of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment. There are indeed in some writers visible instances of deep thought, close and acute reasoning, and ideas well pursued. The light these would give would be of great use, if their reader would observe and imitate them: all the rest at best are but particulars fit to be turned into knowledge; but that can be done only by our own meditation, and examining the reach (range), force, and coherence of what is said; and then, as far as we apprehend and see the connexion of ideas, so far it is ours; without that, it is but so much loose matter floating in our brain. The memory may be stored, but the judgment is little better, and the stock of knowledge not increased, by being able to repeat what others have said, or produce the arguments we have found in them. Such a knowledge as this is but knowledge by hearsay, and the ostentation of it is at best but talking by rote, and very often upon weak and wrong principles. For all that is to be found in books is not built upon true foundations, nor always rightly deduced from the principles it is pretended to be built on. Such an examen (examination) as is requisite to discover that, every reader's mind is not forward (prepared) to make; especially in those who have given themselves up to a party, and only hunt for what they can scrape together, that may favour and support the tenets of it. Such men wilfully exclude themselves from truth, and from all true benefit to be received by reading. Others of more indifferency (impartiality) often want attention and industry. The mind is backward in itself to be at the pains to trace every argument to its original, and to see upon what basis it stands, and how firmly; but yet it is this that gives so much the advantage to one man more than another in reading. The mind should, by severe rules, be

(1) Knowledge. Other people's knowledge-bare facts-are not knowledge in themselves, at least, not for us, until we have, by meditation and investigation into the relation between them, made them ours. Without this mental operation upon them they are but "locse matter floating in our brain."

(2) Meditation. See note 2, p. 138.

(3) Reach, force, and coherence;-most aptly chosen words to express the author's meaning. The range or scope of thought in reasoning is one thing, the force or fitness to produce an impression is another, and the connection between the various thoughts a third, and the most important of the three.

(4) Examen, fr. Lat. examen, a swarm of bees, wh. fr. exagmen, that which is driven out; hence examinare, to drive out the swarm, to clear out generally; hence to search into. The word examen seems to have been used simultaneously with examination, which is of earlier date, until in the end the latter prevailed.

tied down to this, at first uneasy, task; use and exercise will give it facility. So that those who are accustomed to it, readily, as it were with one cast of the eye, take a view of the argument, and presently, in most cases, see where it bottoms. Those who have got this faculty, one may say, have got the true key of books, and the clue to lead them through the mizmaze (labyrinth) of variety of opinions and authors to truth and certainty. This young beginners should be entered in (initiated into) and showed the use of, that they might profit by their reading. Those who are strangers to it will be apt to think it too great a clog in the way of men's studies, and they will suspect they shall make but small progress if, in the books they read, they must stand to examine and unravel every argument, and follow it step by step up to its original.

I answer, this is a good objection, and ought to weigh with those whose reading is designed for much talk and little knowledge, and I have nothing to say to it. But I am here inquiring into the conduct of the understanding in its progress towards knowledge; and to those who aim at that, I may say, that he who fair and softly' goes steadily forward in a course that points right, will sooner be at his journey's end, than he that runs after every one he meets, though he gallop all day full speed.

To which let me add, that this way of thinking on, and profiting by, what we read, will be a clog and rub to any one only in the beginning; when custom and exercise has made it familiar, it will be despatched in most occasions, without resting or interruption in the course of our reading. The motions and views of a mind exercised that way, are wonderfully quick; and a man used to such sort of reflections, sees as much at one glimpse as would require a long discourse to lay before another, and make out in an entire and gradual deduction. Besides, that when the first difficulties are over, the delight and sensible advantage it brings, mightily encourages and enlivens the mind in reading, which, without this, is very improperly called study.❜

2

(1) Fair and softly—a clog and rub. These expressions, and some others in the passage, justify the guarded criticism of Hallam on Locke's style, which certainly can, by no stretch of language, be called elegant, nor even very correct.

(2) Reading; study. It is important to preserve the vital connection between reading and study here insisted on, if we would indeed make reading a discipline for the mind. Too often it becomes a means of scattering instead of concentrating the mental forces.

2. THE INCORRECT USE OF WORDS.

(FROM "AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.") THERE remains yet another more general, though perhaps less observed, abuse of words; and that is, that men having by a long familiar use annexed to them certain ideas, they are apt to imagine so near and necessary a connexion between the names and the signification they use them in, that they forwardly' (readily) suppose one cannot but understand what their meaning is: and therefore one ought to acquiesce in the words delivered, as if it were past doubt, that in the use of those common received sounds the speaker and hearer had necessarily the same precise ideas. Whence presuming, that when they have in discourse used any term, they have thereby, as it were, set before others the very thing they talk of." And so likewise, taking the words of others, as naturally standing for just what they themselves have been accustomed to apply them to, they never trouble themselves to explain their own, or understand clearly others' meaning. From whence commonly proceed noise and wrangling, without improvement or information; whilst men take words to be the constant regular marks of agreed notions, which, in truth, are no more but (than) the voluntary and unsteady signs of their own ideas. And yet men think it strange, if in discourse, or (where it is often absolutely necessary) in dispute, one sometimes asks the meaning of their terms: though the arguings one may every day observe in conversation, make it evident, that there are few names of complex ideas, which any two men use for the same just precise collection. It is hard to name a word which will not be a clear instance of this. Life is a term none more familiar. Any one almost would take it for an affront, to be asked what he meant by it. And yet if it comes in question, whether a plant, that lies ready formed in the seed, have life; whether the embryo in an egg before incubation, or a man in a swoon without sense or motion, be alive or no? it is easy to perceive, that a clear distinct settled idea does not always accompany the use of so known (well-known) a word, as that of life is. Some gross and confused conceptions men indeed ordinarily have, to which they

