  Definition is the process of explaining a subject by setting bounds to it, enclosing it within its limits, showing its extent. The ocean is properly defined by the shore; a continent or island is defined by its coastline: shores set limits to the ocean; coastlines bound the island or continent. So, when a child asks, "What is Switzerland?" you show on the map the pink or yellow or green space that is included within certain definite boundaries. These boundaries set a limit to the extent of that country; in other words, they define it. As soon as a traveler steps beyond the limit of that country, he is at once in another realm, has become identified with a quite different set of conditions and circumstances—he is, in fact, in a country that has a different definition from that of Switzerland. In the same way, when some one asks what truth is, or nickel steel, or a grand piano, or humanism, or art, or rotation of crops, or a rocking chair, or the forward pass, you attempt, in your reply, to set bounds to the thing in question, to restrict it, to fence it off, to state the line beyond which if it goes it ceases to be one thing and becomes another. It is by no means always an easy task to find this line. Many a child has come to grief in his attempts to keep safely within the limits of truth and yet be close up to the realm of desirable falsehood. Likewise many witnesses in court have been beguiled or browbeaten into crossing the line without knowing that they were getting into the country of the enemy. But though the quest for the line may be difficult, a true definition must set off the thing being defined from other things, must set bounds to it, enclose it within its limits, show its extent. The Process of DefinitionThe logical process of defining consists of two steps: first, stating the class or group to which the object of definition belongs, as to say that Switzerland is a country, the forward pass is a strategic device in football, humanism is a philosophy of personal development; and second, pointing out the difference between the object of definition and other members of the class, showing how it is distinguished from them. Since the purpose of definition is to limit the thing defined, the practical value of the first step is at once apparent. If, in total ignorance, a resident of India asks you, "What is ragtime?" the most helpful thing in the world that you can do for him is to cleave away with one stroke everything else in the world but music—absolute exclusion of all other human interests—and place ragtime in that comparatively narrow field. That is the first thing of great help. However many qualities you may attribute to ragtime,—whether you call it inspiring, invigorating, pleasing, detestable, or what not,—you are making at best only slow progress toward defining, really limiting ragtime. The number of pleasing things, for example, is so endless, and the things are so diverse in character that your listener is almost as ignorant after such a quality has been attributed as he was before. But the moment that you limit ragtime to music you scatter untold clouds of doubt and place the inquirer in the comfortable position of having a fairly large working knowledge. What is left for the inquirer to do is merely to distinguish ragtime from other kinds of music—after all, a rather simple task. Likewise in any definition, such as that of rotation of crops, the first necessity is to place the subject in its proper field, in this case agriculture; the grand piano in the class of musical instruments; the rocking chair in the class of furniture. Now sometimes the task of discovering to what class your What is a clearing-house? The Supreme Court of the State of Pennsylvania has defined it thus: "It is an ingenious device to But we must go farther than this, for though originally designed as a labor-saving device, the clearing-house has expanded far beyond those limits, until it has become a medium for united action among the banks in ways that did not exist even in the imaginations of those who were instrumental in its inception. A clearing-house, therefore, may be defined as a device to simplify and facilitate the daily exchange of items and settlements of balances among the banks, and a medium for united action upon all questions affecting their mutual welfare. The second step in the logical process of definition is to show how the subject for definition differs from other members of its class. Once I am told that the piano is a musical instrument I must next learn wherein it differs from the violin, the kettle-drum, and the English horn. The surname Tomlinson partly defines a person as a member of the Tomlinson family, but the definition is not complete until the name is modified and the person is distinguished by George or Charles or whatever name may belong to him. A skillful shepherd knows not only his flocks but also the characteristics of the different members of the flocks, so that he can say, "This sheep is the one in X flock that is always getting into the clover." Here "X flock" is the class, and the quality of abusing the clover is the distinguishing individual tag. Since the desire in this part of the process of defining is to set individuals apart, no mention will be made of qualities For convenience in keeping the list of differentia reasonably small, to avoid unwieldiness of definition, care must be exercised in choosing the