History in English words

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:

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:

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 the time of Shakespeare. By its derivation it carries the sense of ‘owing’ and it meant in Chaucer’s time an act of obedience which was owed to some other person—usually to a feudal superior.[51] It is not till the close of the sixteenth century that it begins to take on its modern sense of a more or less abstract moral obligation—an obligation owed, if to any being, to oneself or to a sort of ideal of manhood—such an ideal, for instance, as is expressed in the word gentleman. Later on, as with conscience, there is a tendency to personify it. At the beginning of the seventeenth century we first find the word Nature employed in contexts where medieval writers would certainly have used the single word God. Spontaneous has already been mentioned, and it is interesting to note a certain tendency, which seems to have been inherent, before Shakespeare’s time, in the adjective voluntary, to connote disapproval when it was applied to human actions or feelings. Later in the century the word character[52] was first used in its modern personal sense by the historian Clarendon.

Students of the period know well the sudden, extraordinary craze for “character-drawing” which swept over France and England at this time. In France literary “portraits” of oneself and one’s friends were produced in hundreds, the first as a hobby, the second actually as a round game; and Clarendon, whose History of the Great Rebellion is a string of such character-studies, was only doing systematically what men like Hall, Overbury, Earle, and others had already done in a more disjointed and dilettante way. To the medieval observer a person or a soul had been interesting chiefly in its relation to Society, to the Church, to the Cosmos. “All the personality of man,” said Wyclif, “standeth in the spirit of him.” But these new writers and their readers were interested in characters and characteristics for their own sakes. We begin to hear of people’s autographs, of their foibles and their fortes; eccentric is taken from astronomy and mathematics; the Greek word idiosyncrasy—signifying an ‘individual mixture’ (of ‘humours’)—is borrowed from Galen; but with the new point of view the astrological and physical meanings of this and other words, like disposition, humour, spirits, temperament, ...[53] gradually fade away, and their modern meanings arise instead. One relic of these ancient physics, however—the vapours which were supposed to rise into the head from the region of the stomach—lingered well on into the eighteenth century; and from the way in which Boswell and Johnson write of their fits of melancholy, it seems that they had just reached a point at which they could not be sure, from their feelings at any rate, whether their common malady was physical in its origin or purely mental.

The same difference is observable in the names for feelings and passions. The nomenclature of the Middle Ages generally views them from without, hinting always at their results or their moral significance—envy, greedy, happy (i.e. ‘lucky’), malice, mercy, mildheartness, peace, pity[54], remorse, repentance, rue, sin,... Even the old word sad had not long lost its original sense of ‘sated’, ‘heavy’ (which it still retains in sad bread), and fear continued for a long time to mean, not the emotion, but a ‘sudden and unexpected event’. Hardly before the beginning of the seventeenth century do we find expressed that sympathetic or “introspective” attitude to the feelings which is conveyed by such labels as aversion, dissatisfaction, discomposure, ... while depression and emotion—further lenient names for human weaknesses—were used till then of material objects.

In the eighteenth century we notice, as we should expect, a considerable increase in the number of these words which attempt to portray character or feeling from within; such are apathy, chagrin, diffidence, ennui, homesickness, together with the expression ‘the feelings‘, while agitation, constraint, disappointment, embarrassment, excitement are transferred from the outer to the inner world. Outlook, which meant ‘a place from which a good view is obtained’, was first employed figuratively by Dr. Young in 1742.

This brings us to another class of words—appropriate enough to the century which produced Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge—describing external things not objectively, from their own point of view, but purely by the effects which they produce on human beings, such, for instance, as affecting, amusing, boring, charming, diverting, entertaining, enthralling, entrancing, exciting, fascinating, interesting, and pathetic in its modern sense, none of which are found before the seventeenth and only a few before the eighteenth century. These adjectives can be distinguished sharply—indeed they are in a sense the very opposite of those older words, which can also be said, though less accurately, to describe external objects “from the human point of view”. Thus, when a Roman spoke of events as auspicious or sinister, or when some natural object was said in the Middle Ages to be baleful, or benign, or malign, a herb to possess such and such a virtue, an eye to be evil, or the bones of a saint to be holy, or even, probably, when Gower wrote:

it is true that these things were described from the human point of view, but the activity was felt to emanate from the object itself. When we speak of an object or an event as amusing, on the contrary, we know that the process indicated by the word amuse takes place within ourselves; and this is none the less obvious because some of the adjectives recorded above, such as charming, enchanting, and fascinating, are the present participles of verbs which had implied genuine, occult activity.