(1) Forwardly, i.e. in the direction of the fore or front. Both here, and in the previous extract, the word forward is used peculiarly. It was not, however, peculiar to Locke, but to his time, and rather later. Middleton ("Life of Cicero ") has, "He freely and forwardly resumed his former employment."

(2) This is an incomplete sentence-it contains no main proposition.

apply the common words of their language, and such a loose use of their words serves them well enough in their ordinary discourses or affairs. But this is not sufficient for philosophical inquiries. Knowledge and reasoning require precise determinate ideas. And though men will not be so importunately dull, as not to understand what others say, without demanding an explication of their terms; nor so troublesomely critical, as to correct others in the use of the words they receive from them; yet where truth and knowledge are concerned in the case, I know not what fault it can be to desire the explication of words, whose sense seems dubious; or why a man should be ashamed to own his ignorance,2 in what sense another man uses his words, since he has no other way of certainly knowing it but by being informed. This abuse of taking words upon trust (i.e. not definitely settling their meaning) has nowhere spread so far, nor with so ill effects, as amongst men of letters. The multiplication and obstinacy of disputes, which has so laid waste the intellectual world, is owing to nothing more than to this ill use of words. For though it be generally believed, that there is great diversity of opinions in the volumes and variety of controversies the world is distracted with, yet the most I can find that the contending learned men of different parties do, in their arguings one with another, is, that they speak different languages. For I am apt to imagine, that when any of them, quitting terms, think upon things, and know what they think, they think all the same: though perhaps what they would have, be different.

(1) It is remarkable that the fault which Locke here reprehends in others, is just that with which he is himself, in the judgment of competent critics, thought especially chargeable. "In his language," says Sir William Hamilton, "Locke is, of all philosophers, the most figurative, ambiguous, vacillating, various, and even contradictory." The very next sentence, "knowledge and reasoning," &c., is an instance in point. The general tenor, however, of his remarks is admirable. It is probable that more mischief has arisen in the world from ignorance of the exact meaning of words, than from defective information about things.

(2) To own his ignorance in what sense, &c., i.e. to own that he does not know in what sense, &c. This employment of a noun with a sort of verbal government was once more common than it is now. Good writers generally avoid it. If the noun is retained in the above sentence, it would be better to say-"to own his ignorance of the sense in which another man," &c.

RICHARD STEELE,1

1. THE GOOD STORY-TELLER.

(FROM "THE TATLER," PUBLISHED IN 1709.)

I HAVE often thought that a story-teller is born as well as a poet. It is, I think, certain that some men have such a peculiar cast of mind, that they see things in another light than men of grave dispositions. Men of a lively imagination and a mirthful temper will represent things to their hearers in the same manner as they themselves were affected with them; and whereas serious spirits might perhaps have been disgusted at the sight of some odd occurrences in life, yet the very same occurrences shall please them in a well-told story, where the disagreeable parts of the images are concealed, and those only which are pleasing are exhibited to the fancy. Story-telling is therefore not an art, but what we call a 'knack,' it doth not so much subsist upon (consist of) wit as upon (of) humour; and I will add, that it is not perfect without proper gesticulations of the body, which naturally attend such merry emotions of the

(1) Steele's merits as a writer have been somewhat thrown into the shade by the exceeding brightness of the fame of Addison. It may, however, with truth, be said that no such English prose as his had been written when the "Tatler" *appeared. It was he, too, who started some of the veins which Addison so successfully worked. Sir Roger de Coverley is Steele's, not Addison's, creation. Steele's style, whether seen in his serious essays, or in his lighter sketches, as above, has remarkable force and beauty. Far less elaborate than Addison's, it has far less of the mark of the tool upon it. He produces the results of art by a free use of his natural faculties.

(2) Fancy, imagination. As we at present understand the distinction between these words, Steele should have used "imagination," not "fancy." It is the former which "bodies forth the forms of things unknown," as Shakspere wonderfully says; and this faculty of "bodying forth"-moulding and shaping in the mind, whether as the originator or the recipient of a conception, is its very essence. Hence Coleridge's notion that imagination, and not reason, is the distinctive faculty of man. Reason we have in common with the lower creation; imagination is our own characteristic. Fancy, on the other hand, may be considered as the attendant or ministering spirit of imagination-the decorative faculty-not originating or shaping, but adorning and vivifying what the imagina tion has created. Imagination is the Prospero, Fancy the Puck, of genius. See farther, Wordsworth's preface to the "Lyrical Ballads."

(3) Wit, humour. See note 2, p. 212, and Barrow, " On Wit," p. 212.

R