and can only act uniformly when there is such frequency of intercourse
among neighbours as is sufficient to enforce them. And there are many
reasons why a man should prefer his own way of speaking to that of others,
unless by so doing he becomes unintelligible. The struggle for existence
among words is not of that fierce and irresistible kind in which birds,
beasts and fishes devour one another, but of a milder sort, allowing one
usage to be substituted for another, not by force, but by the persuasion,
or rather by the prevailing habit, of a majority. The favourite figure, in
this, as in some other uses of it, has tended rather to obscure than
explain the subject to which it has been applied. Nor in any case can the
struggle for existence be deemed to be the sole or principal cause of
changes in language, but only one among many, and one of which we cannot
easily measure the importance. There is a further objection which may be
urged equally against all applications of the Darwinian theory. As in
animal life and likewise in vegetable, so in languages, the process of
change is said to be insensible: sounds, like animals, are supposed to
pass into one another by imperceptible gradation. But in both cases the
newly-created forms soon become fixed; there are few if any vestiges of the
intermediate links, and so the better half of the evidence of the change is
wanting.

(3) Among the incumbrances or illusions of language may be reckoned many
of the rules and traditions of grammar, whether ancient grammar or the
corrections of it which modern philology has introduced. Grammar, like
law, delights in definition: human speech, like human action, though very
far from being a mere chaos, is indefinite, admits of degrees, and is
always in a state of change or transition. Grammar gives an erroneous
conception of language: for it reduces to a system that which is not a
system. Its figures of speech, pleonasms, ellipses, anacolutha, pros to
semainomenon, and the like have no reality; they do not either make