Here is one advantage
of acquaintance with other languages besides our own, and of the
institution that will follow, if we have learned those other to any
profit, of such comparisons, namely, that we thus become aware that
names are not, and least of all the names in any one language, co-
extensive with things (and by 'things' I mean subjects as well as
objects of thought, whatever one can _think_ about), that innumerable
things and aspects of things exist, which, though capable of being
resumed and connoted in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and
unregistered; and thus, vast as may be the world of names, that the
world of realities, and of realities which are nameable, is vaster
still. Such discoveries the Romans made, when they sought to transplant
the moral philosophy of Greece to an Italian soil. They discovered that
many of its terms had no equivalents with them; which equivalents
thereupon they proceeded to devise for themselves, appealing for this
to the latent capabilities of their own tongue. For example, the Greek
schools had a word, and one playing no unimportant part in some of
their philosophical systems, to express 'apathy' or the absence of all
passion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a
corresponding word, Cicero invented 'indolentia,' as that 'if I may so
speak' with which he paves the way to his first introduction of it,
sufficiently declares. [Footnote: _Fin_. ii. 4; and for 'qualitas' see
_Acad_. i. 6.] Sometimes, indeed, such a skilful mint-master of words,
such a subtle watcher and weigher of their force as was Cicero,
[Footnote: Ille verborum vigilantissimus appensor ac mensor, as
Augustine happily terms him.
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