Chapter III: Definition (2)

The other of these two methods is that of defining by showing the origin or causes of the subject or by showing its effects. If we can be made to see what forces went to the making of anything, or what has resulted from it, we shall have a fairly clear idea of the nature of the thing. Thus we may perhaps best understand the nature of _cabinet government_ by showing how the system came into being, what need it filled, what forces produced it. The same method might make clear _primitive Greek drama_, _the Hanseatic League_, _fertilization of land_, _the Federal Reserve System of Banking_, _the modern orchestra_. And by showing the effects we might define such matters as _the Montessori method of education_, _the Feudal System_, _anarchy_, _militarism_. The writer of a definition after this method needs to take care that when he has shown the various causes or effects, he surely binds them somehow together and vitally to the subject of definition. There must be no dim feeling in the mind of the reader that, after all, the subject is not yet clearly limned, not yet set off from other things. The definition which follows makes clear the origin of the mechanical engineer, and by showing what he does, what need there was for him, what lack he fills, makes clear what he is.

The period of systematic and scientific power development is
coincident with the true progress of the most basal of the several
branches of natural philosophy, chemistry, physics, mechanics,
thermodynamics, and the theory of elasticity of materials of
construction; and there is no doubt that the steam engine, which
was designed and built by workmen before these were formulated,
attracted the attention of philosophers who, in attempting
to explain what took place in it, created a related body of
principles by which future development was guided, and which are
now the fundamental bases for the design of the future. Those
men who became familiar with the natural sciences, and also with
the shop methods of making machinery, and who brought both to
bear on the problem of the production of machinery for specified
conditions, combining the special knowledge of the scientist and
the shop mechanic, were the first mechanical engineers; and the
profession of mechanical engineering, which is the term applied to
this sort of business, was created out of the efforts to improve
power systems, so as to make them more efficient and adapted to
all classes of service, and to render that service for the least
cost.[24]

[24] C. E. Lucke: _Power_. By courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia
University Press.

Emerson makes a definition of the civilization of America in the following selection wherein he describes the effect of American society and life upon the individual.

The true test of civilization is, not the crops, not the
size of cities, not the census,--no, but the kind of man the
country turns out. I see the vast advantages of this country,
spanning the breadth of the temperate zone. I see the immense
material prosperity,--towns on towns, states on states, and wealth
piled in the massive architecture of cities: California quartz,
mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally
alongshore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward to California
again. But it is not New York streets, built by the confluence of
workmen and wealth of all nations, though stretching out toward
Philadelphia until they touch it, and northward until they touch
New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and Boston,--not
these that make the real estimation. But when I look over this
constellation of cities which animate and illustrate the land, and
see how little the government has to do with their daily life, how
self-helped and self-directed all families are,--knots of men in
purely natural societies, societies of trade, of kindred blood, of
habitual hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight
of opinion, of longer or better-directed industry; the refining
influence of women, the invitation which experience and permanent
causes open to youth and labor: when I see how much each virtuous
and gifted person whom all men consider, lives affectionately with
scores of people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with
greatest reason reckons these people his superiors in virtue and in
the symmetry and force of their qualities,--I see what cubic values
America has, and in these a better certificate of civilization than
great cities or enormous wealth.[25]

[25] Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Civilization," in _Society and Solitude_.
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

These, then, are the various methods that are in common use. The list might be extended, but perhaps enough varieties have been discussed to be of practical value. The choice of method will depend on the result that the writer wishes to accomplish; at times he will wish to please the reader's fancy with an illustration, and again he may wish to contrast the subject to something else. If at any time more methods than one are useful, there is not the slightest objection to combining; in fact, most definitions of any length will be found to have more than one method employed. Remember that the methods were made for you, not you for the methods. And so long as you make your subject clear, so long as you set it off by itself in a class, distinct from other members of the class, you can be sure of the value of your definition.

EXERCISES

I. Discover the restricting adjectives or phrases that will reduce
the number of differentia required by the genus in the following
definitions:

1. Vaudeville is _an entertainment_.

2. Pneumonia is _a disease_.

3. The Browning gun is _a machine_.

4. Landscape gardening is _an occupation_.

5. Smelting is _an operation_.

6. Lyrics are _writing_.

7. A college diploma is _a statement by a body of men_.

8. Rotation of crops is _a system_.

9. The Republican party is _an organization_.

10. Anglo-Saxon is _a language_.

11. An axe is _a tool_.

12. A printing press is _a steel structure_.

13. A hair-net is _weaving_.

14. Literature is _writing_.

15. Militarism is _an attitude of mind_.

II. Write a definition of any of the following, showing how the
subject has shifted its genus by its development, as the
_clearing-house_ (page 75) has.

