The English Utilitarians, Volume I.

tendencies fostered by the position. If it be asked what philosophical doctrines were explicitly taught, the answer must be a very short one. English ph

ng, for though it contained little definite philosophy, it showed wh

] that they did; because they were equivalent to the phrase, 'Crooke had been indicted for forgery: she, knowing that,' did so and so. This raises the question: What is the meaning of 'that'? Tooke took up the study, thinking, as he says, that it would throw light upon some philosophical questions. He learned some

s in politics. Locke, he said,[146] made a lucky mistake in calling his book an essay upon human understanding; for he thus attracted many who would have been repelled had he called it what it really was, 'a treatise upon words and language.' According to Tooke, in fact,[147] what we call 'operations of mind' are only 'operations of language.' The mind contempla

trouble of enumerating the separate items. Tooke, in short, is a thoroughgoing nominalist. The realities, according to him, are sticks, stones, and material objects, or the 'ideas' which 'represent' them. They can be stuck together or taken apart, but all the words which express relations, categories, and the like, ar

ract idea' is a mere word. Abstract words, he says,[151] are generally 'participles without a substantive and therefore in construction used as substantives.' From a misunderstanding of this has arisen 'metaphysical jargon' and 'false morality.' In illustration he gives a singular list of words, including 'fate, chance, hea

aw 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' f

xpounded. 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

155] who, of course, did not accept the principles, and had a warm disciple in Charles Richardson (1775-1865), who wrote in its defence against Dugald Stewart and accepted its authority in his elaborate dictionary of the English language.[156] But its chief interest for us is that it was a great authority with James Mill. Mill accepts the etymologies, and th

ions of Purley, by Richard Taylor (1829), to which I refer. The first part of the Diversion

s of Purley (18

n his History of Materialism rightly perceived, a critique of language which, together with Kant's Critique

Ibid.

ions of Purl

Ibid.

Ibid.

atement in Analysis, i. 304, that 'abstract terms

bid. ii

Ibid.

ephens,

f Mackintosh

shed in 1835-37. Dugald Stewart's chief criticism is in his Essay