ART. VI. THE MEANING OF Dir. To deduce general conclusions from particular facts, is one of the strongest tendencies of the human mind. It may, indeed, be considered a law of our nature, that, facts being given, theorizing will follow. The science of geology has furnished abundant material for the exercise of this faculty; and cosmogonies have been constructed with a facility only equalled by the labour afterwards required to defend them. The crust of the earth presents so many indications of gradual deposition, that many have passed to the conclusion as certain and forever irrefutable, that, from the reign of chaos over the dark void of unformed matter, to the creation of man and the planting of the garden, there must have intervened an immeasurably long period of duration; and any interpretations of Scripture that will not consist with this opinion, though received as truth from the earliest times, must be laid aside. Others, reading in Moses, that "In six days the LORD made heaven and earth; the sea and all that in them is," claim that the express words of Revelation must be paramount in authority to the theories of man, however apparently demonstrated by acknowledged facts: for, in the deductions of human wisdom, there may be error; in the truths which the Holy Ghost indites, there may not. The difference between these views turns on the word day;-the one party affirming that it may signify an indefinite period of time; the other, that it can be applied only to designate the present period of the earth's diurnal revolution. A later theory, it is true, has been put forth, adopting and seeking to reconcile the essential parts of each of these. It proposes to open a gap between the first verse of Genesis, which says, "God created," and the succeeding portion of the chapter; and in the chasm thus invented, it locates a deep chaotic gulf of indefinite extent, whose long-repeated convulsions and revolutions, with a gradual development of vegetable and animal life, may satisfy the geological theory of formation; and then, after these unmeasured ages of confusion, and the reign "Of gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire," it supposes the Almighty to have commenced anew the work recorded by Moses in detail, and to have completed it in six common days. This theory has gained the assent of many Christians, who have felt compelled to yield to the inductions of science; and the FOURTH SERIES, VOL. II.—17 rather, we think, from the natural desire to retain undisturbed a longestablished interpretation of a passage of Scripture, than from any conviction of merit or consistency in the theory itself. The fact, indeed, of the existence and partial reception of a theory of this biformed nature, we take as merely another expression of the difficulty the mind has had to encounter here, and of the want of a clear conviction of any satisfactory solution of the problem; and if ever we advance into the light of truth, the incongruous parts of it will fall asunder, as not possessing in themselves any principle of coherence or affinity. The grand question, then, lying, as we conceive, between the two first-named theories, depends simply on the interpretation of the word rendered day. For if that word may signify an indefinite period of time, there is no objection against receiving the views which science seems to require; but if it means literally a period of twenty-four hours, and is limited to that one signification, the question is settled. The authority of God's words puts to silence the seeming wisdom of human studies. The question, then, is purely a philological one-what is the meaning of bis (iom) day? Before entering directly on the subject, we respectfully ask that these remarks may be viewed with candour by any who may differ from us in regard to the conclusion. We are aware, that on few subjects has speculation exposed itself more to censure, and even to ridicule, than on philology. The wildest conjectures have often been propounded with the gravity of solemn conviction. But science has its limits and laws, and these we have diligently sought to observe. And in matters of etymology, guided by the certain laws of derivation, we shall often find ourselves arriving at conclusions which would stagger the faith of one who saw not the several steps of the process. One might place it among the absurdities of speculation, if you tell him that our word tear and the French larme come regularly from the same root; but to the eye of the etymologist, the connexion is perfectly clear and simple. Equally strange might it seem, that names of the same origin, and differing only, as Aristotle would say, TπTwσe, in the accidents of form, should be used to designate a sacred edifice, or any limit of consecrated space; a surgeon's forceps; a shoemaker's knife; that part of the head where the arteries are observed to beat; the mouth; stump of a tree; volume of a book; time; a storm, and several other things equally diverse. Yet from the root Teμ- (Tévw,) as naturally as different branches rise from the same trunk, these various terms proceed. We have réuevos and templum, to signify a section of space, whether in the heavens or on the earth, either with or without an edifice consecrated to sacred purposes. A tome (Tóuoç) is a cut of parchment, or other writing material of convenient length for one roll or volume, (volumen.) Time, tempus, is duration cut into parts. The temples (of the head) were, in classic Latin, tempora,-the times, or the cuts, in some sense.* And without further specification, it is evident that any variation of the notion of cutting, whether as the act, or agent, or instrument, or object, or effect, may philosophically be represented by a corresponding variation of this etymon. To what extent usage may have developed forms for this multifarious application is merely a question of fact. It is no rare thing to see several hundred words in the same language, and, tracing them into the cognate dialects, several thousands,-grouping themselves together as one family of derivatives from a single parent stem. But as in other things, so in words; in so numerous a progeny there will be aristocracies and other conventional distinctions. An instance of this we have in the list just given. While we say the temples, (of the head,) the Latins, in their classic or book language, generally said tempora, (the times,)-very rarely templa. But templa was undoubtedly the word in colloquial use, and has therefore been preserved in the living language of the people in Italy; while the classic use of tempora, in this sense, ceased with the decay of Roman literature. For the same reason the form templa, and not tempora, (the temples and not the times,) was carried with the progress of Roman arms, and became naturalized in France and the British Island. Such a phenomenon is worthy of notice, and as we shall have occasion to refer to it as an important fact in the argument, we wish to illustrate it a little further. The primitive meaning of yoápw, scribo, was