Solecism

“ If a solecism, or a vulgarism even, will serve his purpose better at a given moment than the more elegant word, he avails himself of it, knowing what he is doing, and risking the smaller loss for the greater gain. ”

“ The situation of a strange dog in a country town, barked at and worried by all the curs in the village, is about as enviable as that of a person who affects singularity in politics. What is a man to do who gets himself into this predicament, in an age when patriotism is a misnomer in language, and public principle a solecism in fact? If he cannot bring the world round to his opinion, he must as a forlorn hope go over to theirs, and be content to be knave—or nothing. ”

“ It is simply a form of etiquette, a mode of speech, as of the Englishman of past generations who challenged you to mortal combat and subscribed himself "your obedient humble servant." You will be guilty of a grave solecism if you imitate that American to whom the grandee remarked with effusion that the stud which captivated his taste was his own, his very own. ”

“ We feel that the spiritual concerns of an individual may be safely left to himself as most interested in them, except so far as they can be affected by argument or friendly monition; that the idea of compelling belief in particular doctrines is a solecism, as absurd as wicked ”

“ Is your rage for novelty so great, that you are first to sign and seal, and then to retract? Is it possible to conceive a greater solecism? I am at a loss what to say. You agree to bind yourselves hand and foot—for the sake of what? ”

“ In proportion to his weakness, he is played upon by designing men, till the bloated monster has lost all traces of humanity. And that tribes of men, like flocks of sheep, should quietly follow such a leader, is a solecism that only a desire of present enjoyment and narrowness of understanding can solve. Educated in slavish dependence, and enervated by luxury and sloth, where shall we find men who will stand forth to assert the rights of man;—or claim the privilege of moral beings, who should have but one road to excellence? ”

“ While I am the oldest man of my political generation, I have been brought by the seeming force of exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of the other, and I shall be a solecism in the government which I have undertaken to form. ”

“ The qualities good and evil can only exist in the mind as they are measured by a supreme law. “If we deny the existence of a Divine law obligatory on men, we must deny that the world is under Divine government, for a government without rule or law is a solecism.” ”

“ For what is called a solecism is nothing else than the putting of words together according to a different rule from that which those of our predecessors who spoke with any authority followed. For whether we say inter homines (among men) or inter hominibus, is of no consequence to a man who only wishes to know the facts. And in the same way, what is a barbarism but the pronouncing of a word in a different way from that in which those who spoke Latin before us pronounced it? ”

“ Here then occurs the difficulty, of filling up that infinite gap before creation. Consider the supreme first being sitting in the center of an universal solitude, environ’d with the abyss of infinite nothing, a chasm of immense vacuity! what words can paint the greatness of the solecism? what mind does not start at the horror of such an absurdity? and especially supposing this state subsisted from infinite ages.
’Tis in vain to pretend, that a being of all perfections can be happy in himself, in the consciousness of those perfections, whilst he does no good to any thing ”

“ In the meantime these rules of etiquette observed in society are adhered to and followed by those who do not wish to appear singular, eccentric, old-fashioned, unconventional, or any other adjective that the temper of their judges may induce them to apply to them for committing solecisms, either small or great. ”

“ It wars against the passions that spring out of the bosom of a world of fine sentiments, a world of admirable sayings and foul practices, of good maxims and bad deeds; whose darker passions are not only restrained by custom and ceremony, but hidden even from itself by a veil of beautiful sentiments. This terrible solecism has existed in all ages. Romish sentimentalism has often covered infidelity and vice; Protestant straightness often lauds spirituality and faith, and neglects homely truth, candor, and generosity ”

“ The idea of having committed the slightest solecism in politeness, whether real or imaginary, was agony to him; for perhaps even guilt itself does not impose upon some minds so keen a sense of shame and remorse, as a modest, sensitive, and inexperienced youth feels from the consciousness of having neglected etiquette or excited ridicule. ”

“ A form of control, clearly embodying the idea of government, and at the same time conferring absolute freedom, is a solecism. If men would uniformly govern themselves aright by their own wills, there could be no necessity for government, or room for its exercise, at least in the sense in which we now understand the term. A government adapted to such a people, I allow, might be without the element of physical control, so indispensable in human governments. ”

“ As with individual, any one who is not prepared to clear his ideas upon its meaning will do well to avoid it; it is a very telltale word, readily convicting the unwary, and on the other hand it may quite easily be done without. Every one knows by now that our mutual friend is a solecism. ”

“ If the present state were thought to comprise the beginning and the end of the human system, and if, at the same time, this system be attributed to the Supreme Intelligence, then indeed the prodigious waste and destruction which is continually taking place, not only of the germs of life, but of the rarest and of the most excellent specimens of divine art, is a solecism that must baffle every attempt at explanation. Let then the deist, who knows of nothing beyond death, talk of the mysteries of Providence ”

“ It is a solecism in good manners to suppose it unsuitable to designate the members of your own family by their proper titles under all circumstances that would render it suitable and convenient to do so in the instance of other persons. Never fall into the American peculiarity on this point, I entreat you. Say—"My father, Dr. V——," or "My sister, Miss V——," "Mrs. Col. V——, my sister-in-law," or, "My sister, Mrs. John Jenkins," with as scrupulous a regard for rank and precedence, as though dealing with strangers. ”

“ After long dumb-groaning generations, has the turn suddenly become thine?—To such abysmal overturns, and frightful instantaneous inversions of the centre-of-gravity, are human Solecisms all liable, if they but knew it ”