1. The Temperance Movement (sentimental crusade; sensible
campaign for efficiency).

2. War.

3. Incantation (means of salvation; curiosity).

4. Household Science (drudgery; occupation).

5. Aristocracy (through physical strength; through birth;
through property).

6. Justice (B.C.; A.D.).

7. Chemistry (magic; utility).

8. The Presidency of the United States (as changed by Mr.
Wilson's procedure with Congress).

9. The Theater (under Puritan and Cavalier).

10. Electricity (curiosity; fearsome thing; utility).

Of course any one of these ten subjects can be defined with a
changeless genus, but such a genus is likely to be in the realm
of the abstract, pretty thoroughly divorced from practical life.

III. From the following definitions taken from Webster's New
International Dictionary construct definitions of a more
amplified, pleasing nature, after the manner of the definition of
_war correspondents_.

1. _Laziness_ is the state of being disinclined to action or
exertion; averse to labor; indolent; idle; slothful.

2. _Efficiency_ is the quality of being efficient, of producing
an effect or effects; efficient power or action.

3. A _department store_ is a store keeping a great variety of
goods which are arranged in several departments, especially
one with dry goods as the principal stock.

4. _Metabolism_ is the sum of the processes concerned in the
building up of protoplasm and its destruction incidental to
the manifestation of vital phenomena; the chemical changes
proceeding continually in living cells, by which the energy
is provided for the vital processes and activities and new
material is assimilated to repair the waste.

5. _Judgment_ is the faculty of judging or deciding rightly,
justly, or wisely; good sense; as, a man of judgment; a
politician without judgment.

6. _Puddling_ is the art or process of converting cast iron into
wrought iron, or, now rarely, steel by subjecting it to
intense heat and frequent stirring in a reverberatory furnace
in the presence of oxidizing substances, by which it is freed
from a portion of its carbon and other impurities.

7. _Overhead cost_ is the general expenses of a business, as
distinct from those caused by particular pieces of traffic.

8. A _joke_ is something said or done for the sake of exciting a
laugh; something witty or sportive (commonly indicating more
of hilarity or humor than jest).

9. A _diplomat_ is one employed or skilled in the art and
practice of conducting negotiations between nations, as in
arranging treaties; performing the business or art of
conducting international discourse.

10. A _visionary_ is one who relies, or tends to rely, on
visions, or impractical ideas, projects, or the like; an
impractical person.

11. An _entrepreneur_ is an employer in his character of one who
assumes the risk and management of business.

12. _Loyalty_ is fidelity to a superior, or to duty, love, etc.

13. A _prig_ is one narrowly and self-consciously engrossed in
his own mental or spiritual attainments; one guilty of moral
or intellectual foppery; a conceited precisian.

14. _Heresy_ is an opinion held in opposition to the established
or commonly received doctrine, and tending to promote
division or dissension.

15. _Eugenics_ is the science of improving stock, whether human
or animal, or of improving plants.

IV. Compare the definitions of the following which you find in the
Century Dictionary, the Standard Dictionary, the Webster's New
International Dictionary and the New English Dictionary; find the
common elements, and make a definition of your own.

1. Literature.

2. Living wage.

3. Capillary attraction.

4. Sympathy.

5. Classicism.

6. Inertia.

7. Fodder.

8. Religion.

9. Introspection.

10. Individuality.

11. Finance.

12. Capital.

13. Soil physics.

14. Progress.

15. Narrow-mindedness.

V. Look up the definitions of the following terms and estimate the
resulting amount of increase in your knowledge of the subject
which includes the terms. Do you find any stimulus toward
_thinking_ about the subject? What would you say, as the result
of this investigation, about the value of definitions? What does
Coleridge mean by his statement "Language thinks for us"?

1. _Religion_: awe, reverence, duty, mystery, peace, priest,
worship, loyalty, prayer, supplication, trust,
divinity, god, service, church, temple, heaven,
fate.

