To say that etymology is a science--is to use this word in its laxest and improper sense. But our language, except, at least, in poetry, has dropped the word "lore"--the _lehre_ of the Germans, the _logos_ of the Greek. Either we should have retained the word and ventured on _Root-lore_, _verse-lore_, etc., or have adopted the Greek as a single word as well as a word in combination. All novelties appear or are rather felt as ridiculous in language; but, if it had been once adopted, it would have been no stranger to have said that etymo_logy_ is a _logy_ which perishes from a plethora of probability, than that the _art_ of war is an _art_ apparently for the destruction and subjugation of particular states, but really for the lessening of bloodshed and the preservation of the liberties of mankind. Art and Science are both too much appropriated--our language wants terms of comprehensive generality, implying the kind, not the degree or species, as in that good and necessary word _sensuous_, which we have likewise dropped, opposed to sensual, sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt this difficulty, and found the necessity of having one word for the supposed cause, another for the effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to heat; and psychology has still more need of the reformation.
[Sidenote: SENTIMENT, AN ANTIDOTE TO CASUISTRY]
The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, the great mother of the swarm, seems to me their tenet concerning Faith and Works, placing the former wholly in the rectitude, nay, in the rightness of intellectual conviction, and the latter in the definite and, most often, the material action, and, consequently, the assertion of the dividuous nature and self-existence of works. Hence the doctrine of damnation out of the Church of Rome--of the one visible Church--of the absolute efficiency _in se_ of all the Sacraments and the absolute merit of ceremonial observances. Consider the incalculable advantage of chiefly dwelling on the virtues of the heart, of habits of feeling and harmonious action, the music of the adjusted string at the impulse of the breeze, and, on the other hand, the evils of books concerning particular actions, minute cases of conscience, hair-splitting directions and decisions, O how illustrated by the detestable character of most of the Roman Catholic casuists! No actions should be distinctly described but such as manifestly tend to awaken the heart to efficient feeling, whether of fear or of love--actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep it full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and make it play in its abundance, shining in that purity in which, at once, the purity and the light is each the cause of the other, the light purifying, and the purified receiving and reflecting the light, sending it off to others; not, like the polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but by transmission through itself.