“ Of these it is used to describe the serving of worshippers more than forty times, of tributaries, about thirty five, and of servants or domestics, about ten.
If the Israelites not only held slaves, but multitudes of them, if Abraham had thousands, and if they abounded under the Mosaic system, why had their language no word that meant slave? That language must be wofully poverty-stricken, which has no signs to represent the most common and familiar objects and conditions. To represent by the same word, and without figure, property, and the owner of that property, is a solecism. ”

“ He is fallen so low this once-high man; no criminal nor traitor, how far from it; but the unhappiest of Human Solecisms: whom if abstract Justice had to pronounce upon, she might well become concrete Pity, and pronounce only sobs and dismissal! ”

“ I believe, in a word, that solipsism is a sharp horn of the pluralistic idealist’s dilemma. To the monistic idealist, on the other hand, it presents no unavoidable difficulty. For the monistic idealist’s position is, in brief, the following: In being conscious of myself I know myself as limited, thwarted, circumscribed. But one can not know oneself as bounded without knowing the existence of a boundary; and to be aware of a boundary as boundary one must be aware of a something beyond. That is to say, in the experience of my narrow, single self, I experience also a somewhat-beyond-myself. ”

“ It is an aristocratic feeling that is at the bottom of this propensity to seclusion and solitude.
Rascals are always sociable—more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company. He prefers solitude more and more, and, in course of time, comes to see that, with few exceptions, the world offers no choice beyond solitude on one side and vulgarity on the other. This may sound a hard thing to say; but even Angelus Silesius, with all his Christian feelings of gentleness and love, was obliged to admit the truth of it. ”

“ For, as is natural, he has by that time inferred other people's character from an examination of his own; with the result that he has been gradually disappointed to find that in the qualities of the head or in those of the heart—and usually in both—he reaches a level to which they do not attain; so he gladly avoids having anything more to do with them. For it may be said, in general, that every man will love or hate solitude—in other Words, his own society—just in proportion as he is worth anything in himself. ”

“ The absolute, for Solov'ev, is the all-in-one being, is God, is the good. The absolute is one, of one kind, the unifying, the one thing uniting all others; God is all-embracing and all-unifying in the sense that all parts of the world-all aspire towards him, through him, finding unity in him. God is love.
Absolute being, as absolute substance, as absolute reality, as actus purus, God taking pleasure in himself, God with his absolute autonomy, with his freedom (the only freedom in the true sense of the word) —is spaceless and timeless, is everlasting. ”

“ For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man—"in society"—it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime—"commonplace." ”

“ Whatever may have been said by those who, in the pride of a deceitful philosophy, have wished to glorify the power of the solitary man—if the latter, supported by certain fortunate circumstances, can remain some time in a state hardly endurable, it is not by his own strength, but by means which society itself has furnished. This is the incontestable truth, from which, in his pride, Selkirk had turned away. ”

“ Solov'ev shows more originality and independence when he deduces the theocratic organisation of mankind from an ethical principle, that of asceticism. He assumes the feeling of shame to be inborn. It appears, he says, in three distinct modifications, and constitutes the moral vital energy. The sentiment of shame in the strictest sense is shown in the relationship between man and the lower creation, and in man's relationship to matter, in especial towards his own material body, towards matters of sex. The sentiment of shame also takes the form of fellow-feeling, of sympathy or altruism. ”

“ Solitude has practical limits, no doubt; if it is too great, one does not perpetuate oneself—the social many, kindred to one another, perpetuate themselves best, and that is why, perhaps, commonness preponderates in the world. ”

“ Soloman being an excellent diplomatist, does, with the aid of the hostess, her twelve masters of ceremony, her beadle, and two policemen, forthwith bring the house to a more orderly condition. But night has rolled into the page of the past, the gray dawn of morning is peeping in at the half-closed windows, the lights burning in the chandeliers shed a pale glow over the wearied features of those who drag, as it were, their languid bodies to the stifled music of unwilling slaves. ”

“ But this genial heat is latent in all constitutions, and is disengaged only by the friction of society. As Bacon said of manners, ‘To obtain them, it only needs not to despise them,’ so we say of animal spirits, that they are the spontaneous product of health and of a social habit. ‘For behavior, men learn it, as they take diseases, one of another.’
But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy. ”

“ Society and socialisation endure in space and time, so that it is impossible for the individual to enter into a brief and experimental union with society. Nolens volens the individual is permanently associated with the social whole, and an ephemeral treaty such as some individualists desire is impossible in practice. The solitude, the isolation of the intellectual forces, essential to every individual, is something utterly different from the forcible isolation of the solipsist, which necessarily culminates in metaphysical disaster. ”

“ SOLOV'EV is definitely opposed to egoism and therefore to eudemonism and to utilitarianism, since these are based on egoism. He rejects egoism as individualism and subjectivism; his metaphysical amalgam of monotheism and pantheism makes it impossible for him to find satisfaction in individualism. His conception of the relationship between the individual and society resembles that of Comte. There is for him no opposition; society forms the content of personality, and the individual is concentrated society ”

“ Living among that people who knew not the horrors of war, who obeyed the one law of work, with a solidarity simply based upon reason and individual interest, properly understood, a people, too, saved from the monstrous falsehoods of religion, well informed, knowing the truth and bent on justice, one realised how possible became the alleged 'utopia' of universal happiness. ”