2. _Socialism_: property, social classes, economic rights,
capital, labor, wages, the masses, aristocracy,
envy, self-respect, economic distribution,
labor union, boycott, strike, lock-out,
materialism, profit-sharing.

3. _Ability_: genius, wit, talent, insight, judgment,
perseverance, logic, imagination, originality,
intellectuality, vitality.

4. _Music_: sound, rhythm, melody, harmony, orchestra,
interval (musical), key, beat, tonic,
modulation, musical register, polyphony,
monophony, sonata, oratorio, musical scale,
diatonic, chromatic, tempo.

5. _Democracy_: independence, suffrage, representation,
equality, popular, coöperation.

VI. Are the two statements which follow definitions? If not, why not?
What would be the effect of the use of definitions of this type
in argument? Write a defining theme with such a definition as its
nucleus, and test its value.

1. Beauty is its own excuse for being.

2. Virtue is its own reward.

VII. In the following definitions[26] what are the genera? Are the
definitions fair? How would you criticize them in general? Write
a theme using the differentia noted, and trying to catch in the
theme the spirit that is shown in the lists.

[26] From B. L. T.'s "The Line o' Type Column." By courtesy of the
_Chicago Tribune_.

Highbrow: Browning, anthropology, economics,
Bacon, the up-lift, inherent sin, Gibbon, fourth dimension,
Euripides, "eyether," pâté de fois gras, lemon phosphate,
Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson.

Low-highbrow: Municipal government, Kipling,
socialism, Shakespeare, politics, Thackeray, taxation, golf,
grand opera, bridge, chicken à la Maryland, "eether," stocks
and bonds, gin rickey, Theodore Roosevelt, chewing gum in
private.

High-lowbrow: Musical comedy, euchre, baseball,
moving pictures, small steak medium, whiskey, Robert W.
Chambers, purple socks, chewing gum with friends.

Lowbrow: Laura Jean Libbey, ham sandwich, haven't
came, pitch, I and her, melodrama, hair oil, the Duchess,
beer, George M. Cohan, red flannels, toothpicks, Bathhouse
John, chewing gum in public.

VIII. Expand the following definition[27] into a theme, using the
combined methods of illustration and comparison. What is the
value of having the heart of the definition stated before the
theme is begun?

[27] George Bernard Shaw: _The Sanity of Art_. By courtesy of the
publishers, Boni & Liveright.

The worthy artist or craftsman is he who serves
the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures,
musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good
clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays, and
dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties
into pleasurable activity. The great artist is he who goes a
step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher
beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived,
succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in
adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the
race.

IX. See "Poverty" (page 84).

1. In view of the fact that Gissing uses so slight an
illustration to fix his ideal, what makes the definition
valuable? Compare the value of this definition with another
of the same subject such as you might find in a text on
Sociology or Economics.

2. Define by illustration any of the following: Homesickness,
Jealousy, Despair, Discouragement, Vulgarity, Opulence,
Misery, Cheapness, Tenacity, Anger, Adaptability, Man of
action, Man of executive ability, Statesman, Ward boss, Man
of learning, Luck, Courage, Business success, "Bonehead
Play," Political shrewdness, The "College Widow," Perfect
technique, Up-to-date factory, Social tact, A Snob, "Some
Kid," Other-worldliness, A Gentleman, A Lady, A "real meal,"
A fighting chance, Good breeding, A "Social climber,"
Community music, Poetic justice, A wage-slave, A political
ring, Good team-work, Elasticity of mind, Bigotry.

How far is definition by illustration concerned
with _morality_? Could you, for example, so illustrate
_courage_ as to seem to exclude a really courageous person?
What necessity in employing this method does your answer to
the preceding question indicate?

Define any of the following: The ideal leader of
the "gang," The ideal ward boss, The ideal town librarian,
The ideal teacher, The ideal military general, captain,
corporal, The ideal headwaiter, The ideal foreman in a
factory, The ideal soda-clerk, The ideal athletic coach, The
ideal intellectual leader, The ideal orchestra conductor, The
ideal mayor, The ideal "boss" in a steel mill, on a farm, of
an engineering gang, of cotton pickers, of lumberjacks.

Is the definition of a _Responsible Statesman_ any
the less sound because the differentia are duties rather than
facts? Write a theme explaining why an executive too far
"ahead of his times" fails of immediate results.