class. When a class which itself contains other possible classes is chosen, a long list of differentia will be necessary. It is well, therefore, to choose a relatively small class to begin with. For example, if I put the piano into the large class of musical instruments, I shall then be under the necessity of amassing sufficient differentia to set it apart from wind instruments whether of brass or wood, from instruments of percussion, and from other stringed instruments that do not use metal strings. If I restrict the class to stringed instruments, I thereby exclude the differentia of both wind instruments and instruments of percussion. If I further restrict the class, at the beginning, to instruments with metal strings, I need then to employ only such differentia as will set it off, perhaps, from instruments that do not have a sounding board for their metal strings. Such restriction of the class is advisable chiefly for purposes of economy of effort in discovering the differentia, and is usually accomplished, in expression, by preceding the class name with a limiting adjective or by using a limiting phrase. This adjective or this phrase is likely to be the expression of differentia among smaller classes, the differentia among individual members being stated more at length later in the definition. The process of definition will be complete, then, when the subject of definition has been assigned to a class, which for convenience should be relatively small, and the qualities that distinguish the subject from other members of the class have been found. The Two Main Classes of DefinitionsTwo main classes of definition exist: first, the rigidly logical, scientific kind such as is found in dictionaries, textbooks, and other such writings which are not concerned with emotional values; and second, the less rigid, more expanded, more informal kind which aims to please as well as to instruct, and which is found in essays and all forms of writing with a strong human appeal. The two kinds are alike in the presence of both genus and differentia; they differ chiefly in the presence, in the less formal, of the qualities of pleasingness and stimulation as opposed to the quality, in the formal, of scientific impersonality, cold intellectuality. For example, the Standard Dictionary defines a correspondent as "one who communicates by means of letters; specifically one who sends regular communications from a distant place to a newspaper or a business house." The author of the volume entitled Famous War Correspondents The war correspondent is a newspaper man assigned to cover a campaign. He goes into the field with the army, expecting to send his reports from that witching region known as "the front." He is a special correspondent commissioned to collect intelligence and transmit it from the camp and the battle ground. A non-combatant, he mingles freely with men whose business it is to fight. He may be ten thousand miles from the home office, but he finds competition as keen as ever it is in Fleet Street or Newspaper Row. He is engaged in the most dramatic department of a profession whose infinite variety is equalled only by its fascination. If he becomes a professional rather than an occasional correspondent, wandering will be his business and adventure his daily fare. Mr. A. G. Hales is of the opinion that the newspaper man who is chosen as a war correspondent has won the Victoria Cross of journalism. For the making of a first-rate war correspondent there are required all the qualifications of a capable reporter in any other branch of the profession, and others besides. Perhaps it is true that the regular hack work of the ordinary newspaper man is the best training for the scribe of war. The men who had reported fires and train wrecks in American cities proved themselves able to describe vigorously and clearly the campaign in Cuba. William Howard Russell had been doing a great variety of descriptive writing before he was sent to the Crimea. The prime requisites for a satisfactory war correspondent are those fundamental to success in any kind of newspaper work, the ability to see straight, to write vividly and accurately, and to get a story on the wire. Occasionally a brilliant workman appears from nowhere, the happy possessor of an almost uncanny intuition of movements and purposes. Such a man was Archibald Forbes. But Forbes, no less than the average special, had to have the physical capacity to march with the private soldier, to ride a hundred miles at a clip at top speed over rough country, to sleep in the open, to stand the heat of the desert and the cold of the mountain height, to endure hunger and thirst and all the deprivations of a hard campaign. Every correspondent at times must keep going until his strength is utterly spent. He must have the tenacity which does not yield to exhaustion until his messages are written and on the way to his paper. When the soldier ceases fighting, the correspondent's work is only begun. He needs also to have a degree of familiarity with the affairs of the present and the history of the past which will secure him the respect of the officers with whom he may associate. Along with the courage of the scout he should possess the suavity and tact of the diplomat, for he will have to get along with men of all types, and occasionally, indeed, his own influence may overlap into the field of international diplomacy. British