Nominalism

“ They have wished to generalize beyond measure, and, at the same time, they have forgotten that liberty is not license. Thus they have reached what is called nominalism, and have asked themselves if the savant is not the dupe of his own definitions and if the world he thinks he discovers is not simply created by his own caprice. ”

“ The grounds of nominalism, however, are not very well understood, even by the nominalists themselves; and hence conceptualism is supposed to recover her position, or at least to effect a compromise with her adversary, by affirming that the object which the mind contemplates when it employs a general term is some resemblance, some point or points of similarity, which it observes among a number of particular things, and that to this resemblance it gives a name expressive of the genus to which the things in question belong. ”

“ The nominalist is right in so far as he denies that law as an abstract thing (considered apart from a person—as his thought) is anything: the realist is right in so far as he affirms that law, apart from {64} any particular manifestation, is an eternal reality. The reconciliation of nominalism and realism is found in God. Applying this to the case in hand—you admit that the Ten Commandments are the ground of morality; therefore, I say, they must be an expression of a thought of God, the Author of morality. ”

“ We are then, in truth, revolving in a circle, nominalism leading us to conceptualism, and conceptualism bringing us back to nominalism. Generalization can only be effected by extracting common qualities; but, that qualities should appear common, they must have already been subjected to a process of generalization.
Now, when we get to the bottom of these two opposite theories, we find in them a common postulate; each will have it that we start from the perception of individual objects. The first composes the genus by an enumeration ”

“ If conceptualism stands to the distinction, and maintains that the general conceptions are distinct cognitions—are ideas cognisable by themselves, and independently of the particular cognitions—in that case the general conceptions evaporate in mere words; for it is certain that the mind cannot think of any genus without thinking of one or more of the particulars which rank under it. Thus nominalism is triumphant. ”

“ Of course a people of fifty millions who have invented a new civilisation have a right to a language of their own; that’s what they tell me, and I can’t quarrel with it. But I wish they had made it as pretty as the mother-tongue, from which, when all’s said, it’s more or less derived. We ought to have invented something as noble as our country. ”

“ Then, in the name of God, of manhood, of common sense, say it, directly, positively, assertively, as is your right, remembering the assurance of the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." Don't worry about whether you are saying it in the genteel fashion of some one else's standard. Make your own standard. Even the standards of the grammar books and dictionaries are not equal to that of a man who has something to say and says it forcefully, truthfully, pointedly, directly. ”

“ Government itself—any form of it—is a convention; marriage is a convention; money of course is a convention, and the alphabet itself I suppose to contain as many conventions as all the old Courts of Love and Laws of Chivalry put together, and our English alphabet one tremendous fallacy, that twenty-six letters, separately or in combination are capable of symbolising all the sounds produced by an Englishman's organs of speech, let alone the sounds he hears from foreigners, dogs, guns, steam-engines, motor-horns and other friends and enemies to whom we deny the franchise. ”

“ For myself, I am so aghast at the increasing difficulties which present themselves, and so well convinced of the almost demonstrable impossibility that languages should owe their original institution to merely human means, that I leave, to any one who will undertake it, the discussion of the difficult problem, which was most necessary, the existence of society to the invention of language, or the invention of language to the establishment of society. ”

“ When men are framing a supreme law and chart of government, to secure blessings and prosperity to untold generations yet to come, they use language as short and direct and plain as can be found, to express their meaning In all matters but this of slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language. ”

“ Nay, this Kingdom begins to be seen not only in religious ecstasy, in moral vision, but in the light of common sense, and the human understanding. Social science begins to verify the prophecy of poetry. ”

“ Moreover, if a controversy be raised of the accurate and proper signification, that is, the definition of those names or appellations which are commonly used; insomuch as it is needful for the peace of the city, or the distribution of right, to be determined; the determination will belong to the city. For men, by reasoning, do search out such kind of definitions in their observation of diverse conceptions, for the signification whereof those appellations were used at diverse times and for diverse causes. But the decision of the question, whether a man do reason rightly, belongs to the city. ”

“ Unity of language creates unity of thought, of literature, and largely unity of civilization and of institutions. It facilitates social and commercial intercourse, and must produce still more marked political phenomena. We profit naturally by inventions, by discoveries, by constitutional struggles, by civil and religious achievements, by lessons of traditions, by landmarks of usage and prescription. Magna Charta, Petition of Right, Habeas Corpus, what O’Connell even called the “glorious Revolution of 1688,” are as much American as English. ”

“ All names are imperfect, and have their unsuitable, as well as their suitable suggestiveness in connection with every new object to which they are applied; but I hold, and with the utmost confidence, that there is no general name so truly descriptive of a language as institution—none which takes into account so many of its essential characteristics, or marks so distinctly its place among the possessions of its community. ”

“ In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing political and social questions. “Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,” this is what has remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe; and in America comparative philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the unhallowed theory of slavery. ”

“ This casts all linguistic law to the winds, flouts the aristocracy of intelligence and learning, and worships unbathed democracy as the true god of language. The laws of correctness are abrogated for the usages of caprice, ignorance, and for careless inaccuracy. ”

