The metaphors and _facons de parler_ to
which even in the plainest speech we are perpetually recurring (as, for
example, in this last two lines, "plain," "perpetually," and "recurring,"
are all words based on metaphor, and hence more or less liable to
mislead) often deceive us, as though there were nothing more than what we
see and say, and as though words, instead of being, as they are, the
creatures of our convenience, had some claim to be the actual ideas
themselves concerning which we are conversing.
This is so well expressed in a letter I have recently received from a
friend, now in New Zealand, and certainly not intended by him for
publication, that I shall venture to quote the passage, but should say
that I do so without his knowledge or permission which I should not be
able to receive before this book must be completed.
"Words, words, words," he writes, "are the stumbling-blocks in the way of
truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that
misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the
appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. Words divide;
thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey, while they are all
only differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing they must
be got rid of: they are the clothes that thoughts wear--only the clothes.
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