brotherly, womanly have, to our apprehension, a greater depth and intimacy of significance than paternal, fraternal, feminine, and so in many other like cases; yet the part of this which is due to the perceived connection of the former with father, brother, woman is probably less than is usually imagined; the difference of the two classes consists much more in their character as Anglo-Saxon and as Latin respectively, and in the more formal and learned use of the latter class, as is usual with the Latin part of our language, when compared with the other. How independent of all etymological aid is our conventional sense of the meaning of the words we familiarly use may be shown by a great variety of facts in our language. It is convenient to have the various conjugational and declensional parts of our verbs and nouns agree in form as in sense; where we say I love, to say also he loves, we love, they loved, having loved; where we say man, to say also man's, men, men's; yet we say I am, he is, we are, they were, having been, and I, my, we, our, she and her, go and went, think and thought, and so on, without any sense whatever of hesitation or difficulty. So, on the other hand, it gives us no manner of trouble to separate words which ought, according to the usual analogies of the language, to stand in a near relation of meaning together; however close may be their correspondence of form, it does not disturb the independent act of association by which we bind together each separate sign and its own conventional idea: take as instances home and homely, scarce and scarcely, direct and directly, lust and lusty, naught and naughty, clerk and clergy, a forge and forgery, candid and candidate, hospital and hospitality, idiom and idiocy, light, alight, and delight, guard and regard, approach and reproach, hold, behold, and beholden—and it would be easy to gather an indefinite list of such words. They furnish, indeed, only another illustration of that power of the mind over its instruments which appears in the facility and directness wherewith, as has been already pointed out, we select from among the various and often very diverse meanings of a single word—such as kind, like, become, court, head—that one which the circumstances and the connection require. They help us to apprehend the