“ First then, you in a way require a more thorough knowledge of the English tongue than perhaps any people on the face of the globe. Without the power to comprehend clearly the thoughts conveyed therein, your progress in the course of intellectual and social amendment is impossible. Remember, that words often confuse ideas, and that the inharmonious use of a word may often lead to great and permanent divisions and estrangements in thought, estrangements so great that whole societies of men may be led thereby in different ways. ”

“ In literature the tendency was to make letters a concrete part of the national mind, just as the great French revolution called into existence the first notion of national life by investing the people with the controlling power of their country’s interests. ”

“ Slang is now but the language of the elite—it would then become the vulgar tongue; and, in fact, there is no predicting the amount of national benefit likely to arise from an amalgamation of all ranks in society, where-the bond of union is so honourable in its nature. ”

“ If you believe them, no other people but the English are born with a political understanding or forecast: why then should the English, who come here, not apply the same doctrines also to the Americans? and why should they not, occasionally, join our own fashionable people in depreciating the advantages of our government, and speak disrespectfully of those whom ourselves are accustomed to treat with so little ceremony? ”

“ The practice must there prevail, and gradually change the whole structure of the Latin derivatives. Such is the force of custom, in a nation where all fashionable people are drawn to a point, that the current of opinion is irresistible; individuals must fall into the stream and be borne away by its violence; except perhaps a few philosophers, whose fortitude may enable them to hold their station, and whose sense of propriety may remain, when their power of opposition has ceased. ”

“ Dominating this American tradition is, dominating, almost tyrannical, for one reason only, but that a strong one, a fact not a convention, a factor, not a mere influence—dominating because of the English language. ”

“ We shall at almost every turn hear modern laws and constitutions—liberty of worship, liberty of the press, liberty of meeting, with representative legislatures and responsible governments—denounced as the curse of mankind in all the varying accents of a strange dialect, or a dialect happily strange to us. ”

“ The causes of national character are scarcely at all understood, and the effect of institutions or social arrangements upon the character of the people is generally that portion of their effects which is least attended to, and least comprehended. Nor is this wonderful, when we consider the infant state of the science of Ethology itself, from whence the laws must be drawn, of which the truths of political ethology can be but results and exemplifications. ”

“ To say, with Frost, Hall, Smith, Perley, Kirkham, Sanborn, Rand, and others, "The nominative case governs the verb in number and person," and again, "A verb must agree with its nominative case in number and person," is to confound the meaning of government and agreement, to say the same thing in different words, and to leave the subject of a verb still without a rule: for rules of government are applicable only to the words governed, and nothing ever agrees with that which governs it. ”

“ She alleges that the sameness of language, of manners, of appearance, renders it impossible to distinguish us from her subjects. But because we speak English, and look like them, are we to be punished? Are free and independent men to be submitted to their bondage? ”

“ First, one must remark that the language of definition is inevitably the language of generality because only the generalizable is definable. Singulars and individuals can be described but not defined; e.g., one can define man, but one can only describe Abraham Lincoln. ”

“ The Nominalistic doctrine that only individuals have real existence, and that the universal, whatever it may be, is to be sought in the mind, distinguishes between the spheres of being and denies to one what it allows to another. Of the extreme nominalistic position, that the only true universal is the word, which may be applied indifferently to several distinct objects, I shall not here speak. ”

“ The anomaly of a ruling class without legal sanction or titular prestige has seized upon the popular mind; titles have been created for our great "untitled nobility"—mock titles which have speedily assumed a serious import and meaning. ”

“ To cut knots by dogmatism, and to tie them by sophistry, are employments equally vain. It cannot be denied that there are in every multitude both a unity and a plurality, one or the other of which must be preferred as the principle of concord for the verb or the pronoun, or for both. ”

“ A hundred years ago there were pulpits that led the popular movement; while outside of religion and of what called itself literature, industry and a jealous sense of personal freedom obeyed, in their rapid growth, the law of their natures. English common sense and those municipal institutions born of the common law, and which had saved and sheltered it, grew inevitably too large for the eggshell of English dependence, and allowed it to drop off as naturally as the chick does when she is ready. ”

“ This equivocation of names maketh it difficult to recover those conceptions for which the name was ordained; and that not only in the language of other men, wherein we are to consider the drift, and occasion, and contexture of the speech, as well as the words themselves; but also in our own discourse, which being derived from the custom and common use of speech, representeth not unto us our own conceptions. ”

“ Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality ”

“ I shall consider Assent made to propositions which express abstractions or notions under five heads; which I shall call Profession, Credence, Opinion, Presumption, and Speculation.
1. Profession.
There are assents so feeble and superficial, as to be little more than assertions. I class them all together under the head of Profession. Such are the assents made upon habit and without reflection; as when a man calls himself a Tory or a Liberal, as having been brought up as such ”

“ Under the notion that the concrete name must of course convey a meaning, or in other words, that there is some property common to all things which it denotes, people give a name to this common property; from the concrete Civilized, they form the abstract Civilization. But since most people have never compared the different things which are called by the concrete name, in such a manner as to ascertain what properties these things have in common, or whether they have any ”