Note 69 — PREFACE TO AN ABRIDGMENT OF ABRAHAM TUCKER’S LIGHT OF NATURE PURSUED
Reading edition
In this age of solid reason, it is always necessary to refer to particular examples, as it was formerly necessary to explain all hard words to the ladies. Condillac, in his Logic, that favourite manual of the modern sciolist, with admirable clearness proves, that our idea of virtue is a sensible image; because virtue implies a law, and that law must be written in a book, which must consist of letters, or figures of a certain shape, colour, and dimensions, which are real things, the objects of sense: that we are therefore right in asserting virtue to have a real existence, namely on paper, and in supposing that we have some idea of it, that is, as consisting of the letters of the alphabet. Mr. Horne Tooke, a man of wonderful wit, knowledge, and acuteness, but who, with my consent, shall not be empanelled as a juror to decide upon any question of abstruse reasoning, has endeavoured to explain away the whole meaning of language, by doing away its habitual or customary meaning, by denying that words have any meaning but what is derived to them from the umbilical root which first unites them to matter; and by making it out, that our thoughts having no life or motion in them, but as they are dragged about mechanically by words, are ‘just such shard-born beetle things’
‘As only buz to heav’n on ev’ning wings;
Strike in the dark, offending but by chance;
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They know not beings, and but bear a name.’
Mr. Tooke’s description of the formation of language[70] is a sort of pantomime or masquerade, where you see the trunks of our abstract ideas going about in search of their heads, or clumsily setting on their own noses, and afterwards pointing to them in answer to all questions: it reminds you of the island of Pantagruel (or some such place), where the men carry their heads before them