softened glamour from a specific association with Shakespeare's great
play; _hurricane_ has a greater forthrightness, a directer ruthlessness
than its synonyms. Yet the individual's feeling-tones for these words
are likely to vary enormously. To some _tempest_ and _hurricane_ may
seem "soft," literary words, the simpler _storm_ having a fresh, rugged
value which the others do not possess (think of _storm and stress_). If
we have browsed much in our childhood days in books of the Spanish Main,
_hurricane_ is likely to have a pleasurably bracing tone; if we have had
the misfortune to be caught in one, we are not unlikely to feel the word
as cold, cheerless, sinister.

[Footnote 9: E.g., the brilliant Dutch writer, Jac van Ginneken.]

The feeling-tones of words are of no use, strictly speaking, to science;
the philosopher, if he desires to arrive at truth rather than merely to
persuade, finds them his most insidious enemies. But man is rarely
engaged in pure science, in solid thinking. Generally his mental
activities are bathed in a warm current of feeling and he seizes upon
the feeling-tones of words as gentle aids to the desired excitation.
They are naturally of great value to the literary artist. It is
interesting to note, however, that even to the artist they are a danger.
A word whose customary feeling-tone is too unquestioningly accepted
becomes a plushy bit of furniture, a _cliché_. Every now and then the
artist has to fight the feeling-tone, to get the word to mean what it
nakedly and conceptually should mean, depending for the effect of
feeling on the creative power of an individual juxtaposition of concepts
or images.