Best Thoughts of Best Thinkers

LACONICS.

BEST THOUGHTS ON PHILOSOPHY.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.-Thoreau.

Philosophy is the art and law of life, and it teaches us what to do in all cases, and, like good marksmen, to hit the white at any distance.-Seneca.

The modern sceptical philosophy consists in believing everything but the truth, and exactly in proportion to the want of evidence; in making windows that shut out the light; and passages that lead to nothing.-Nisbet.

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.-Cousin.

The discovery of what is true, and the practice of what is good, are the two most important objects of philosophy.-Voltaire.

Philosophy is the art of living.-Plutarch.

It is not a head merely, but a heart and resolution, which complete the real philosophy.-Shaftesbury.

Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might more truly be called the knowledge of our ignorance, or in the language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge. -Max Muller.

Philosophy is the science which considers truth.-Aristotle.

It is the bounty of nature that we live, but of philosophy that we live well; which is, in truth, a greater benefit than life itself.-Seneca. The first business of a philosopher is to part with self-conceit. -Epictetus.

Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it expels it.-Bacon.

Be a philosopher, but amid all your philosophy, be still a man.
-Hume.

Philosophy, if rightly, defined, is nothing but the love of wisdom.
-Cicero.

It is easy for men to write and talk like philosophers, but to act with wisdom

there's the rub.-Rivarol.

of intellect, their works, at the revival of learning, ceased to be popular, and it was considered a mark of intellectual progress and advance to have thrown off their yoke. Some persons, however, still clung to these schoolmen, especially to Duns Scotus, the great teacher of the Franciscan order; and many times an adherent of the old learning would seek to strengthen his position by an appeal to its great doctor, familiarly called Duns; while his opponents would contemptuously rejoin, “Oh, you are a Duns-man," or more briefly, "You are a Duns." As the new learning was enlisting more and more of the scholarship of the age on its side, the title became more and more a term of scorn, and thus from the long extinct conflict between the old and the new learning, the medieval and the modern theology, we inherit the word "dunce" and “duncery." The lot of poor Duns, as the Archbishop observes, was certainly a hard one. That the name of the "Subtle Doctor," as he was called, one of the keenest and most subtlewitted of men, - according to Hooker, "the wittiest of the school divines," should become a mere synonym for stupidity, was a fate of which even his bitterest enemies would never have dreamed.

“Saunterers were once pilgrims to the Holy Land (la Sainte Terre) who, it was found, took their own time to go there. Bit is that which has been bit off, and exactly corresponds to the word "morsel," used in the same sense, and from the Latin, mordere, to bite. Bankrupt means literally broken bench. It was the custom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for the Lombard merchants to expose their wares for sale in the market-place on benches. When one of the number failed, all the other merchants set upon him, drove him from the market and broke his bench to pieces. Banco rotto, the Italian for bench-broken, becomes banqueroute in French, and in English, bankrupt. Alligator is from the Spanish el lagarto, "the lizard," being the largest of the lizard species. Stipulation is from stipulum, a straw, which the Romans broke when they made a mutual engagement. Dexterity is simply right-handedness. Mountebank means a quack-medicine ven

from the Italian, montare, to mount, and banco, a

bench. Literally, one who mounts a bench to boast of his infallible skill in curing disease. Quandary is a corruption of the French qu'en dirai (je)? "what shall I say of it?" and expresses that feeling of uncertainty which would naturally prompt such a question. Faint is from the French se feindre, to pretend; so that originally faintness was a pretended weakness or inability. We have an example of the thing originally indicated by the word, in the French theaters, where professional fainters are employed, whose business it is to be overcome and sink to the floor under the powerful acting of the tragedians.

Topsy-turvy is said to be a contraction of "top-side t'other-way," just as helter-skelter is from hilariter et celeriter, "gaily and quickly," * The tendency to regard money as the source of true happiness is strikingly illustrated in the source of the word wealth, which is connected with weal, just as the Latin beatus meant both blessed and rich, and the same is true of the Greek. The term blue-stocking,

applied to literary ladies, has a curious origin. Originally, in England, in 1760, it was conferred on a society of literary persons of both sexes. The society derived its name from the blue worsted stockings always worn by Benjamin Stillingfleet, a distinguished writer who was one of the most active promoters of the association. This term was subsequently conferred on literary bodies, from the fact that the accomplished and fascinating Mrs. Jerningham wore blue stockings at the social and literary entertainments given by Lady Montague. Woman is the wif or web-man, who stays at home to spin, as distinguished from the weap-man, who goes abroad to use the weapons of war. [Note also the word wife, from this source.] The term "man is, of course, generic, including both male and female. Lady primarily signifies bread-keeper. It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, hlafdie, i. e. hlafweardige, bread-keeper, from hlaf, bread, loaf, and weardian, to keep, look after. Waist is the same as waste; that part of the figure which wastes, that is, diminishes.

“Canard has a very curious origin. M. Quetelet, a French writer, attributes the first application of this term to Norbert Cornellisen, who, to give a sly hit at the ridiculous pieces of intelligence in the public journals, stated that an interesting experiment had just been made calculated to prove the voracity of ducks. Twenty were placed together; and one of them having been killed and cut up into the smallest possible pieces, feathers and all, was thrown to the other nineteen, and most gluttonously gobbled up. Another was then taken from the nineteen, and being chopped small like its predecessor, was served up to the eighteen, and at once devoured like the other; and so on to the last, who thus was placed in the position of having eaten his nineteen companions. This story, most pleasantly narrated, ran the rounds of all the journals of Europe. It then became almost forgotten for about a score of years, when it went back from America with amplifications; but the word remained in its novel signification.

Poltroon is pollice truncus, that is, with the thumb cut off, - pollex, Latin, meaning thumb, and truncus, maimed or mutilated. When the Roman empire was about falling to pieces, the valor of the citizens had so degenerated, that, to escape fighting, many cut off their right thumbs, thus disabling themselves from using the pike."

And thus we might go on for hundreds of pages citing peculiar meanings, curious derivations, strange mutations, and queer associations of words with ideas more or less congruous or compatible; but enough has been given to illustrate the fact that even though the study of the etymology of words is intensely interesting for its own sake, it is not necessary, or even particularly advantageous, to an English writer, because so many words have now a changed meaning, while others have become restricted to a small fraction of their original import.