The change is an important one; it is a reverberation into wider and wider circles of the scholastic progress from Realism to Nominalism, and inside the walls of the Church we can perceive the same movement going on at the Reformation in the Protestant and Dissenting tendency to abandon belief in the Real Presence. Perhaps the somersault was turned most neatly by the old Aristotelean word subjective, which developed in the seventeenth century from its former meaning of ‘existing in itself’ to the modern one of ‘existing in human consciousness’. Objective made a similar move in the opposite direction. When using such words as “progress” and “develop” in this connection, however, we must remember that the semantic histories of words merely inform us of changes which have actually occurred in a large number of minds or “outlooks”. They tell us of what is earlier and what is later, but not of truth and error. In this direction all that a knowledge of them can do is to equip us a little better for forming opinions of our own.

At the same time we find a few words to denote the kind of people who are easily “affected” in this way. Susceptible is first found in Clarendon, and in the eighteenth century the words sensible and sensibility acquire their special sense of ‘easily affected’ or ‘having the emotions easily aroused’; and as this kind of experience grows more familiar, clearer heads become conscious of it, and the new words sentiment and sentimental appear. Sentimental, which was first used in the title of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, published in 1768, was found so convenient that the French language borrowed and the German translated it. No doubt these new notions of ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentimentality,’ of a variety of emotions lying dormant in the bosom and waiting eagerly to be called forth, combined with the recently developed interest in character to produce the curious personality, which acquired its modern meaning a few years later and has gone on increasing in popularity ever since.

It is impossible in the short space that is left to us to do justice to that extraordinary interlude in England’s literary and social history—the eighteenth century. The age of powder and platitudes, of charmers with automatically heaving bosoms, ogling and simpering at their corseted swains; the age of ugly shaven heads secretly perspiring under fashionable periwigs; the age when country gentlemen erected artificial “ruins” at the bottom of their gardens, and serious poets could hardly mention the sea without adding a reference to the finny drove—this age seems to us now to have faded away as suddenly and inexplicably as it arose, leaving only the faintest traces upon our language. Those half-hidden vestiges, however—the just slightly different shades of meaning with which sundry familiar words were used a hundred and fifty years ago—sometimes seem to fascinate us by the very paradox of their proximity and elusiveness. We feel that, if we could only bring them out in some way, we might take from them the very form and pressure of the age. And so, when we come across some particularly popular word like reason in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies between words and their meanings.

If we would seek for the genesis of the curious clockwork cosmos through which the minds and imaginations of the period seem to have moved with a measure of contentment, we should find it, perhaps, not so very far back in the past. Emotionally, the age was still dominated by a pronounced reaction against religious fanaticism—an attitude we see reflected in the changeable meaning of enthusiasm, which in Plato’s Greek meant ‘possessed by a god’. Spenser uses it in its Greek form in a good sense, but by the end of the seventeenth century we find Henry More writing: “If ever Christianity be exterminated, it will be by enthusiasm”; and even as late as 1830 a certain zealous, if dogmatic, Churchman thought it worth while to write and publish a Natural History of Enthusiasm, in which that dreadful vice, especially in its theological aspect, is castigated with much vigour. Fanatic, which had also meant ‘possessed by a god or demon,’ underwent the same change of meaning and gave birth to fanaticism about the middle of the seventeenth century. Extravagant, which had formerly meant ‘non-codified’, got its new meaning and produced extravagance. And the way in which the word Gothic was used to describe anything barbarous and uncouth reminds us of how the eighteenth century perceived barbarity and uncouthness in many places where we no longer see it—such as medieval architecture, much of which was pulled down at this time and replaced by buildings which were felt to be more “correct” and classical.