correspondents, having covered many wars, small and great, since 1870, usually are acquainted with several languages, and often have acquired a knowledge of the technicalities of military science. Of the two kinds of definition—formal and informal—you will more often have occasion to write the second. You must guard against the danger, in such writing, of allowing General CautionsFor the sake of clearness and general effectiveness a few cautions need to be made. In the first place, be sure to exclude everything from your definition that does not properly belong in it. For example, if you define the aeroplane as a machine that journeys through the air under its own power, you include dirigible balloons, which are not aeroplanes. You must introduce both the characteristics of being heavier than air and of having a plane or planes before your definition can stand. You will make this exclusion by choosing both class and differentia with the greatest care. In the second place, include everything that does properly belong in the definition. If you define a bridge as a roadway over a stream, either resting on piers or hanging on cables strung over towers, you exclude pontoon bridges certainly, and all bridges across dry chasms, if not other kinds. Not until you include all varieties of things crossed and all the methods of support and the various materials used will your definition be sound and complete. This does not mean that you will have to make an endless list of all possible forms, but that you will make a comprehensive statement which will allow of being distributed over all the different forms and kinds of bridges. In the third place, use simple and familiar diction. Since the first purpose of a definition is to explain, one that is obscure or difficult makes confusion worse confounded. The famous—or notorious—definition which Dr. Johnson made of so simple a thing as network, "anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between the intersections," is worse than useless because it positively throws dust upon a comparatively easy matter to perceive—unless the reader take time out for meditation. Remember that the Gettysburg Address and many of Shakespeare's sonnets are largely in words of one syllable. And then do not be afraid that you will be understood; the fire is always presumably somewhat more uncomfortable than the frying-pan. In the fourth place, do not use the term that you are defining, or any derivative of it. When college freshmen, in mortal combat with a quiz question, define a description as something that describes, they use words that profit them nothing. That a cow is a cow is fairly obvious. The temptation to make this mistake, which, in the intellectual world, occupies the relative space of the saucy old advice, "Chase yourself round the block!" occurs usually when a long definition is being written, in which the writer forgets to keep the horizon clear, and finally falls into the formula x is x. To avoid yielding to such temptation, you will do well, after a definition is complete, to phrase it in a single sentence which shall include both differentia and genus, and in which you can easily discover the evil formula x is x. Bardolph, in Shakespeare's King Henry IV, yields to the temptation—for which we are glad as to humor but not made wise as to meaning—when Shallow puts him to the test: Shallow: Better accommodated! it is good; yea, indeed, it is: good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable. Accommodated! it comes of accommodo: very good; a good phrase. Bardolph: Pardon me, sir; I have heard the word. Phrase call In the fifth place, be sure that you define, and do not merely "talk about" the subject. Any amount of however interesting comment that fails to accomplish the two necessities of definition, statement of the genus and the differentia, is futile; it is not definition. This temptation, like the former one, will be overcome if you take the trouble to phrase the actual material of your definition in one sentence that really includes both genus and differentia. As a minor suggestion, do not begin your definition with the words, "X is when" or "X is where," unless you are defining either a unit of time or a place—and even then you will do well to avoid these too frequently used phrases. Finally, do not make your definition too mechanical, too much lacking in real life. Thinking of how you must deal with genus and differentia, you are liable to be overwhelmed with the grim duty of being logical, and to forget that you should also be human, that people read definitions, as other kinds of writing, in the double hope of information and pleasure. No real antagonism exists between logic of the strictest kind and pleasurable presentation, as is proved by the examples quoted during the course of this chapter and at the end. While you remember your subject, remember also your reader; then you will be unlikely to make a dull definition. Methods of DefiningYou may use various methods of defining. Sometimes you will choose only one, and sometimes you will combine. a. The Method of IllustrationOne of the most useful, natural, and easy methods is that of giving an example or illustration of the thing that is being defined. The great usefulness of this method lies in the stimulating quality that the concrete example always has. If you wish to define an abstract quality, for example, such as patriotism, or honor, or