Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/661

Rh "How shall we interpret into thought the words 'arrive at a . . . habit?' A habit is produced. But 'arrival' implies, not production of a thing, but coming up to a thing that preëxists, as at the end of a journey. What, again, shall we say of the phrase, 'a fixed and settled habit?' Habit is a course of action characterized by constancy, as distinguished from courses of action that are inconstant. If the word 'settled' were unobjectionable, we might define habit as a settled, course of action; and, on substituting for the word this equivalent, the phrase would read 'a fixed and settled settled course of action.' Obviously the word habit itself conveys the whole notion; and, if there needs a word to indicate degree, it should be a word suggesting force, not suggesting rest. The reader is to be impressed with the strength of a tendency in something active, not with the firmness of something passive, as by the words 'fixed and settled.' And then why 'fixed and settled?' Making no objection to the words as having inapplicable meanings, there is the objection that one of them would be sufficient: surely that which is fixed must be settled. Nor are these all the imperfections in this short sentence. The habit referred to is the habit of believing; and to call it the habit of faith is to imply that the words faith and believing are synonymous.

"Passing to the next sentence, we are arrested by a conspicuous fault in its first clause—'The doubt which was laid revives again." To revive is to live again; so that the literal meaning of the clause is 'the doubt which was laid lives again again.' In the following line there is nothing objectionable; but at the end of it we come to another pleonasm. The words run: 'and that generally for this reason, because the mind. . . .' The idea is fully conveyed by the words, and that generally because the mind.' The words 'for this reason' are equivalent to an additional 'because.' So that we have here another nonsensical duplication. Going a little further there rises the question—Why 'controversies and disputes?' 'Dispute' is given in dictionaries as one of the synonymes of 'controversy;' and though it may be rightly held to have not quite the same meaning, any additional meaning it has does not aid, but rather interrupts, the thought of the reader. Though, where special attention is to be drawn to a certain element of the thought, two almost synonymous words may fitly be used to make the reader dwell longer on that element, yet, where his attention is to be drawn to another element of the thought (as here to the effect of controversy on the mind), there is no gain, but a loss, in stopping him to interpret a second word if the first suffices. One more fault remains. The mind is said 'to be disquieted with any former perplexity when it appears in a new shape, or is started by a different hand.' This portion of the sentence is doubly defective. The two metaphors are incongruous. Appearing in a shape, as a ghost might be supposed to do, conveys one kind of idea; and started by a hand, as a horse or a hound might be, conveys a conflicting kind of idea. This defect, however, is less serious than the other; namely, the unfitness of the second metaphor for giving a concrete form to the abstract idea. How is it possible to 'start' a perplexity? 'Perplexity,' by derivation and as commonly used, involves the thought of entanglement and arrest of motion; while to start a thing is to set it in motion. So that, whereas the mind is to be represented as enmeshed, and thus impeded in its movements, the metaphor used to describe its state is one suggesting the freedom and rapid motion of that which enmeshes it.

"Even were these hypercriticisms, it might be said that they are rightly to be made on a passage which is