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Updated: May 26, 2025
The last century abounded with antiquarians of profound learning and easy faith, who, by the dim light of legends and traditions, of conjectures and etymologies, conducted the great grandchildren of Noah from the Tower of Babel to the extremities of the globe. Of these judicious critics, one of the most entertaining was Oaus Rudbeck, professor in the university of Upsal.
"No, monsieur le comte, he wishes to make a present of it." "To whom?" "To myself, monsieur." "Why did you not say so at once, my dear M. Mauvaisecorne?" "Malicorne, monsieur le comte." "Forgive me; it is that Latin that bothers me that terrible mine of etymologies. Why the deuce are young men of family taught Latin? Mala and mauvaise you understand it is the same thing.
Moreover, if all Greek gods could be certainly explained, by undisputed etymologies, as originally elemental, we still object to such logic as that which turns Saranyu into 'grey dawn. We still object to the competing interpretations by which almost every detail of very composite myths is explained as a poetical description of some elemental process or phenomenon.
If so, according to Tooke, it would be a nonentity. This doctrine gives a short cut to the abolition of metaphysics. The word 'metaphysics, says Tooke, is nonsense. All metaphysical controversies are 'founded on the grossest ignorance of words and the nature of speech. The greatest part of his second volume is concerned with etymologies intended to prove that an 'abstract idea' is a mere word.
Achilleus and Helena, Oidipous and Iokasta, Oinone and Paris, have been discovered in India and again in Scandinavia, and so on, until their nonentity has become the legitimate inference from their very ubiquity. Legislators like Romulus and Numa, inventors like Kadmos, have evaporated into etymologies.
But when the later Friends raised their protest, the case was altogether different. The false gods whose names were bound up in these words had ceased to be worshipped in England for about a thousand years; the words had wholly disengaged themselves from their etymologies, of which probably not one in a thousand had the slightest suspicion.
By gathering from different epochs, remote from each other, the songs, symbols, monuments, laws, etymologies, and religious and philosophical doctrines, in a word, the infinite elements which form the life of mankind, he establishes the unity of human history.
An old man observed that in this same place was formerly a source of thermal water, of which his great great grandfather had drunk. In short, in less time than it takes a fly to embrace its sweetheart, there had been a pocketful of etymologies, in which the truth of the matter had been less easily found than a louse in the filthy beard of a Capuchin friar.
This work does not profess to deal much with etymologies; the author thinking that any very strict attention to the derivation of words, in connection with synonyms, would only tend to confuse the subject.
There were other passages, where I should gladly have altered or struck out whole lines, particularly in the ethnological passages, and in the attempted etymologies of German proper names. Neither the one nor the other, I believe, are Kingsley's own, though I have tried in vain to find out whence he could possibly have taken them.
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