Descartes and the Sorbonne.—1. Useless Literature.—2.—A Personal Explanation.—3. The Blockade of the Schoolmasters.—4. Scientific Philosophy.—5. Truth and Verihood.—6. The White Mind. AS the astronomer, in order to tell fairly the time kept by a star in heaven, must first record the time taken by his own thought, and thereby correct his reckoning; and as Descartes did not deem it beside the purpose to tell the Sorbonne that he was in his dressing-gown when he sat down to prove the existence of God; so it will not be vain for me to describe with what bias I approached my present task. I An eloquent writer upon Art, in a work called The Seven Lamps of Architecture, has chosen Truth to be his second Lamp, and thereby shown that it was not his first wish to tell the truth about architecture. Accordingly it is no surprise to see him begin by defining architecture as useless building, and end, in a preface written long afterwards, by complaining The foreword of this Letter was really written thirty years ago, when a mere schoolboy, hardly knowing what he did, chose Truth as being for him the one sacred Name. Afterwards, when I had read the book in which Darwin reminded us clearly of a fact dimly familiar to our forefathers, I laid it down with the reflection that most other books would have to be re-written in the light of that forgotten fact.—The question was how to begin. I spent the next twenty years in exploring the human mind as it is revealed in literature, and as it is revealed in life. I have not passed the time shut up in libraries. I have been a speaker and a writer; I have been a lawyer and a soldier; I have been a ruler and a judge. I have taught children, and learned from them. I have talked with the learned in their colleges, and talked with the Black men in their own land beside the Black River, in the oldest and most catholic speech, the language of Signs. In a place where no White man had been before me, I found a Black king and his folk withheld by an old curse from planting a medicinal tree; and I broke the curse by showing to them a stone whereon a Greek of long ago had carved the figure of his God.—In such ways I have learned somewhat of the nature of words. At the same time I have learned somewhat of the Literature, from the lyric's pure cry of pain or joy down to the pill-seller's advertisement, is a communication. There is a personal equation of the reader as well as of the writer, and the fairest language is a bargain between two minds. The counsel's speech to the jury is not as his speech to the judge. The greatest of playwrights has written for the gallery as well as for the boxes. It is the second equation in which the difficulty lies. It is that equation the thought of which caused the perfect Idealist to condemn speech. It is that which stands in the way of Nobel's Fourth Bequest. If we should judge the mind of Europe by the work in various fields of learners like Retzius and Sergi and Massey and Montelius, we should think it had recovered from that disease of word-lore remembered as the Aryan Myth. But all philologists have by no means recovered. I have before me the latest and best work on English etymologies; and Professor Skeat must be the whipping-boy of worser men. By way of groundwork he has a list of imaginary Aryan roots, as though the Aryans were a historic nation, dwelling in some country called Aryana, whose literary remains were before him. That is not so, and the buried cities of Bokhara, perhaps, hold many surprises in store for the philologist. But even if it were so, Aryan would not be the last word on English etymology. These roots were invented by men who had not read Darwin, or, like Max Müller, did not believe in him; and if they are anything but fancies, they are not roots but stems cut off from their roots. The study of words from such a beginning is no more scientific than a young lady's album of dried leaves is scientific botany. There are only two sound starting-points for the history of a word; one is where the word itself begins, in the wild man's cry, or the technical coinage which is manifest in Nobel's dynamite; the other is where The English philologist has not got beyond the state of mind of the Australian Black, who has not yet found out the father's share in child-begetting, In the meanwhile I hope he will accept these suggestions in the spirit in which they are uttered, as those of a provincial Englishman. V Since I first wrote this Letter there has come into my hands a work by Bréal entitled La Semantique, which an English professor of philology treats as the first recognition of the need for a science, or at least a history, of the meaning of words. That seems to be the science the need for which was recognised by Socrates in the market place of Athens, and that is the science I have had to piece out for myself as best I could in this inquiry; and which I call verihood, instead of truth. Truth is the merit of the speaker rather than of the speech. The speaker may be truthful, and yet his story may not be true. The witness who is sworn to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," is only sworn to tell what happened as he saw it. He does not swear that he saw rightly, and that his story is the correct one. The correct story has to be put together by the jury, who areTHE PERSONAL EQUATION