tic. The evil of dogmatic teaching lies much deeper,
and spreads much farther.

Think only of language, the work of other people, not of ourselves, which
we pick up at random in our race through life. Does not every word we use
require careful examination and revision? It is not enough to say that
language assists our thoughts or colors them, or possibly obscures them.
No language and thought are indivisible. It was not from poverty of
expression that the Greeks called reason and language by the same word,
{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}. It was because they knew that, though we may distinguish between
thought and speech, as we distinguish between force and function, it is as
impossible to tear the one by violence away from the other as it is to
separate the concave side of a lens from its convex side. This is
something to learn and to understand, for, if, properly understood, will
it supply the key to most of our intellectual puzzles, and serve as the
safest thread through the whole labyrinth of philosophy.

"It is evident," as Hobbes remarks,(14) "that truth and falsity have no
place but amongst such living creatures as use speech. For though some
brute creatures, looking upon the image of a man in a glass, may be
affected with it, as if it were the man himself, and for this reason fear
it or fawn upon it in vain; yet they do not apprehend it as true or false,
but only as like; and in this they are not deceived. Wherefore, as men owe
all their true ratiocination to the right understanding of speech, so also
they owe their errors to the misunderstanding of the same; and as all the
ornaments of philosophy proceed only from man, so from man also is derived
the ugly absurdity of false opinion. For speech has something in it like
to a spider's web (as it was said of old of Solon's laws), for by
contexture of words tender and delicate wits are ensnared or stopped, but
strong wits break easily through them."

Let me illustrate my meaning by at least one instance.

Among the words which have proved spider's webs, ensnaring even the
greatest intellects of the world from Aristotle down to Leibniz, the terms
_genus_, _species_, and _individual_ occupy a very prominent place. The
opposition of Aristotle to Plato, of the Nominalists to the Realists, of
Leibniz to Locke, of Herbart to Hegel, turns on the