n, while _Verstand_ meant likewise
perception, but soon came to imply a kind of understanding, even a
kind of technical knowledge, though from a purely etymological
standpoint it had nothing that fitted it more for carrying the
meaning, which is now assigned to it in German in distinction to
_Vernunft_, than understanding had as distinguished from reason. It
requires, of course, a very minute historical research to trace the
steps by which such words as reason and understanding diverge in
different directions, in the language of the people and in
philosophical parlance. This teaches us a very important distinction,
namely that between the popular development of the meaning of a word,
and its meaning as defined and asserted by a philosopher or by a poet
in the plenitude of his power. Etymological definition is very useful
for the first stages in the history of a word. It is useful to know,
for instance, that _deus_, God, meant originally bright, bright
whether applied to sky, sun, moon, stars, dawn, morning, dayspring,
spring of the year, and many other bright objects in nature, that it
thus assumed a meaning common to them all, splendid, or heavenly,
beneficent, powerful, so that when in the Veda already we find a
number of heavenly bodies, or of terrestrial bodies, or even of
periods of time called Devas, this word has assumed a more general,
more comprehensive, and more exalted meaning. It did not yet mean what
the Greeks called [Greek: theoi] or gods, but it meant something
common to all these [Greek: theoi], and thus could naturally rise to
express what the Greeks wanted to express by that word. There was as
yet no necessity for defining deva or [Greek: theos], when applied to
what was meant by gods, but of course the most opposite meanings had
clustered round it. While a philosophical Greek would maintain that
[Greek: theos] meant what was one and never many, a poetical Greek or
an ordinary Greek would hold that it meant what was by nature many.
But while in such a case philosophical analysis and historical
genealogy would support each other, there are ever so many cases where
etymological analysis is as hopeless as logical analysis. Who is to
define _romantic_, in such expressions as romantic literature.
Etymologically we know that romantic goes back finally to Rome, but
the mass of incongruous meanings that have been thrown at random into
the caldron of that word, is so great that no definition could be
contrived