generosity, you will often find advantage, for the first, in calling up the figure of Washington, of Lincoln, of Cromwell; in citing, for the second, the case of some man who, after bankruptcy, has set himself to pay all his former debts, or of Regulus who, though he had the chance not to keep his promise to return to Carthage as prisoner, yet bade Rome farewell and returned to unspeakable torture; in presenting, for the third, a specific set of conditions, such as possession of only one dime, which is then shared with another person who is even less fortunate, or showing a known person, like Sir Philip Sidney, who, though at death's door on the field of battle, urged that the exquisite joy of cold water be given to a comrade who was even more terribly in need. In every one of these cases the quality under definition is presented in an easily grasped, concrete form that has the great advantage of human interest, of stimulating the reader's thought. That using such a method is natural is apparent as soon as we remember that we think largely in concrete forms, specific cases. That it is rather easy is obvious, because so many instances are always at hand to be used. The danger in this method is that the example chosen will Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory something of long ago. I had somehow escaped into the country and on a long walk began to feel mid-day hunger. The wayside brambles were fruiting; I picked and ate, and ate on, until I had come within sight of an inn where I might have made a good meal. But my hunger was satisfied; I had no need of anything more, and, as I thought of it, a strange feeling of surprise, a sort of bewilderment, came upon me. What! Could it be that I had eaten, and eaten sufficiently, without paying? It struck me as an extraordinary thing. At that time, my ceaseless preoccupation was how to obtain money to keep myself alive. Many a day I had suffered hunger because I durst not spend the few coins I possessed; the food I could buy was in any case unsatisfactory, unvaried. But here nature had given me a feast, which seemed delicious, and I had eaten all I wanted. The wonder held me for a long time, and to this day I can recall it, understand it. I think there could be no better illustration of what it means to be poor in a great town. In business, as a rule, a man must make what he gets and something over into the bargain. I have known a man to be employed by a firm of underwriters to interview would-be insurers. His sole business was to talk to them and decide whether to insure or not. Salary, £4000 a year. This meant that the loss of his judgment would have cost his employers more than £4000 a year. Other men have an eye for contracts or whatnot, or are born captains of industry, in which cases they go into business on their own account, and make ten, twenty, or two hundred per cent where you or I would lose five. Or, to turn back a moment from the giants to the minnows, take the case of a woman with the knack of cutting out a dress. She gets six guineas a week instead of eighteen shillings. Or she has perhaps a ladylike air and a figure on which a mantle looks well. For these she can get several guineas a week merely by standing in a show-room letting mantles be tried on her before customers. All these people are renters of ability; and their ability is inseparable from them and dies with them. The excess of their gains over those of an ordinary person with the same capital and education is the "rent" of the exceptional "fertility." But observe, if the able person makes £100,000, and leaves that to his son, who, being but an ordinary gentleman, can get only from two and a half to four per cent on it, that revenue is pure interest on capital and in no sense whatever rent of ability. By "amortization" is meant the method of paying a debt by regular semi-annual or annual installments. To illustrate: Suppose a farmer gives a mortgage on his farm of $1000, with interest at 5 per cent. In addition to the interest, he agrees to pay 2 per cent a year on the principal. This makes a total of 7 per cent a year, or a payment of $70, which may be paid in two semi-annual installments of $35 each. The first year's interest and payment on the principal are taken as the amount to be paid annually. But For the sake of simplicity, let us suppose that payments are made annually. When the next time of payment comes round, the farmer pays his $70. Since his debt is less, the interest the second year amounts to $49 instead of $50, and therefore the payment on the principal is $21 instead of $20 as it was the first year. In the second year the debt is reduced to $959. On the return of the third time of payment the farmer pays another $70, of which amount $47.95 represents the interest and $22.05 the payment on the principal. This reduces the farmer's mortgage debt to $936.95. Now, this system of payment and method of reducing the debt continues until the mortgage has been lifted by a gradual process. Thus, while the annual payments are always the same, the amount of interest is always decreasing and the amount of the payments on the debt is always increasing. Consequently, the mortgage is paid off in ten to forty years according to the rate of payment on the loan that the debtor himself elects to pay when the contract is made. This is the simple principle of amortization, and it is recognized in Europe as the