r anything
of this sort, he is affirming a proposition which has several senses,
and in none of these senses can be assisted to be uniformly true. For
the laws of language are precarious, and can only act uniformly when
there is such frequency of intercourse among neighbours as is sufficient
to enforce them. And there are many reasons why a man should prefer his
own way of speaking to that of others, unless by so doing he becomes
unintelligible. The struggle for existence among words is not of that
fierce and irresistible kind in which birds, beasts and fishes devour
one another, but of a milder sort, allowing one usage to be substituted
for another, not by force, but by the persuasion, or rather by the
prevailing habit, of a majority. The favourite figure, in this, as in
some other uses of it, has tended rather to obscure than explain the
subject to which it has been applied. Nor in any case can the struggle
for existence be deemed to be the sole or principal cause of changes
in language, but only one among many, and one of which we cannot easily
measure the importance. There is a further objection which may be urged
equally against all applications of the Darwinian theory. As in animal
life and likewise in vegetable, so in languages, the process of change
is said to be insensible: sounds, like animals, are supposed to pass
into one another by imperceptible gradation. But in both cases the
newly-created forms soon become fixed; there are few if any vestiges of
the intermediate links, and so the better half of the evidence of the
change is wanting.

(3) Among the incumbrances or illusions of language may be reckoned many
of the rules and traditions of grammar, whether ancient grammar or the
corrections of it which modern philology has introduced. Grammar, like
law, delights in definition: human speech, like human action, though
very far from being a mere chaos, is indefinite, admits of degrees, and
is always in a state of change or transition. Grammar gives an erroneous
conception of language: for it reduces to a system that which is not a
system. Its figures of speech, pleonasms, ellipses, anacolutha, pros
to semainomenon, and the like have no reality; they do not either make
conscious expressions more intelligible or show the way in which they
have arisen; they are chiefly designed to bring an earlier use of
language into conformity with the later. Often they seem intended only
to remind us that great poets like Aesch