Not a few of our English particles are equivocal in their signification, especially “and” and “or.” The dual meaning of the latter particle, which may imply either that two objects or propositions are equivalent, if not identical, or that they are unlike, if not contradictory, is a fruitful source of misunderstanding and confusion. The conjunction “and” is hardly less indefinite and equivocal. This is illustrated in the case of _Stradling vs. Stiles_, in “Martinus Scriblerus,” familiar to the readers of Pope, where, in a supposed will, a testator, possessed of six black horses, six white horses, and six pied, or black-and-white horses, bequeathed to A. B. “all my black and white horses.” The question, thereupon, rose whether the bequest carried the black horses, and the white horses, or the black-and-white horses only. The equivocation could have been avoided by writing “all my black and all my white horses,” or, “all my pied horses”; still, it is evident that our language needs a new conjunctive.
Sir William Hamilton points out a defect in our philosophical language, in which the terms “idea,” “conception,” “notion,” are used as almost convertible to denote objects so different as the images of sense and the unpicturable notions of intelligence. The confusion thus produced is avoided in the German, “the richest in metaphysical expressions of any living tongues,” in which the two kinds of objects are carefully distinguished.
Again, how many systems of error in metaphysics and ethics have been based upon the etymologies of words, the sophist assuming that the meaning of a word must always be that which it, or its root, originally bore! Thus Horne Tooke tries to prove by a wide induction that since all particles,--that is, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions,--were originally nouns and verbs, they must be so still; a species of logic which would prove that man, if the Darwinian theory be true, is still a reptile. In a similar way the same writer has reached the conclusion that there is no eternal truth, since “truth,” according to its etymology, is simply what one “troweth,” that is, what one thinks or believes. This theory, it is thought, was suggested to Tooke by a conjecture that “if” is equivalent to “gif,” an imperative of the verb “to give”; but as it has been shown, from cognate forms in other languages, that this particle has no connection with the verb “to give,” or any other verb, any system founded on this basis is a mere castle in the air. Truth, argues Tooke, supposes mankind; for whom, and _by_ whom alone the word is formed, and to whom alone it is applicable. “If no man, then no truth. There is no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting truth, unless mankind, _such as they are at present_, be also eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict each other, and yet both speak truth, for the truth of one person may be opposite to the truth of another.”