fession.[49]

That this is not a fanciful case can be shown by noticing how often we
speak of "transparent" honesty, or of "absolute" honesty: this is
notably one of the words for which we have a sliding scale of values,
which vary considerably with the age and the community. "Political
honesty" has a very different meaning in the England of to-day from that
which it had in the eighteenth century. To get at the exact meaning of
honesty, then, either for Mr. Sidgwick's Brown, Jones, Robinson, and
Smith, or for Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour as compared with Walpole or
Pitt, we need a good deal more than a dictionary definition. What has
already been said (p. 65) on the use of the history of the case to get a
preliminary understanding of the question which is to be argued, and the
terms to be used in it, applies all through the reasoning involved in
the argument. Scrutinize all the terms you use yourself, as well as
those used in arguments on the other side. I have already pointed out
the ambiguity there is in the emotional implications of words; but the
danger from it is so subtle and so besetting that it will be worth while
to dwell on it again. There are many cases in which there is no doubt as
to the denotation of the word,--the cases which it is intended to
name,--but in which the two sides to a controversy use the word with a
totally different effect on their own and other people's feelings.
Before the Civil War pretty much the whole South had come to use the
word "slavery" as implying one of the settled institutions of the
country, more or less sanctified by divine ordinance; at the same time a
large portion of the North had come to look on it as an abomination to
the Lord.

Here there was no doubt as to the denotation of the word; but in a
highly important respect it was ambiguous, because it implied a totally
different reaction among the people who used it. In a case where the
contrast is so glaring there is little danger of confusion; but there
are a good many cases where a word may have very different effects on
the feelings of an audience without the fact coming very clearly to the
surface. "Liberal" is to most Americans a term implying praise, so far
as it goes; to Cardinal Newman it implied what were to him the
irreverent and dangerous heresies of free thought, and therefore in his
mouth it was a word of condemnation.[50] "Aesthetic" to many good people
has an implication of effeminacy and of trifling which is