se in philosophical language, often understood the term in
its ordinary acceptation. This change of the meaning of words, which is
constantly recurring in metaphysical disputes, has made that curious but
obscure science liable to this objection of Hobbes, "with many words
making nothing understood!"

Controversies have been keenly agitated about the principles of morals,
which resolve entirely into _verbal disputes_, or at most into questions
of arrangement and classification, of little comparative moment to the
points at issue. This observation of Mr. Dugald Stewart's might be
illustrated by the fate of the numerous inventors of systems of thinking
or morals, who have only employed very different and even opposite terms
in appearance to express the same thing. Some, by their mode of
philosophising, have strangely unsettled the words _self-interest_ and
_self-love_; and their misconceptions have sadly misled the votaries of
these systems of morals; as others also by such vague terms as "utility,
fitness," &c.

When Epicurus asserted that the sovereign good consisted in _pleasure_,
opposing the unfeeling austerity of the Stoics by the softness of
pleasurable emotions, his principle was soon disregarded; while his
_word_, perhaps chosen in the spirit of paradox, was warmly adopted by
the sensualist. Epicurus, of whom Seneca has drawn so beautiful a
domestic scene, in whose garden a loaf, a Cytheridean cheese, and a
draught which did not inflame thirst,[45] was the sole banquet, would
have started indignantly at

The fattest hog in Epicurus' sty!

Such are the facts which illustrate that principle in "the abuse of
words," which Locke calls "an affected obscurity arising from applying
_old words to new, or unusual significations_."

It was the same "confusion of words" which gave rise to the famous sect
of the Sadducees. The master of its founder Sadoc, in his moral purity,
was desirous of a disinterested worship of the Deity; he would not have
men like slaves, obedient from the hope of reward or the fear of
punishment. Sadoc drew a quite contrary inference from the intention of
his master, concluding that there were neither rewards nor punishments
in a future state. The result is a parallel to the fate of Epicurus. The
morality of the master of Sadoc was of the most pure and elevated kind,
but in the "confusion of words," the libertines adopted them for their
own purposes--and having once assumed that neither reward