ by the Dutch chemist van
Helmont marks a definite epoch in the evolution of the scientific
outlook. He used it, however, to describe an occult principle—a
sort of ultra-rarefied water—which he supposed to be contained in
all matter. It was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth
century that the word acquired its modern meaning of ‘matter in the
condition of an aeriform fluid’, at which time the word _gaseous_
also appeared. _Ether_ (Greek ‘aithēr’, ‘the _upper_ air’ above the
clouds), which had been practically a synonym for the Aristotelian
_quintessence_[46], was now adopted to express the mechanical
substitute for that spiritual medium required by modern science in
order to explain the phenomenon of action at a distance. These are
among the first attempts which were made to describe the outer world
objectively—from its own point of view instead of from the point of
view of divinity or of human souls; it is interesting, therefore, to
reflect that the success achieved is really only a relative one, as
all the words mentioned, with the possible exception of _gas_,[47]
are in the first place metaphors drawn from human activities such as
those of ‘cutting’, ‘stretching’, and ‘pulling’.

In about the year 1660 the spirit of curious inquiry which was abroad
prompted the foundation of the Royal Society, for the purpose, as its
title announced, of “Improving Natural Knowledge,” and it is notable
that the word _improve_ should have been employed. Originating, as we
saw, in Lawyer’s French, it had been used up to about 1620 to denote
merely “the enclosure and cultivation of waste land”. So that when
we find its old meaning butchered to make a striking metaphor, it is
reasonable to assume that some new idea or feeling had come to the
front, to which men were struggling to give the outward expression
that is life, that their outlook had changed somewhat, and that they
were groping for a means of readjusting their cosmos accordingly.

We have attempted so far to trace the evolution of Western outlook
from the earliest days of Greece down to the Revival of Learning in
England. It must not be forgotten that this process is hitherto an
unconscious one. Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the
European mind upon the world, fluid as it has always been, has yet
always felt itself to be at rest, just as men have hitherto believed
that the earth on which they trod was a solid and motionless body.
The first appearance of a distinction between _ancient_ and _modern_,
and of the word _progressive_, in Bacon’s _Essays_ has already been
noted, and we find that _progress_ itself had only begun to emerge
a few years before from its relatively parochial meaning of ‘royal
journey’ or, as we still say, ‘progress’. To the seventeenth century,
as Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed out, we owe the words _antiquated_,
_century_, _decade_, _epoch_, _Gothic_, _out-of-date_, _primeval_,
and we may add to these _contemporary_, _contemporaneous_,
_synchronise_, _synchronous_, and a queer jungle-growth of words with
similar meanings which sprang up about the middle of the seventeenth
century and has since vanished: _contemporal_, _co-temporary_,
_contemporize_, _isochronal_, _synchronal_, _synchronical_,
_synchronism_, _synchronistic_. A curious feature about these latter
words is the number of them which first appeared in theological
writings, the mystic philosopher, Henry More, being alone responsible
for three. They seem to have arisen chiefly from an interest in
comparing the dates of different events recorded in Scripture, and
they may thus be placed beside the epithet _primitive_, applied by
the Reformers to the early Church, which Mr. Pearsall Smith has
pointed to as “probably the first word in which our modern historical
sense finds expression”.

When we try combing the dictionaries—Greek, Latin, English, and
others—for words expressing a sense of the “march of history”, or
indeed of a past or future differing at all essentially from the
present, we are forced to the conclusion that this kind of outlook
on time is a surprisingly recent growth. We saw how the Greek
‘historia’ could mean practically any kind of knowledge; in the
same way, when ‘periodos’ (literally ‘way round’) was used of time,
it meant a cycle, one of a recurring series; it was not till the
eighteenth century that a _period_ of history acquired its modern
sense of an indefinite portion cut from a continuous process. Labels
like _Middle Ages_, _Renaissance_, ... are none of them earlier
than the eighteenth century, which also saw the new expressions
_develop_ and _development_, and the fact that the significant words
_anachronism_,[48] _evolution_,[48] and _prehistoric_, with the new
perspectives they denote, only appeared during the nineteenth century
may make us doubtful whether the mists of time have even yet fallen
wholly from our eyes.

In order to enter sympathetically into the outlook of an educated
medieval gentleman, we have to perform the difficult feat of
undressing, as it were, our own outlook by divesting it of all those
seemingly innate ideas of progress and evolution, of a movement of
some sort going on everywhere around us, which make our cosmos what
it is. This is more difficult even than it sounds, because so many
of these thoughts and feelings have become sub-conscious. We have
imbibed them with our vocabulary and cannot without much labour and
research disentangle the part that is due to them from the rest of
our consciousness. Let us try, for a moment, to realize with our
imaginations as well as with our intellects the world in which our
fathers dwelt—a world created abruptly at a fixed moment in time,
and awaiting a destruction equally abrupt, its inhabitants for ever
to be the same, and for ever struggling, not to _progress_ or to
_evolve_ into something different, but merely to become once more
exactly like the first man and woman. Where we speak of _progress_
and _evolution_, the Middle Ages could speak only of _regeneration_
and _amendment_. Their evolution was like Alice’s race with the Red
Queen. It took all their energies to keep still; and even in this
they had very little hope of succeeding, for they believed that the
world was getting steadily worse.