to mark or scratch; secondarily came the specific use, to mark with the stylus on the tablet, that is, to write; and in this sense, almost exclusively, is it found in the classic authors of Rome. But if we go now into certain mechanics' shops in our own country, we shall hear the word in its primitive sense, to mark, while the secondary sense has never found its way, in the verb, into our language at all. Roman conquests carried Roman arts, and with them the technical terms of Roman artisans, to those who learned not the language of the court and the schools. Such facts show the distinctive character, to a certain degree, of a spoken and a written * Of the reasons given for this use of the word, a probable one is, that the ancient warriors aimed at that part, as most easily receiving a mortal wound. The one commonly given in our medical books, we must think erroneous. We strongly suspect there is a lost fact which would supply a very natural link, and make the connexion obvious. language, a classic and a colloquial,—an under and an upper current, not always liable to the same fluctuations. But we further see the under-current sometimes rising to the surface, or the disparted streams becoming re-united. The Greek ew, or eiuí, designated both existence and motion; as if, in the conceptions of the early Greeks, the one state reciprocally implied the other. In the Latin the two forms are used distinctively, eo, ire, to go, and sum, esse, to be; but when we come to the præterit of sum, we have a new form, fui.* The grammarians suppose an obsolete fuo. Whether this form was ever in use in the Latin or not, the root of it is evidently the same from which arose fugio,† bringing again, more undisguised, the idea of motion. In the modern language of Italy, fui remains as the præterit of essere; but of ire, the few forms that are not already obsolete have, except one, and that in one dialect, become antiquated. The Spanish preserves in common use both ser, to be, and ir, to go, and supplies the præterites from the same source, fui, fuisté, &c., identically the same in both throughout; thus exhibiting a re-union of the words, after their so long separation, on the same form. The French also has substantially the same coincidence in the præterites of estre, to be, and fuir, to flee.§ Though the labyrinths of etymology are sometimes difficult to thread, we are safe so long as we follow the principle that every etymon has a single meaning of its own; and that every secondary * [We have the roots in Greek, to-, and øv-; in Latin es-, fu-. The perfect in Greek, πé-v-ka, corresponds with that in Latin, fu-i. We have been accustomed to consider the root (i-) of eiui, I go, as a different radical.-Ed.] †The addition of a palatal is a common mode of lengthening a verb stem, e. gTμnуw, from Tεμ-; Tρéxw, fr. dpa-; &c. In the French and Spanish the g is lost again, and the fugere has become fuir and huir. The participle ito alone is current in the Tuscan. § With these we may compare the English be, evidently from the root Bɛ- or 3a(Baívw,) Latin, be-o, (obsolete, but implied by be-to;) and hence the anomalous form of the first person singular, which is in German bin; in Dutch ben; corresponding to the primitive tense (aor. 2.) of the Greek, Bŋy, and in the Anglo-Saxon beō and bin, corresponding to the Latin also. Richardson, in his Dictionary, says, "The etymologists do not attempt to settle the meaning of this word:" of which, however, he seems to have had a correct notion, though not of its derivation. The sense of motion is still often perceptible in it, as, “Are you going to market?” “I have been.” And hence so often in the mouths of the unlearned,-who have an intuitive sense that gone is not the word, and to whom been is not strong enough to express their ruder sense of action, he has went. Such "ungrammatical expressions" are embodiments of mental phenomena which the philologist must investigate, and which he generally finds to be only secondary and legitimate, though imperfect, forms of a true ideal; just as the mineralogist sees in the many-faced and many-angled thing which he calls a trapezohedron, the idea of the simple cube as its perfect form,-and knows that this multiform character results, by certain replacements, according to ascertained laws of crystallization. or metaphorical sense in which it may be used, or which may accede to its derivatives, must have a natural and essential relation to the meaning of the radix. If we forsake this ciew we tread in darkness, and are at once bewildered, "In wandering mazes lost." Of the various ways in which secondary senses may arise, it shall suffice to name the following: 1. A generic term may be employed to designate any species included under it; for example, the oak, ash, or chestnut, may be called tree. Sometimes the generic term attaches itself to one species, and loses, in a greater or less degree, its generic use. This happens, (a) when one species becomes matter of more frequent attention or engrossing importance, and (b) when a new species arises which lacks a specific name, or does not readily discover one which shall gain general acceptance. Of the former kind is meat; and of the latter, the word corn, as used in this country, is a recent example.* 2. Qualifications which are in idea general or abstract, become by ellipsis specific and concrete substantives; for example, altus, which as adjective may be applied to anything which has the quality of height or depth; but altum, (sc. mare,) the deep, (that is, the sea;) universus, (sc. mundus,) the universe. But it is evident there is nothing in the nature of the word altus, whereby it should signify the sea, any more than a well, or tree, or mountain. 3. Derivatives acquire an almost endless variety of signification, but always in accordance with fixed laws. Verbs from nouns may stand in the relation of cause, as strengthen or effect, as gravitate. Derivatives of verbs may signify, (a) the direct effect, or (b) any state, condition, or quality indirectly resulting from the action; (c) any attendant circumstance, whether necessarily or by custom associated with it; (d) any complete action, of which the simpler action of the primitive forms an essential or a conspicuous part, though in different combinations the resultant, or specific end of the actions, may be widely different. Thus the Latin supplicium, which etymologically denotes only the posture of the body, signifies either prayer or punishment. It will of course happen that in those languages which, like the English and some of the ancients, are barren of inflections and derivative endings, the same form will often be compelled to subserve a variety of secondary uses; while in those which are prolific in this respect, this will seldom occur. These are some of the immediate links of that internal development, which, to a greater or less extent, has gone forward in every * In some parts of our country the apple has nearly laid aside its own title, and usurped the generic one of fruit. |