3. In the manner of the definition of _Amortization_, write a
definition of the following: Collective buying, Sabotage,
Montessori method of education, Dry cleaning, Dry farming.

X. What is the chief value of the following selection as a real
definition? Which is of greater value, this selection or the kind
of definition that would be found in a text on geography?

Define, in a manner similar to that of the selection: New
England, The Middle West, The "Old Dominion," "The Cradle of
Liberty," "Gotham," The "Gold Coast," "Dixie," "The Old South,"
"The Auld Sod," "The Corn Belt," "The Wheat Belt," The Anthracite
Region, The Land of Big Game, "The Land of Heart's Desire," "The
Cockpit of Europe," "The Vacation Land."

Between the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful
land wherein more history was made, and recorded in old
monuments full of grace and grandeur and fancy, than in
almost any other region of the world. The old names were
best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams:
Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne,
Franche-Comté; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names
ring with the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a
great and indelible past: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Liége;
Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblenz, and Trêves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai
and Fontenoy, Arras and Malplaquet; Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and
Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. Cæsar, Charlemagne, St.
Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and
marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights,
and aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of
the splendid names.

It is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three
hundred and fifty miles, perhaps, from the Alps to the sea,
and not more than two hundred and fifty from the Seine at
Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of
Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years following
the fall of Rome, this little country--or the men that made
it great--was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the
spiritual energy of the Holy See, and with a varying and
sometimes negligible influence from the Teutonic lands beyond
the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings of mediævalism, even
though for its full manifestation you must take into account
the men in the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the
Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony, Bohemia.[28]

[28] Ralph Adams Cram: _The Heart of Europe_. By courtesy of the
publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York City. Copyright,
1915.

XI. Note the two selections that follow, in comparison with the
definitions of a responsible statesman and quack novels on pages
87 and 88, and write a definition of any of the following groups,
using the method of comparison and contrast.

A sale of personal property is the transfer of its
general ownership from one person to another for a price
in money. It is almost always the result of a contract
between the seller and the buyer. If the contract provides
for the transfer of ownership at once the transaction is
called "a present sale," or "a bargain and sale," or "an
executed contract of sale." If it provides for the transfer
of ownership at some future time it is called "a contract to
sell," or "an executory contract of sale."

The business transaction most nearly resembling a
sale is that of barter, or the transfer of one article of
personal property for another, as when A and B trade horses,
or wagons, or oats, or cows. It differs from a sale only
in this, that the consideration for each transfer is the
counter-transfer of a chattel instead of money. Next to barter
in its likeness to sale is a mortgage of personal property,
usually called a chattel mortgage. This, in form, is a sale,
but it contains a proviso that if the mortgagor pays a certain
amount of money, or does some other act, at a stipulated time,
the sale shall be void. Even though the mortgagor does not
perform the act promised at the agreed time, he still has the
right to redeem the property from the mortgage by paying his
debt with interest. In other words, a chattel mortgage does
not transfer general ownership, or absolute property in the
chattels, while a sale does.

A sale differs from a bailment.... The former is the
transfer of title to goods, the latter of their possession.
A bailee undertakes to restore to the bailor the very thing
bailed, although it may be in a changed form, while the buyer
is to pay money to the seller for the subject-matter of their
contract.[29]

[29] Francis M. Burdick: _The Essentials of Business Law_. By courtesy
of the publishers, D. Appleton & Co., New York City. Copyright,
1902 and 1908.

The familiar distinction between the poetic and the
scientific temper is another way of stating the same
difference. The one fuses or crystallizes external objects
and circumstances in the medium of human feeling and passion;
the other is concerned with the relations of objects and
circumstances among themselves, including in them all
the facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery
and classification of these relations. There is, too, a
corresponding distinction between the aspects which conduct,
character, social movement, and the objects of nature are able
to present, according as we scrutinize them with a view to
exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which
they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility,
our tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all
the other emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry
heavens have one side for the astronomer, as astronomer, and
another for the poet, as poet. The nightingale, the skylark,
the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in an ornithologist,
and a very different sort in a Shelley or a Wordsworth. The
hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world, the
thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants,
from those whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if
they were deadly monsters, down to "the meanest flower that
blows," all these are clothed with one set of attributes by
scientific intelligence, and with another by sentiment, fancy,
and imaginative association.[30]

[30] John Morley: _Miscellanies_, vol. I. By courtesy of the
publishers, The Macmillan Company, New York City.

