1819: Espèce deCanard
Private papers
The morning proves too damp for walking, and so I have been reading (and rereading) an article in The Repository concerning “the instability of language as an instrument of thought.” The writer argues that words are but shadows of ideas, transient and mutable. I find myself both persuaded and troubled. What, after all, becomes of conversation or persuasion if our very instrument is unreliable—like a compass that trembles even when the sea is still?
At luncheon yesterday, I ventured a light remark that we—ladies and gentlemen equally—never mean quite the same thing by our own phrases. Sir Thomas laughed, declaring that language possesses precision enough for any necessary purpose. Yet I doubt it. Even the simplest sentence conceals an abyss of assumption. Consider that innocent phrase every English child recites—“The cat sat on the mat.” How harmless, how elementary! But if we examine it, we find each word opens its own labyrinth.
What cat? Mine, the sleek and amber-eyed one from Devon, differs utterly from the large tabby belonging to my neighbour, or from the fleet, thin creatures that haunt the stables. What form of “sat”? Upright, crouched, curled? And what texture or colour has the mat? In each imagination the creature and its resting place must vary. What we call the same sentence is but a frame for a dozen distinct pictures. We repeat the words, but never the vision.
Suppose, then, we alter one term and say instead “The cat sat on the hat.” At once the mind leaps towards conjecture and alarm. Did the cat crush the hat? Whose hat? Was it silk, felt, or beaver? Was it ruined or merely disarranged? In attending to the new image, we import wholly new vocabulary—“crush,” “ruin,” “damage,” “offence.” Each new word demands further consent as to its meaning. Our attempt at clarification breeds its own obscurity, multiplying sense into nonsense by degrees.
It seems the more we enlarge a statement—the more precise we hope to be—the more terms we must invent for its explication, each carrying its own uncertainty. Meaning expands like a vine and wraps itself about the structure of the sentence until the form is lost amid the foliage. Thus, the simplest proposition of grammar becomes a plaything for philosophers, and communication a perpetual negotiation rather than a meeting of minds.
Perhaps agreement in language arises only when we cease to question. Politeness relies on such tacit surrender: when one says “How do you do?” one neither expects nor desires an account of the body’s ailments, but only the token of civility. True comprehension would destroy the ease of society. Yet if we cannot secure understanding even in small things, what hope have we when discussing God, virtue, or government? We quarrel incessantly, not because we differ in substance, but because we assign diverse meanings to the same words, and pride forbids us to yield our private definitions.
In former days, scholars spoke confidently of universal reason; now I suspect universality itself may be a charming delusion. Perhaps every mind is a solitary architecture of signs—its windows similar in shape, but the view from each wholly distinct. When I say “cat,” you may nod in assent, yet the creature you conjure bears little resemblance to mine. We converse, then, as travellers exchanging sketches of a country neither has precisely seen.
As I write, a grey mist gathers beyond the lawn, and in it the gardeners move like shadows speaking their own mute dialect of gesture and action. I almost envy their immediacy: a spade turned, a nod of understanding—a language of needs and tasks, innocent of semantics. Words, by contrast, seem both our glory and our undoing. They permit reflection, yet by reflection divide what once was whole.
Still, I continue to speak, to write, to wrestle with expression as one tames an unruly horse—well aware it will never be fully mastered. Perhaps that is the fate of thought: to reach always outward through the porous veil of words, knowing that the shape of understanding shivers like the cat’s tail on the mat—no sooner observed than altered.
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