Note 7 — II.
Reading edition
De Maistre found a curiously characteristic kind of support for this view in the fact that evils are called fléaux: flails are things to beat with: so evils must be things with which men are beaten; and as we should not be beaten if we did not deserve it, argal, suffering is a merited punishment. Apart from that common infirmity which leads people after they have discovered an analogy between two things, to argue from the properties of the one to those of the other, as if, instead of being analogous, they were identical, De Maistre was particularly fond of inferring moral truths from etymologies. He has an argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirées, 2ième entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others of the same quality.