safest, easiest, and best method of reducing land-mortgage indebtedness hitherto conceived and put into practice. If, then, you have a subject that is abstract and perhaps difficult to understand in abstract explanation; if you wish, to stimulate your readers and make their reading pleasant; if, for any reason, you wish to write informally, then you may well decide to employ the useful, natural, and easy method of definition by illustration. b. The Method of Comparison or ContrastA second method, closely akin to that by illustration, is the method of defining by comparison or contrast. The Lord Cromer describes a responsible statesman in a democracy as very much in the position of a man in a boat off the mouth of a tidal river. He long has to strive against wind and current until finally a favorable conjunction of weather and tide forms a wave upon which he rides safely into the harbor. There is an essential truth in this which no man attempting to play the part of leader in a democracy can forget except at his peril. Government by public opinion is bound to get a sufficient body of public opinion on its side. But withal it is manifestly the duty of a leader to help form a just public opinion. He must dare to be temporarily unpopular, if only in that way he can get a temporary hearing for the truths which the people ought to have presented to them. He is to execute the popular will, but he is not to neglect shaping it. It is his duty to be properly receptive, but his main striving ought to be that virtue should go out of him to touch and quicken the masses of his citizens. If their minds and imaginations are played upon The quack novel is a thing which looks like a book, and which is compounded, advertised, and marketed in precisely the same fashion as Castoria, Wine of Cardui, Alcola, Mrs. Summers's free-to-you-my-sister Harmless Headache Remedy, Viavi Tablettes, and other patent medicines, harmful and harmless. As the patent medicine is made of perfectly well-known drugs, so the quack novel of course contains perfectly familiar elements, and like the medicine, it comes wrapped in superlative testimonials from those who say they have swallowed it to their advantage. Instead of "After twenty years of bed-ridden agony, one bottle of your Fosforo cured every ache and completely restored my manhood," we have "The secret of his powers is the same God-given secret that inspired Shakespeare and upheld Dickens." This, from the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, accompanies a quack novel by Mr. Harold Bell Wright, of whom the Portland, Oregon, Journal remarks, "It is this almost clairvoyant power of reading the human soul that has made Mr. Wright's books among the most remarkable works of the present age." Similar to that aroma of piety and charity which accompanies the quack medicines, an equally perceptible odor of sanctity is wafted to us with Mr. Wright; and just as imitators will make their boxes and bottles to resemble those of an already successful trade article, so are Mr. Wright's volumes given that red cloth and gold lettering which we have come to associate with the bindings of Mr. Winston Churchill's very popular and agreeable novels. Lastly—like the quack medicines—the quack novel is (mostly) harmful; not always because it is poisonous (though this occurs), but because it pretends to be literature and is taken for literature by the millions who swallow it year after For complete truth you need to present both resemblance and difference. This necessity is apparent as soon as we remember that the differentia are of vital importance, that we understand the subject only when we see how it differs from other members of the same class. When these differences are obvious, of course they need no mention. But in defining wit and humor, for example, or immorality and unconventionality, we must know not only the parallelisms but also the divergencies. The best method of procedure is to discover in each of the subjects compared the vital things, the heart without which it could not exist, and then to observe how these work out in the particulars of the subject. In defining State and Nation in the following selection Mr. Russell takes care to show both resemblances and differences. Nation is not to be defined by affinities of language or a common historical origin, though these things often help to produce a nation. Switzerland is a nation, in spite of diversities of race, religion, and language. England and Scotland now form one nation, though they did not do so at the time of our Civil War. This is shown by Cromwell's saying, in the height of the conflict, that he would rather be subject to the dominion of the royalists than to that of the Scotch. Great Britain was one state before it was one nation; on the other hand, Germany was one nation before it was one state. What constitutes a nation is a sentiment and an instinct—a sentiment of similarity and an instinct of belonging to the same group or herd. The instinct is an extension of the instinct which constitutes a flock of sheep, or any other group of gregarious animals. The sentiment which goes with this is like a milder and more extended form of family feeling. When Such feelings make it easy to organize a nation into a state. It is not difficult, as a rule, to acquiesce in the orders of a national government. We feel that it is our government, and that its decrees are more or