, temperament,
activities, or fate. And it augments its vocabulary to keep pace, roughly
at least, with its expanding ideas. In thought and terminology alike its
growth is from genus to species.

So it is with all our ideas and with all our words to cap them. We radiate
from an ascertained center into new areas of knowledge; we proceed from
the broad, fundamental, generic to the precise, discriminatory, specific.
Upon this natural law are based the exercises in this chapter and the two
to follow. The starting-point is always a word representative of an
elementary idea--a word and an idea which everybody knows; the advance is
into the unknown or the unused, at any rate into the particular. Now
fundamental ideas are not very numerous, and these exercises include the
commoner ones. Such a method of studying synonyms must therefore yield
large and tangible results.

One matter, however, should be explained. Most books of synonyms start
with a word and list all the terms in any way related to it. The idea of
the compilers is that the more they give the student the more they help
him. But oftentimes by giving more than is strictly pertinent they
actually hinder and confuse him. They may do this in various ways, of
which two must be mentioned. First, they follow an idea too far afield.
Thus in listing the synonyms of _love_ they include such terms as
_kindness_ and _lenity_, words only through stretched usage
connected with _love_. Secondly, they trace, not one meaning of a
word, but two or more unrelated meanings when the word chances to possess
them. Thus in listing the synonyms of _cry_ they include both the
idea of weeping and the idea of calling or screaming. What are the results
of these methods? The student finds a clutter where he expects
rationalized order; he finds he must exclude many words which lie in the
borders and fringes of the meaning. Moreover he finds mere chance
associations mingled with marked kinships. In both cases he finds dulled
distinctions.

This book offers synonyms that are apropos and definite rather than
comprehensive. Starting with a basic idea, it finds the generic term; it
then disregards dim and distant relationships, confines itself rigorously
to one of perhaps two or three legitimate senses, and refuses to consider
the peculiar twists and devious ways of subsidiary words when they wander
from the idea it is tracing. It thus deliberately blinds itself to much
that is interesting. But thi