1. Autocracy and Democracy.

2. Fame and Notoriety.

3. Cribbing and Lying.

4. Immorality and Unconventionality.

5. Musician and Music Lover.

6. Popularity and Cheapness.

7. Enthusiast and Crank.

8. An Irish Bull and a Paradox.

9. Puppy Love and Real Love.

10. Boiling and Broiling.

11. Honesty and Truthfulness.

12. White Lies and Falsehoods.

13. Liberty and License.

14. Wages and Unearned Increment.

15. Knowledge and Scholarship.

16. Religion and Superstition.

17. Broadmindedness and Spinelessness.

18. Architecture and Architectural Engineering.

19. Socialism and Anarchy.

20. Wit and Humor.

21. Enough and Sufficient.

22. Genetic Heredity and Social Heredity.

23. Lying and Diplomacy.

24. Theology and Religion.

25. Force, Energy, and Power.

26. Sanitary Engineers and Plumbers.

27. Business, Trade, and Commerce.

28. "Kidding" and Taunting.

29. Eminence and Prominence.

30. Realism and Romanticism.

31. Kinetic and Potential Energy.

32. Popular and Permanent Literature.

33. A "Gentleman Farmer" and a Producer.

34. An Employer and a Slave-driver.

35. A Practical Joke and a "Mean Trick."

Is the following selection properly a definition by the method
of comparison? What is defined? Are the general statements that
serve as background true? In how far does the whole selection
depend for its validity upon the truth of these general
statements?

There is a difference between boys and men, but it
is a difference of self-knowledge chiefly. A boy wants to do
everything because he does not know he cannot; a man wants to
do something because he knows he cannot do everything; a boy
always fails, and a man sometimes succeeds because the man
knows and the boy does not know. A man is better than a boy
because he knows better; he has learned by experience that
what is a harm to others is a greater harm to himself, and
he would rather not do it. But a boy hardly knows what harm
is, and he does it mostly without realizing that it hurts. He
cannot invent anything, he can only imitate; and it is easier
to imitate evil than good. You can imitate war, but how are
you going to imitate peace? So a boy passes his leisure in
contriving mischief. If you get another fellow to walk into a
wasp's camp, you can see him jump and hear him howl, but if
you do not, then nothing at all happens. If you set a dog to
chase a cat up a tree, then something has been done; but if
you do not set the dog on the cat, then the cat just lies in
the sun and sleeps and you lose your time. If a boy could find
out some way of doing good, so that he could be active in it,
very likely he would want to do good now and then; but as he
cannot, he very seldom wants to do good.[31]

[31] William Dean Howells: _A Boy's Town_. By courtesy of the
publishers, Harper & Brothers, New York City. Copyright, 1890.

XII. Does the style of the definition of moral atmosphere (page 9) fit
well with the subject? Would the definition be more effective if
written in a more formal style?

Define:

1. The scholarly atmosphere of a university.

2. The business atmosphere of the Stock Exchange.

3. The holy atmosphere of a large church.

4. The inhuman atmosphere of an ordinary criminal court.

5. The human atmosphere of a reunion (of a class, a family, a
group of friends).

6. The majestic atmosphere of Niagara Falls.

7. The beautiful atmosphere of a pond of skaters.

{inspiring }
8. The {overpowering} atmosphere of a steel mill.
{brutal }
{beautiful }

9. The calm atmosphere of a dairy farm.

XIII. Does the following selection serve to define _honor_ as too
difficult of attainment, as too closely bound up with fighting?
Is any definition of _privilege_ implied? Define honor as taught
in a college and honor as taught in the business world. Can a
State University afford to maintain the kind of honor that forces
it to "remain loyal to unpopular causes and painful truths"? Is
the honor that seeks "to maintain faith even with the devil"
foolish? Write a report on the state of honor in your college or
university such as Washington or Lincoln would have written after
investigating conditions in the student politics of the
institution, or conditions in examinations and quizzes.

