creation. Not that the exact definable sense of a word is of no
value to the stylist; he profits by it as a painter profits by a
study of anatomy, or an architect by a knowledge of the strains and
stresses that may be put on his material. The exact logical
definition is often necessary for the structure of his thought and
the ordering of his severer argument. But often, too, it is the
merest beginning; when a word is once defined he overlays it with
fresh associations and buries it under new-found moral
significances, which may belie the definition they conceal. This
is the burden of Jeremy Bentham's quarrel with "question-begging
appellatives." A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious
philosopher, abettor of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god-
father of the panopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of
such unimpassioned vocables as "codification" and "international,"
Bentham would have been glad to purify the language by purging it
of those "affections of the soul" wherein Burke had found its
highest glory. Yet in censuring the ordinary political usage of
such a word as "innovation," it was hardly prejudice in general
that he attacked, but the particular and deep-seated prejudice
against novelty. The surprising vivacity of many of his own
figures,--although he had the courage of his convictions, and
laboured, throughout the course of a long life, to desiccate his
style,--bears witness to a natural skill in the use of loaded
weapons. He will pack his text with grave argument on matters
ecclesiastical, and indulge himself and literature, in the notes
with a pleasant description of the flesh and the spirit playing
leap-frog, now one up, now the other, around the holy precincts of
the Church. Lapses like these show him far enough from his own
ideal of a geometric fixity in the use of words. The claim of
reason and logic to enslave language has a more modern advocate in