very bad sign. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they arise from
vagueness of thought, which, in its turn, is almost always fundamentally
discordant, inconsistent, and therefore wrong. When a right thought
springs up in the mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it
soon attains it, for clear thought easily finds its appropriate
expression. A man who is capable of thinking can express himself at all
times in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those writers who
construct difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most
certainly do not rightly know what it is they wish to say: they have
only a dull consciousness of it, which is still struggling to put itself
into thought; they also often wish to conceal from themselves and other
people that in reality they have nothing to say. Like Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel, they wish to appear to know what they do not know, to think
what they do not think, and to say what they do not say.

Will a man, then, who has something real to impart endeavour to say it
in a clear or an indistinct way? Quintilian has already said, _plerumque
accidit ut faciliora sint ad intelligendum et lucidiora multo, quae a
doctissimo quoque dicuntur.... Erit ergo etiam obscurior, quo quisque
deterior_.

A man's way of expressing himself should not be _enigmatical_, but he
should know whether he has something to say or whether he has not. It is
an uncertainty of expression which makes German writers so dull. The
only exceptional cases are those where a man wishes to express something
that is in some respect of an illicit nature. As anything that is
far-fetched generally produces the reverse of what the writer has aimed
at, so do words serve to make thought comprehensible; but only up to a
certain point. If words are piled up beyond this point they make the
thought that is being communicated more and more obscure. To hit that