Honor, perhaps because it is associated in the
public mind with old ideas of dueling and paying gambling
debts, and in general with the habits, good and bad, of
a privileged class, is not in high repute with a modern
industrial community, where bankruptcy laws, the letter of
the statute book, the current morality of an easy-going,
good-natured, success-loving people, mark out a smoother path.
But the business of a college is not to fit a boy for the
world, but to fit him to mould the world to his ideal. Honor
is not necessarily old-fashioned and antiquated; it will adapt
itself to the present and to the future. If it is arbitrary,
or at least has an arbitrary element, so are most codes of
law. If honor belongs to a privileged class, it is because
it makes a privileged class; a body of men whose privilege
it is to speak out in the scorn of consequence, to keep an
oath to their own hurt, to remain loyal to unpopular causes
and painful truths, to maintain faith even with the devil,
and not swerve for rewards, prizes, popularity, or any of the
blandishments of success. Because it is arbitrary, because it
has rules, it needs to be taught. To teach a code of honor is
one of the main purposes of education; a college cannot say,
"We teach academic studies," and throw the responsibility for
honor on parents, on preliminary schools, on undergraduate
opinion, on each boy's conscience. Honor is taught by the
companionship, the standards, the ideals, the talk, the
actions of honorable men; it is taught by honoring honorable
failure and turning the back on all manner of dishonorable
success.[32]

[32] Henry Dwight Sedgwick: _The New American Type_. Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston, publishers.

XIV. Define, by showing the origin, any of the following:

Highway Engineering, The County Agricultural Adviser, Customs
Officer, A private secretary, The linotype machine, National
public opinion, The Federal Reserve Board, The "Spoils System,"
The American Federation of Labor, American "Moral Leadership" in
1918, The Caste System, The mechanical stoker, The canal lock,
The trial balance sheet, The Babcock Test.

XV. Are the following statements true definitions? Wherein does their
worth consist? What causes any weakness that they may have?

1. Life is one long process of getting tired.

2. Life is the distribution of an error--or errors.

3. Life is eight parts cards and two parts play; the unseen
world is made manifest to us in the play.

4. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from
insufficient premises.

5. The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a
stewpan and the whole fixed upon stilts.

6. Morality is the custom of one's country and the current
feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal
country.

7. Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women.
Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional
truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of
both.

8. Going to your doctor is having such a row with your cells
that you refer them to your solicitor. Sometimes you, as it
were, strike against them and stop their food, when they go
on strike against yourself. Sometimes you file a bill in
chancery against them and go to bed.[33]

[33] All these are from _The Note-Books of Samuel Butler_, published
by A. C. Fifield, London.

XVI. In the light of the following definition of _Superiority of
Status_ write a definition of any of the following: Superiority
of birth, Superiority of training, Superiority of vitality,
Superiority of environment, Superiority of patronage.

There is another sort of artificial superiority which
also returns an artificial rent: the superiority of pure
status. What are called "superiors" are just as necessary
in social organization as a keystone is in an arch; but the
keystone is made of no better material than any other parts of
a bridge; its importance is conferred upon it by its position,
not its position by its importance. If half-a-dozen men are
cast adrift in a sailing-boat, they will need a captain. It
seems simple enough for them to choose the ablest man; but
there may easily be no ablest man. The whole six, or four
out of the six, or two out of the six, may be apparently
equally fit for the post. In that case, the captain must be
elected by lot; but the moment he assumes his authority, that
authority makes him at once literally the ablest man in the
boat. He has the powers which the other five have given him
for their own good. Take another instance. Napoleon gained the
command of the French army because he was the ablest general
in France. But suppose every individual in the French army
had been a Napoleon also! None the less a commander-in-chief,
with his whole hierarchy of subalterns, would have had to
be appointed--by lot if you like--and here, again, from the
moment the lot was cast, the particular Napoleon who drew the
straw for the commander-in-chief would have been the great,
the all-powerful Napoleon, much more able than the Napoleons
who were corporals and privates. After a year, the difference
in ability between the men who had been doing nothing but
sentry duty, under no strain of responsibility, and the man
who had been commanding the army would have been enormous.
As "the defenders of the system of Conservatism" well know,
we have for centuries made able men out of ordinary ones by
allowing them to inherit exceptional power and status; and
the success of the plan in the phase of social development to
which it was proper was due to the fact that, provided the
favored man was really an ordinary man, and not a duffer, the
extraordinary power conferred on him did effectually create
extraordinary ability as compared with that of an agricultural
laborer, for example, of equal natural endowments. The
gentleman, the lord, the king, all discharging social
functions of which the laborer is incapable, are products as
artificial as queen bees. Their superiority is produced by
giving them a superior status, just as the inferiority of the
laborer is produced by giving him an inferior status. But the
superior income which is the appanage of superior status is
not rent of ability. It is a payment made to a man to exercise
normal ability, in an abnormal situation. Rent of ability is
what a man gets by exercising abnormal ability in a normal
situation.[34]

[34] George Bernard Shaw: _Socialism and Superior Brains_. By courtesy
of the publishers, John Lane Company.