But perhaps their total lack of historical imagination is brought
home to us most forcibly by the prevalent belief that—apart from the
Chosen People—all the inhabitants of the pre-Christian world were
doomed to eternal exclusion from paradise. When we recollect that for
some time the doctors of medieval universities were obliged to swear
upon oath that they would teach nothing contrary to the doctrines of
a Greek philosopher who must already have been in this situation for
three hundred years at the birth of the Redeemer, and when we further
reflect that it was the acute brains of these very doctors which were
engaged in building up our present thinking apparatus, we may well
feel inclined to give up as hopeless the task of sympathetically
recreating the medieval cosmos in our imaginations—unless we realize,
as indeed the history of meanings clearly shows, that it is not
merely ideas and theories and feelings which have changed, but
the very method of forming ideas and of combining them, the very
channels, apparently eternal, by which one thought or feeling is
connected with another. Possibly the Middle Ages would have been
equally bewildered at the facility with which twentieth-century minds
are brought to believe that, intellectually, humanity languished for
countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of
crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific
dictum of the last century.

There is another difference between the past and the present which
it is hard for us to realize; and perhaps this is the hardest of
all. For with the seventeenth century we reach the point at which
we must at last try to pick up and inspect that discarded garment
of the human soul, intimate and close-fitting as it was, into
which this book has been trying from the fifth chapter onwards to
induce the reader to re-insert his modern limbs. The consciousness
of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other
selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the
external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of
experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point
of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of
training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different
kind of consciousness. Yet we can see from the history of our words
that this form of experience, so far from being eternal, is quite a
recent achievement of the human spirit. It was absent from the old
mythological outlook; absent, in its fullness, from Plato and the
Greek philosophers; and, though it was beginning to light up in the
Middle Ages, as we see in the development of Scholastic words like
_individual_ and _person_, yet the medieval soul was still felt to
be joined by all sorts of occult ties both to the physical body and
to the world. Self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first
dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation, and
it was not till the seventeenth century that the new light really
began to spread and brighten. One of the surest signs that an idea
or feeling is coming to the surface of consciousness—surer than the
appearance of one or two new words—is the tendency of an old one
to form compounds and derivatives. After the Reformation we notice
growing up in our language a whole crop of words hyphened with
_self_; such are _self-conceit_, _self-liking_, _self-love_, and
others at the end of the sixteenth century, and _self-confidence_,
_self-command_, _self-contempt_, _self-esteem_, _self-knowledge_,
_self-pity_, ... in the next.

From a full list of such words as the above the historical student
of words and their meanings could almost predict, apart from any
other source of knowledge, the appearance at about this time of
some philosopher who should do intellectually to the cosmos what
Copernicus and Kepler had already done astronomically—that is, turn
it inside out. And in Descartes, with his doctrine of “Cogito, ergo
sum”, we do, in fact, find just such a philosopher. His influence
was immense. Practically all philosophy since his day has worked
outwards from the thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos
to the soul. In England, not long afterwards, we find the brand-new
expressions, ‘the _ego_’ and _egoism_, coming into the language from
French philosophy, while the English thinker, Locke, adopts the new
(1632) word _consciousness_, defining it as ‘perception of what
passes in a man’s own mind’, and at the same time impresses on the
still newer _self-consciousness_[49] its distinctive modern meaning.

Though these two developments—the birth of an historical sense and
the birth of our modern self-consciousness—may seem at first sight
to have little connection with one another, yet it is not difficult,
on further consideration, to perceive that they are both connected
with that other and larger process which has already been pointed to
as the story told by the history of the Aryan languages as a whole.
If we wish to find a name for it, we should have to coin some such
ugly word as “internalization”. It is the shifting of the centre of
gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal
human being himself. The results are twofold: on the one hand the
peculiar freedom of mankind, the _spontaneous_[50] impulses which
control human behaviour and destiny, are felt to arise more and
more from _within_ the individual, as we saw in the semantic change
of such words as _conscience_, _disposition_, _spirit_, _temper_,
... in the application to inner processes of words like _dissent_,
_gentle_, _perceive_, _religion_, and in the Protestant Reformation;
on the other the spiritual life and activity felt to be immanent
in the world outside—in star and planet, in herb and animal, in
the juices and “humours” of the body, and in the outward ritual of
the Church—these grow feebler. The conception of “laws” governing
this world arises and grows steadily more impersonal; words like
_consistency_, _pressure_, _tension_, ... are found to describe
matter “objectively” and disinterestedly, and at the same time the
earth ceases to be the centre round which the cosmos revolves. All
this time the European ‘ego’ appears to be engaged, unawares, in
disentangling itself from its environment—becoming less and less
of the actor, more and more of both the author and the spectator.
In the eighteenth century the word _outlook_ is used for the first
time in the sense in which it has been used here; in the nineteenth
_environment_ is introduced by Carlyle. And so it goes on; and as,
on the one hand, it is only when that detachment has progressed to
a certain point that man becomes able to observe the changes which
constitute history, so it is only as he begins to observe them that
he becomes fully conscious of himself—the observer.

Thus, the general process which we have called “internalization” can
be traced working itself out into all kinds of details; not only
in that intimate, metaphysical change of outlook which it is so
hard for us to realize now that the change has taken place—in the
appearance of words betokening a sharper self-consciousness—but also
in the moral and personal sphere. We could, for instance, take such
a common word as _duty_ and mark its expansion of meaning at about