"Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it
may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the
consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property
and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from
the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology
and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own nature more fugacious
and shifting than thought; and particularly thoughts upon the mysteries
of Christianity. A conception that is plain and accurate in the
understanding of the first man becomes obscure and false in that of the
second, because it was not grasped and firmly held in the form and
proportions with which it first came up, and then handed over to other
minds, a fixed and scientific quantity.' [Footnote: Shedd, _History of
Christian Doctrine_, vol. i. p. 362; compare _Guesses at Truth_, 1866,
p. 217; and Gerber, _Sprache als Kunst_, vol. i. p. 145.] And on the
necessity of names at once for the preservation and the propagation of
truth it has been justly observed: 'Hardly any original thoughts on
mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume
their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until
aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and
held them fast.' [Footnote: Mill, _System of Logic_, vol. ii. p. 291.]
And this holds good alike of the false and of the true. I think we may
observe very often the way in which controversies, after long eddying
backward and forward, hither and thither, concentrate themselves at
last in some single word which is felt to contain all that the one
party would affirm and the other would deny. After a desultory swaying
of the battle hither and thither 'the high places of the field' the
critical position, on the winning of which everything turns, is
discovered at last. Thus the whole controversy of the Catholic Church
with the Arians finally gathers itself up in a single word,
'homoousion;' that with the Nestorians in another, 'theotokos.' One