Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/43

I.] and the finer shades of colouring, no two minds will produce pictures perfectly accordant with one another, nor will any precisely reproduce the original.

The limits of variation of meaning are, of course, very different in different classes of words. So far as these are designations of definite objects, cognizable by the senses, there is little danger of our seriously misapprehending one another when we utter them. Yet, even here, there is room for no trifling discordance, as the superior knowledge or more vivid imagination of one person gives to the idea called up by a name a far richer content than another can put into it. Two men speak of the sun, with mutual intelligence: but to the one he is a mere ball of light and heat, which rises in the sky every morning, and goes down again at night; to the other, all that science has taught us respecting the nature of the great luminary, and its influence upon our little planet, is more or less distinctly present every time he utters its name. The word Pekin is spoken before a number of persons, and is understood by them all: but some among them know only that it is the name of an immense city in Asia, the capital of the Chinese empire; others have studied Chinese manners and customs, have seen pictures of Chinese scenery, architecture, dress, occupation, and are able to tinge the conception which the word evokes with some fair share of a local colouring; another, perhaps, has visited the place, and its name touches a store of memories, and brings up before his mind's eye a picture vivid with the hues of truth. I feel a tolerable degree of confidence that the impressions of colour made on my sense are the same with those made upon my friend's sense, so that, when we use the words red or blue, we do not mean different things: and yet, even here, it is possible that one of us may be afflicted with some degree of colour-blindness, so that we do not apprehend the same shades precisely alike. But just so is every part of language liable to be affected by the personality of the speaker; and most of all, where matters of more subjective apprehension are concerned, The voluptuary, the passionate and brutal, the philosophic, and the sentimental, for instance, when they speak of love or of hate,