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:
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:
and the conception of contemplation rising, through love, from the one to the other, as in
or:
until finally, in the Hymne of Heavenly Beauty, Spenser reveals the source of his faith:
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.