f this has arisen 'metaphysical jargon' and 'false
morality.' In illustration he gives a singular list of words, including
'fate, chance, heaven, hell, providence, prudence, innocence, substance,
fiend, angel, apostle, spirit, true, false, desert, merit, faith, etc.,
all of which are mere participles poetically embodied and substantiated
by those who use them.' A couple of specific applications, often quoted
by later writers, will sufficiently indicate his drift.

Such words, he remarks,[152] as 'right' and 'just' mean simply that
which is ordered or commanded. The chapter is headed 'rights of man,'
and Tooke's interlocutor naturally observes that this is a singular
result for a democrat. Man, it would seem, has no rights except the
rights created by the law. Tooke admits the inference to be correct, but
replies that the democrat in disobeying human law may be obeying the law
of God, and is obeying the law of God when he obeys the law of nature.
The interlocutor does not inquire what Tooke could mean by the 'law of
nature.' We can guess what Tooke would have said to Paine in the
Wimbledon garden. In fact, however, Tooke is here, as elsewhere,
following Hobbes, though, it seems, unconsciously. Another famous
etymology is that of 'truth' from 'troweth.'[153] Truth is what each man
thinks. There is no such thing, therefore, as 'eternal, immutable,
everlasting truth, unless mankind, _such as they are at present_, be
eternal, immutable, everlasting.' Two persons may contradict each other
and yet each may be speaking what is true for him. Truth may be a vice
as well as a virtue; for on many occasions it is wrong to speak the
truth.

These phrases may possibly be interpreted in a sense less paradoxical
than the obvious one. Tooke's philosophy, if so it is to be called, was
never fully expounded. He burned his papers before his death, and we do
not know what he would have said about 'verbs,' which must have led, one
would suppose, to some further treatment of relations, nor upon the
subject, which as Stephens tells us, was most fully treated in his
continuation, the value of human testimony.

If Tooke was not a philosopher he was a man of remarkably shrewd cynical
common sense, who thought philosophy idle foppery. His book made a great
success. Stephens tells us[154] that it brought him L4000 or L5000.
Hazlitt in 1810 published a grammar professing to incorporate for the
first time Horne Tooke's 'discoveries.' The book was ad