cally invoked the aid of feeling, and said, 'If any one were willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?"" "On this Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words-words which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat."

No one can think clearly and reason correctly or be relied upon by others as fair-minded and impartial who believes that any view of things is right if it is not true, or who does not strive with all his might to see things as they really are in spite of all his wishes.

Our feelings tend to influence our judgment not only by making us believe what it is pleasant to believe, but also by making us believe whatever happens to fit in with the emotion of the moment. Leslie Stephen says: We are not unhappy because we believe in hell; but we believe in hell because we are unhappy.' When we are despondent the world seems dark and sad, when we are happy it seems bright and glad, when we are in love it is easy to find "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt", and when we are angry or irritated it is hard to believe that anger or irritation is out of place.

This certainly is the logic of the emotions, and it is hard.

enough to overcome it—until the mood is over; and if we must wait until then to see things as they are, we should also make it a rule to wait before we express or act upon our judgments. Hence the wisdom of counting one hundred before displaying anger, and of the regulation which obtains, I believe, in the British navy requiring that no officer shall punish a man until twenty-four hours after the supposed offence.

In our effort to see things as they are in spite of our wishes and emotions we often have to resist an appeal to them made wittingly or unwittingly by some one else. When any one discusses the question at issue on its own intrinsic merits he is said to reason to the point, or, as the old logicians would say, his is an Argumentum ad Rem; but when one party to a discussion takes advantage of the weakness of another and tries to persuade him that something is true by appealing to his wishes or his emotions he uses one form of the Argumentum ad Hominem. Since the essential purpose of this so-called argument is to leave a person in a certain mood which will affect his judgment, it makes very little difference how it is done. It may be by gentle or inflammatory speeches or it may be without speech at all—by feeding him or embarrassing him or getting him out in the moonlight.

The Argumentum ad Populum is essentially the same as this form of the Argumentum ad Hominem except that it is addressed to a crowd. The real arguments of successful political speakers are generally very weak. They carry their point and get the votes merely by gaining the sympathy of the audience: by getting it to feel in harmony with the speaker and out of harmony with his opponents; and it does not make much difference whether this is done by solid arguments, impassioned appeals, ridicule and abuse of the other side, or funny stories.

CHAPTER II.

THE MEANINGS OF WORDS.

In almost all our thought and our communication with others we use words. A word is " a mark which may raise in our mind a thought like to some thought which we had before, and which, being pronounced to others, may be to them a sign of what thought the speaker had before in his mind". Unfortunately, however, the thing or the relation which a given word is used to mark is not always the same. and if we assume that it is in any particular case when in fact it is not, we are bound to misunderstand each other, to make some egregious blunder in our own reasoning, or not to notice such blunders in the reasoning of others.

Blunders of

tion.

To speak first of the blunders of interpretation. These often arise when a student is beginning the study of any science and takes it for granted that words which are used in a purely technical sense are used in interpretathe popular sense to which he happens to be accustomed. The word 'phenomenon' as used in science merely means something that we perceive or appear to perceive, but the student assumes that it means something strange or miraculous. When the psychologist speaks of 'imagining' something he merely means forming a mental picture of it; but the student may assume that he means believing something that is not so. 'Immediate' in science means direct or without the assistance of anything else; but the student will probably assume that it means without any

delay. A‘particular' proposition in logic is one that tells about some undesignated part (cf. 'particle') of a class; but the student who reads his book in a hurry assumes that it is one that tells about some individual in particular. When a student misinterprets statements in this way he is almost certain to misconceive the meaning of the whole paragraph or chapter in which they occur, or to gain no definite idea from it whatever. This may be partly the fault of the author, for if a book is intended as an elementary text-book, it is his business not to use words in these new senses without saying something about it. But it is also largely the fault of the student himself. He knows that the author is trying to convey some definite meaning; and if he took the trouble to inquire what that meaning really is, instead of being satisfied with his work when he has read the words or learned to jumble some of them together, he would see very easily that some of these words must be used in a strange sense.

The same trouble occurs also very frequently in history and literature. If a book was written more than a century ago, many of its words will have been used in a sense with which we are no longer familiar; and here again unless we are very careful we are likely to misunderstand the author's meaning completely. What, for example, is the meaning of the italicised words in the following passages from the Bible? "I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me" (Ps. 22:17). “I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried I hoped in thy word" (Ps. 119: 147). ' But unto thee have I cried, O Lord; and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee" (Ps. 88:13). "That I may show all thy praises within the ports of the daughter of Sion" (Ps. 9: 14, Prayer-book version). "My daughter is grievously vexed with a devil" (Matt. 15:22). What also is meant by the word 'let', by the word 'meat' in the phrase 'meat and drink', by 'rod' and staff' in Ps. 23, and by the phrase What have I to do with thee?' What did the

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Biblical writers mean by a 'prophet', by cherubim ', and by a' penny' as the word is used in the story of the Prodigal Son ? What is meant in Magna Charta when it says, “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned . . . but by lawful judgment of his peers"♪*

If words do not mean anything when they are taken in a sense with which we are familiar, we can be sure that the author was either writing nonsense or using them in some sense with which we are not familiar. But even when they do mean something when taken in our ordinary sense, that may not be what the author meant them to mean. Hence students of historical methods say that we must not read some old writings for the purpose" of extracting information. from it without any thought of first ascertaining exactly what was in the author's mind ". If we do, we are sure to give the author's words our meaning instead of his. Therefore we must make it a rule to understand the exact meaning of what is said "before asking what can be extracted from it for the purpose of history", or for any other purpose. The Bible, for example, is full of the deepest truths; but most of us read it without finding them simply because the rhythm is pleasant and the words are familiar and it never occurs to us to inquire whether or not the men who wrote them meant to say anything that we have not thought already, and if they did, what it is.

This finding of the meaning, even where it seems plain enough already, is no mere perfunctory matter. To be sure

* A student of philosophy should pay particular attention to the meaning of such words as Idea', 'Perception', 'Impression', 'Reflection', as used by Locke, by Berkeley, and by Hume; the phrase 'Moral Philosophy' as used by Hume and his contemporaries; Conceive' as used in different contexts by Herbert Spencer; 'Substanz', 'Wirklichkeit ', 'Realität', 'Noumenon', and 'Ding an sich' as used by Kant, and the like.

+Langlois-Seignobos, "Introduction to the Study of History", pp. 143-146 (Henry Holt & Co,, 1898).