For, being every natural cause actually applied doth necessarily produce its own natural effect,— -and being we have placed the formality of the object of all belief in credibility, Being then I have described the true nature and notion of Belief,— seeing. Preface, and Article I. And one morn it chanced He found her in among the garden yews, according. Idylls of the King. Their abominations were according as they loved.—Hosea ix. 10. talk of. Talk of the privileges of the Peerage, of Members' exemption from the Eighth Commandment, of the separate jurisdiction secured on the Continent to soldiers, what are they all put together to a privilege like this? depend upon it. Depend upon it, a good deal is lost by not looking round the corner.Mrs. Prosser, Quality Fogg's Lost Ledger. When a sentence is opened with No doubt, this seems to claim a place among these verbal conjunctions, being a condensed expression for 'There is no doubt that.' It has, however, a less emphatic burden than would be conveyed by the latter formula : No doubt a determined effort would be made by many of those who are now engaged in these occupations, to prevent the admission of females to them, and to keep up the monopoly of sex.-Frederic Hill, Crime: its Amount, Causes, and Remedies, 1853; p. 86. 546. Here it may be objected-Do you call these words symbolic? What does 'presentive' mean, if such words as see, talk, depend, doubt, are not presentive? In what sense can these belong to a group which is called essentially symbolic? This very contradiction troubled the author of Hermes, a famous book on universal grammar, which was published in 1751. He had pitched upon the distinction of presentive and symbolic as the fundamental and essential distinction of his universal grammar. He did not, indeed, use the terms; but he spoke of words as (1) significant by themselves, or significant absolutely, and (2) significant by association, or significant relatively. When he treats of conjunctions, he regards them as belonging to the second class, and yet he cannot shut his eyes to certain refractory instances. The embarrassment of James Harris on this occasion became the sport of Horne Tooke, who published his Diversions of Purley in 1786. In his saucy manner he sums up the doctrine of the Hermes as follows:— Thus is the conjunction explained by Mr. Harris: A sound significant devoid of signification, Having at the same time a kind of obscure signification; Shewing the attributes both of signification and no signification ; Diversions of Purley, Part I. ch. vii. This is a caricature, and we only avail ourselves of its exaggerated features, in order to raise up before us in bolder relief the difficulty which we are here confronting. 547. The answer seems to be this :-That the essential natural of a conjunction (or of any other organic member of speech) discovers itself, not in the recent examples of the class, but in those which have by long use been purged of accidental elements. This will be clearer by an illustration drawn from familiar experience. It is well known that many words in common use are masked, that they do not express plainly the sense which they are notwithstanding intended to convey. We do not always call a spade a spade. We have recourse in certain well-known cases to forms of expression as distant from the thing meant as is any way consistent with the intention of being understood. It will have struck every observer that it becomes necessary from time to time to replace these makeshifts with others of new device. In fact, words used to convey a veiled meaning are found to wear out very rapidly. The real thought pierces through; they soon stand declared for what they are, and not for what they half feign to be. Words gradually drop the non-essential, and display the pure essence of their nature. And the real nature of a word is to be found in the thought which is at the root of its motive. As in such cases we know full well how this true nature pierces through all disguise, casts off all drapery and pretext and colour, and in the course of time stands forth as the name of that thing which was to be ignored even while it was indicated,—even so it is in the case now before us. 548. There are reasons why the speaker is not satisfied with the old conjunctions, and he brings forward words with more body and colour to reinforce the old conjunctions and give them a greater presence. If these words continue for any length of time to be used as conjunctions, the presentive matter which now lends them colour will evaporate, and they will become purely symbolic. Of this we may be sure from the experience of the elder examples. Even in such a conjunction as because, where the presentive matter is still very plain, it has, generally speaking, no existence to the mind of the speaker. It is not indeed a singular quality in the conjunction, that being itself essentially symbolic, it should receive accessions from the presentive groups. This is seen also in the pronoun and in the preposition, and it is only as a matter of degree that the conjunction is remarkable in this respect. As far as observation reaches, the symbolic element is everywhere sustained by new accessions from the presentive, and it is worthy of note that the extreme symbolic word, the conjunction, which is chiefly supplied from groups of words previously symbolic, seems to be the one which most eagerly welcomes presentive material, as if desirous to recruit itself after its too great attenuation through successive stages of symbolic refinement. 549. The employment of conjunctions has greatly diminished from what it once was, as the reader may readily ascertain if he will only look into the prose of three centuries back. The writings of Hooker, for example, bristle with conjunctions1, many of which we have now learned to dispense with. The conjunction being a comparatively late development, and being moreover a thing of literature to a greater extent than any other part of speech, was petted by writers and scholars into a fantastic luxuriance. It connected itself intimately with that technical logic which was the favourite study of the middle ages. Logic formed the base of the higher region of learning, and was the acquirement that popularly stamped a man as one of the learned, and hence it came that men prided themselves on their wherefores and therefores, and all the rest of that apparatus which lent to their discourse the prestige of ratiocination. But this is now much abated, and the connection of sentences is to a large extent left to the intelligence of the reader. Two or three very undemonstrative conjunctions, such as if, but, for, that, will suffice for all the conjunctional appliances of page after page in a well- reasoned book. Often the word and is enough, even where more than mere concatenation is intended, and this colourless link-word 1 As above, 544: 'howbeit. . . even when... notwithstanding.' seems invested with a meaning which recalls to mind what the and of the Hebrew is able to do in the subtle department of the conjunction. Indeed, we may say that we are coming back in regard to our conjunctions to a simplicity such as that from which the Hebrew language never departed. The Book of Proverbs abounds in examples of the versatility of the Hebrew and. Our but, as a conjunction, covers the ground of two German conjunctions, sondern and aber. If we look at Proverbs x. there is a but in the middle of nearly every verse, equivalent to sondern. These are all expressed in Hebrew by and. If we look at i. 25, 33; ii. 22; iv. 18, we see but in the weightier sense of aber, and here again the simple and in the Hebrew. 550. In the close of the following quotation, the and is equivalent to 'and yet' or 'and nevertheless.' In Mecklenburg, Pommern, Pommerellen, are still to be seen physiognomies of a Wendish or Vandalic type (more of cheek than there ought to be, and less of brow; otherwise good enough physiognomies of their kind): but the general mass, tempered with such admixtures, is of the PlattDeutsch, Saxon, or even Anglish character we are familiar with here at home. A patient stout people; meaning considerable things, and very incapable of speaking what it means.-Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, Bk. II. ch. iv. In conversation we omit the relative conjunction very usually; and poetry often does the same with great gain to its freedom of movement : For I am he am born to tame you, Kate. Taming of the Shrew, ii. I. Where is it mothers learn their love? John Keble. 551. When the bulkier conjunctions are used in the present day, or when ordinary conjunctions are accumulated, an effect is produced as of documentary solemnity. Thus Now therefore (Acts xxiii. 15), Now whereas (Richard Hooker, Of the Laws, v. 76. 5), notwithstanding however, &c. |