XVII. In the following selection how many definitions occur, or how
many things are defined? Do you understand what the author says?
How many words do you have to look up in the dictionary before
you understand the article? Could the author have made the
subject clear in a sensible extent of space?

What would you say is the chief virtue of the selection? How is
it gained? For what kind of audience was the article written?
What was the author's controlling purpose? Point out how he
attains it.

Do you find any _pattern-designers_ among novelists, poets,
architects, landscape gardeners? Name a novel, a poem, a
building, a park, which is primarily a pattern-design. Name one
which is not a pattern-design so much as a dramatic expression.
Which is the more significant? Which is more difficult to make?

Define: Futurist painting, Free verse, Social morality, in
relation to their preceding forms. Explain, through definition,
the controversy between Paganism and Christianity, between
Monarchy and Democracy, between Classical Education and
Industrial Education, between Party Politics and Independent
Politics, between Established Religion and Non-Conformist Views.

Music is like drawing, in that it can be purely decorative,
or purely dramatic, or anything between the two.... You
can compose a graceful, symmetrical sound-pattern that exists
solely for the sake of its own grace and symmetry. Or you can
compose music to heighten the expression of human emotion;
and such music will be intensely affecting in the presence
of that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from it. For
examples of pure pattern-designing in music I should have
to go back to the old music of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries ... designed to affect the hearer solely
by its beauty of sound and grace and ingenuity of pattern;
absolute music, represented to-day in the formal sonata and
symphony....

The first modern dramatic composers accepted as binding
the rules of good pattern-designing in sound; and this
absurdity was made to appear practicable from the fact that
Mozart had such an extraordinary command of his art that his
operas contain numbers which, though they seem to follow the
dramatic play of emotion and character, without reference to
any other consideration whatever, are seen, upon examining
them from the point of view of the absolute musician, to be
perfectly symmetrical sound-patterns.... Even Mozart himself
broke away in all directions, and was violently attacked by
his contemporaries for doing so, the accusations levelled at
him being exactly those with which the opponents of Wagner so
often pester ourselves. Wagner completed the emancipation of
the dramatic musician from these laws of pattern-designing;
and we now have operas, and very good ones, too, written by
composers not musicians in the old sense at all: that is, they
are not pattern-designers; they do not compose music apart
from drama.

The dramatic development also touched purely instrumental
music. Liszt tried hard to extricate himself from pianoforte
arabesques, and become a tone poet like his friend Wagner.
He wanted his symphonic poems to express emotions and
their development. And he defined the emotion by connecting
it with some known story, poem, or even picture: Mazeppa,
Victor Hugo's Les Preludes, Kaulbach's Die Hunnenschlacht,
or the like. But the moment you try to make an instrumental
composition follow a story, you are forced to abandon the
decorative pattern forms, since all patterns consist of
some form which is repeated over and over again, and which
generally consists in itself of a repetition of two similar
halves. For example, if you take a playing-card (say the five
of diamonds) as a simple example of pattern, you find not only
that the diamond pattern is repeated five times, but that each
established form of a symphony is essentially a pattern form
involving just such symmetrical repetitions; and, since a
story does not repeat itself, but pursues a continuous chain
of fresh incident and correspondingly varied emotions, Liszt
invented the symphonic poem, a perfectly simple and fitting
common-sense form for his purpose, and one which makes Les
Preludes much plainer sailing for the ordinary hearer than
Mendelssohn's Melusine overture or Raff's Lenore or Im Walde
symphonies, in both of which the formal repetitions would
stamp Raff as a madman if we did not know that they were mere
superstitions.[35]

[35] George Bernard Shaw: _The Sanity of Art_, "Wagnerism." By
courtesy of the publishers, Boni & Liveright.