TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of the book. Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book. HISTORY IN ENGLISH WORDS HISTORY IN ENGLISH WORDS BY OWEN BARFIELD [Illustration: colophon] METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON _First Published in 1926_ PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN CONTENTS PART I THE ENGLISH NATION CHAPTER PAGE I. PHILOLOGY AND THE ARYANS 3 II. THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE 20 III. ENGLAND BEFORE THE REFORMATION 35 IV. MODERN ENGLAND 50 PART II THE WESTERN OUTLOOK V. MYTH 71 VI. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 85 VII. DEVOTION 107 VIII. EXPERIMENT 128 IX. PERSONALITY AND REASON 145 X. MECHANISM 167 XI. IMAGINATION 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY 205 INDEX 209 PART I THE ENGLISH NATION CHAPTER I PHILOLOGY AND THE ARYANS _Electric._ _Quality._ _Garden._ _Mead._ _Timber._ If somebody showed us a document which he said was an unpublished letter of Dr. Johnson’s, and on reading it through we came across the word “telephone”, we should be fairly justified in sending him about his business. The fact that there was no such thing as a telephone until many years after Johnson’s death would leave no doubt whatever in our minds that the letter was not written by him. If we cared to go farther, we could say with equal certainty that the letter was written since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the telephone was invented. Now suppose that there had been nothing about telephones in the letter, but that it had contained an account of a thunder-storm. If in describing the stillness just before the storm broke the writer had said that “the atmosphere was electric”, we could still be fairly positive that he was not Dr. Johnson. But this time it would not be because the _thing_ of which the letter spoke had no existence in Johnson’s day. No doubt the heavens during a storm a hundred and fifty years ago were exactly as highly charged with electricity as they are to-day; but if we look up the word _electric_ in the _Oxford Dictionary_, we find that in Johnson’s time it simply was not used in that way. Thus, in his own dictionary it is defined as: A property in some bodies, whereby when rubbed so as to grow warm, they draw little bits of paper, or such-like substances, to them.