less the same as those which we should have given if we ourselves had been the governors. There is an instinctive, and usually unconscious, sense of a common purpose animating the members of a nation. This becomes especially vivid when there is a war or a danger of war. Any one who, at such a time, stands out against the orders of his government feels an inner conflict quite different from any that he would feel in standing out against the orders of a foreign government, in whose power he might happen to find himself. If he stands out, he does so with a more or less conscious hope that his government may in time come to think as he does; whereas, in standing out against a foreign government, no such hope is necessary. This group instinct, however it may have arisen, is what constitutes a nation, and what makes it important that the boundaries of nations should also be the boundaries of states. c. The Method of DivisionA third method, often used, and similar in its general form to analysis, divides the subject into its various headings, the sum of which must equal the whole. This method differs from analysis, perhaps, in that it treats the subject throughout as a unit rather than as a congregation of parts. This method may be used to define a subject like mathematics, in stating that it is the pure science which includes arithmetic, algebra, geometry, etc., or to define a quality like patriotism, by enumerating the qualities that patriotism has. These qualities may be, also, the uses to which the subject can be put, as in defining a tool or a machine. The One danger from this method is lack of completeness; great practical value attaches here to the caution to be sure that the definition includes all that properly belongs under it. Another danger is in the temptation to "talk about" the subject without actually defining it, merely saying some pleasant things and then ceasing. The caution against this danger in general must be remembered. Properly used, this method, though it is sometimes rather formal, should result in great clearness through completeness of definition. The following celebrated definition of a "classic" is a good example of compact definition by this method, and the definition of "moral atmosphere" of a more leisurely, informal breaking-up. A classic is an author who has enriched the human mind, who has really added to its treasure, who has got it to take a step further; who has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or penetrated to some eternal passion, in that heart of man where it seemed as though all were known and explored, who has produced his thought, or his observation, or his invention, under some form, no matter what, so it be large, great, acute, and reasonable, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the style of everybody,—in a style that is at once new and antique, and is the contemporary of all ages. The moral atmosphere of the office was ideal. I mean more in the extended and not alone in our specific English sense, though in the latter it was even perhaps more marked. There was not only no temporizing, compromising, compounding with candor, in either But I also mean by moral atmosphere the peace, the serenity, the gentleness, the self-respect, the feeling of character, that pervaded the office. We seemed, to my sense, so recently filled with the reactions of Park Row phenomena, "to lie at anchor in the stream of Time," as Carlyle said of Oxford—which, actually, we were very far from doing; there was never any doubt of the Nation's being what is now called a "live wire," especially among those who took hold of it unwarily—as now and then some one did. Mr. Garrison shared the first editorial room with me. Mr. Godkin had the back office. The publication offices were in front, occupied by the amiable Mr. St. John and his staff, which included a gentle and aristocratic colored bookkeeper who resembled an East Indian philosopher—plainly a Garrisonian protÉgÉ. The silence I especially remember as delightful, and I never felt from the first the slightest constraint; Mr. Garrison had the courtesy that goes with active considerateness. The quiet was broken only by the occasional interchange of conversation between us, or by the hearty laugh of Mr. Godkin, whose laugh would have been the most noteworthy thing about him if he had not had so many other noteworthy characteristics; or by a visit now and then from Arthur Sedgwick, in my time not regularly "on" the paper, who always brought the larger world in with him (the office was perhaps a little Of course, there were visitors, contributors and candid friends, but mainly we worked in almost Quakerish tranquillity five days in the week during my incumbency. d. The Method of RepetitionA fourth method, which may be used in connection with any other, consists in repeating the definition over and over in different words, from different points of view, driving home by accumulated emphasis. The value of this method lies in its feeling of absolute sureness in the reader's mind: once completed, the definition seems quite settled, quite tamped down, quite clinched. It is a difficult method to employ, for the writer is in great danger of saying exactly the same thing again and again, forgetting to assume different points of view. From such a definition tediousness is of course the result. The subjects treated by this method are likely to be abstract matters