k has created
for thousands of workingmen a personified Socialism: Socialism, a
winged goddess with stern eyes and a drawn sword, to be the hope
of the world, and the protector of those that suffer.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 93.]

Political leaders and advertising experts, no less than poets,
have recognized the importance of the suggestive power of
words. Half the power of propaganda lies in its arousing of
emotions through suggestion, rather than in its effectiveness
as an instrument of intellectual conversion.[3]

[Footnote 3: During the recent Liberty Loan campaigns, for
example, when it was of the most crucial practical importance
that bonds be bought, the stimuli used were not in the form of
reasoned briefs, but rather emotional admonition:
"Finish the lob," "Every miser helps the Kaiser," "If you were
out in No Man's Land."]

LANGUAGE AND LOGIC. Even where words are freed from
irrelevant emotional associations, they are still far from being
adequate instruments of thought. To be effectively representative,
words must be clean-cut and definitive; they must
stand for one object, quality, or idea. Words, if they are to
be genuine instruments of communication, must convey the
same intent or meaning to the listener as they do to the
speaker. If the significance attached to words is so vague
and pulpy that they mean different things to different men,
they are no more useful in inquiry and communication than
the shock of random noise or the vague stir and flutter of
music. Words must have their boundaries fixed, they must
be terms, fixed and stable meanings, or they will remain instruments
of confusion rather than communication. Francis
Bacon stated succinctly the dangers involved in the use of
words:

For men imagine that their reason governs words, whilst in fact
words react upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy
and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally
formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad
lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more
acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary
these lines, and adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose
it. Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men terminate
frequently in mere disputes about words and names, in regard to
which it would be better to proceed more advisedly in the first
instance, and to bring such disputes to a regular issue by definitio