Intellectually, on the other hand, men’s minds seem to have been influenced above all things by that conception of impersonal “laws” governing the universe which, as we saw in the last chapter, was scarcely apprehended before the previous century. Poets and philosophers alike were delighted by the perfect order in which they perceived the cosmos to be arranged. They sought everywhere for examples of this orderliness. Pope, for instance, praises Windsor Forest on the ground that it is a place:

This appreciation of Nature’s neatness—from which we do not ourselves so easily derive poetic inspiration—is now so familiar that it is difficult for us to realize its freshness at that time. Yet this is unquestionably demonstrated by the dates at which such crucial words as arrange, category, classify, method, organize, organization, regular, regulate, regularity, system, systematic, ... or their modern meanings, appeared in the language. Only two of these are earlier than the seventeenth, and most of them are not found till the eighteenth century. Thus, arrange was a military term like array until that time, and regular was only used of monastic “orders” until the close of the sixteenth century.

It is this universal conformity to laws, then, this perfect order reigning everywhere undisturbed, which the eighteenth century seems to have had in mind when it used, and sometimes personified, the word Reason. Reason explained everything.

wrote James Thomson, and Pope expressed the same idea even more slickly when he announced in his Essay on Man: “Whatever is, is right.” Thus, rapt in adoration of the radiant new lady, the poets lost all interest in dame Nature. Only when she was arranged and regulated and organized into a park or a landscape garden would they consent to have anything to do with her, and then it was chiefly as a foil to the superior attractions of her rival. She became a stage, a “pleasing” background to a sort of everlasting human boxing-match between reason and “the passions”; and the dictionary dates from this time our curious custom of describing her face as scenery. And then, after having quietly murdered her, poetry proceeded to galvanize the poor corpse into a shameful, marionette-like semblance of life by switching into it that supposititious personal sympathy with human affairs which mars so much of the verse of the eighteenth century. We can, however, mark the beginning of this practice at an earlier date.

The word conscious, like consciousness, was unknown until the seventeenth century, when its newfangledness was ridiculed by Ben Jonson. It is odd, therefore, that the first recorded uses are figurative, applying it to inanimate objects. When we find Denham writing in 1643:

and Milton a few years later:

we can almost fancy, by their readiness to seize upon the new word, that our poets were beginning, even so soon, to feel the need of restoring “subjectively” to external Nature—of “projecting into” her, as we can now say—a fanciful substitute for that voluntary life and inner connection with human affairs which Descartes and Hobbes were draining from her in reality. The tendency we can see here, carried to extravagant lengths, at last produced the extraordinary poetic conventions of the eighteenth century, by which fictitious personality was attributed to every object and idea under the sun. Finally the complicated machinery of classical mythology was applied in the same subjective and purely fanciful way to English society and the English countryside. It is in the same Windsor Forest that we are asked to

At first sight this state of affairs looks like an exact repetition of the later stages of Roman mythology, but in point of fact the two outlooks are sharply distinguished by the new element of self-consciousness. Myth was in some way in the blood of the Romans; it was a living part of their national history, and in spite of all their artificiality and scepticism there is no evidence that they ever deliberately created gods and goddesses of the fancy, in whom they neither believed themselves nor expected anyone else to believe. We imagine them incapable of grasping, for instance, such an idea as that which found expression in the brand-new eighteenth-century verb, to personify. One wonders, therefore, to what extent the dawn of a mechanical age was reflecting itself in this new outlook, this new cosmos controlled by dead laws rather than instinct with living spirit, and therefore requiring to be peopled by the fancy.

We have spoken of the eighteenth-century mind as living in a “clockwork” cosmos, and it is interesting to reflect that even this simplest form of mechanical contrivance was a thing quite unknown to the ancient world. Was the rhythmical mimicry of organic life, which is the characteristic of machinery, already having its unperceived effect on men’s minds and philosophies? The influences which go to make up the outlook of an age are sometimes seen working most powerfully—though beneath the surface—in the very minds which believe themselves to be combating that outlook most stubbornly. The closing years of the eighteenth century produced Paley’s famous watch, a popular cosmic allegory which, in proving the existence of a Creator, at the same time relegates all His activities to the remote past. But this is a subject which can be more usefully considered in the next chapter. Thither we must now turn in order to trace the further development of the eighteenth-century gentleman’s imaginative double life—his life in the order and reason of the moral and material universe and of “sensibility” in the little universe of himself—into two divergent directions.