upon which light is shed from various angles, as if one poured spot lights from all sides upon some object which remains the same but which delivers up all its phases. Emerson often used this method, as in the following example where both the method of repetition and that of comparison are used: The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.... It is the counteraction of the centripetal and the centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement. "That which is was made by God," says Conservatism. "He is leaving that, he is entering this other," enjoins Innovation. There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, And so, while we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists, that each e. The Method of EliminationTwo methods, which are perhaps less frequently found, but which are none the less useful, remain to be mentioned. The first is the method of elimination, that is, the method of defining a thing by telling what it is not, by eliminating all things with which it might become confused. This method is of great value in defining an idea which is often considered to mean what it actually does not. By shutting out the erroneous interpretations, one by one, the errors are finally disposed of. This method is most effective when not only are the wrong interpretations excluded, but the correct idea, interpretation, is positively stated at some point. If this is not done there lingers in the reader's mind a taint of suspicion that either the author did not know exactly the correct meaning, or that the subject is really too difficult to bear real definition. And with a reader who does not think clearly in original ways a positive statement is almost essential lest he be unable to tell what the subject really is, after all, being unable to supply the residue after the process of elimination has been completed. Following this method Mr. Cross defines Socialism by showing that it is not anarchy, is not single tax, is not communism, and is not other systems with which it is often confused. The result is to leave socialism standing out by itself with clearness. In the following definition of college spirit the author has followed the method of elimination to clear away the haze that in many minds surrounds the subject: College spirit is like ancestry: we are all supposed to have it, but few of us know intimately what it is. The freshman in whose heart beats desire to show loyalty, the graduate whose pulse stirs as the In the first place, college spirit is not mere voice culture. The man who yells until his face is purple and his throat is a candidate for the rest cure is not necessarily displaying college spirit—though he may possess it. Yelling is not excluded; it is merely denied the first place. For, to parody Shakespeare, a man can yell and yell and still be a college slacker. Cheering, indiscriminate noise making, even singing the college song with gusto at athletic games—none of these will stamp a man as necessarily loyal. Nor will participation in athletic sports or in "college activities" of other natures be sufficient to declare a man, for the participation may be of a purely selfish nature. The man who makes a record in the sprints chiefly for his own glory, or the man who edits the college paper because by so doing he can "make a good thing out of it" for himself, is not possessed of true college spirit, for college spirit demands more than mere selfishness. In the same way, taking part in celebrations, marching down Main Street with a flag fluttering round his ears, a sunflower in his buttonhole, an inane grin on his face, a swagger in his gait, and a determination to tell the whole world that his "dear old Alma Mater" is "the finest little college in the world"—this, too, is without avail, though it is not necessarily opposed to college spirit. For this exhibition, also, is largely selfish. Likewise, becoming a "grind," removing one's self from the human fellowship that college ought to furnish in its most delightful form, and becoming determined to prepare for a successful business career without regard to the warm flow of human emotion through the heart—this is not college spirit. All these harmless things are excluded because they are primarily selfish, and college spirit is primarily opposed to selfishness. True college spirit is found in the man whose heart has warmed to the love of his college, whose eyes have caught the vision of the ideals that the college possesses, whose brain has thought over and understood these ideals until they have become very fibre of his being. This man will yell not for the selfish pleasure of wallowing in sentimentality, but for the solid glory of his college; will run f. The Method of Showing Origin, Cause, EffectThe 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. 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 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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
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. Define:
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. 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.
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 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 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 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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