Now the supreme importance of abstract or general terms lies in the fact that they are the words with which we guide our lives, mark out our goals and direct our effort. It is therefore urgently necessary that they should stand for very precise ideas, and that as the current coinage of speech they should mean the same things to all men of the same group, body, or nation. [p13] As opposed to the effort of the Middle Ages, however, the effort of this Age, or the Muddle Age, seems to be directed towards turning every nation into a Europe--into a unit, that is to say, without unity. And this lack of unity is nowhere more acute and more apparent than in the realm of abstract or general terms. People of the same nation, nowadays, no longer speak the same language. They no longer mean the same things, or convey the same ideas, when they speak of Happiness, Beauty, Order, Right, Freedom, Liberty, Justice, etc. The frame has gone. The common culture has been replaced by a congeries of pseudo-cultures, all in active conflict. The consequence is that the all-important words of this class have fallen out of place in the design of life; they have no unifying whole in which they can find a stable position, they are at a loose end, so to speak, and they can be used not as intelligent missives, but only as missiles between isolated groups and parties that are doomed to eternal conflict. A word at a loose end, however, is a word devoid of definite associations and therefore of meaning. Can a word devoid of meaning be used as a missile? Certainly it can, provided that it be given, despite its loss of an intellectual appeal, sufficient motive power to provoke an emotion. But of this anon. There can be no doubt that we have reached a condition in modern Europe, in which each nation is, as it were, a complex of nations--a complex in which the majority of the most important words (the abstract [p14] and general terms) not only mean different things to different groups and coteries, but also convey no precise meaning whatsoever to anybody. This, however, constitutes a state of complete confusion, and therefore a very grave danger. Just as one cannot help appearing stupid when one is trying and failing to understand a foreign tongue, one really is stupid when one cannot understand one’s own tongue. If stupidity seems to be increasing--and there surely cannot be much doubt concerning at least this form of “Progress,”--it is due chiefly to men’s growing incapacity to understand their mother tongue. Abstract and general terms are no longer comprehensible even to the most literate; to the illiterate they are simply fireworks, flags or flagstones. Now this would be all very well if it ended in stupidity. But that is not the final bourne of the present confusion of language. The final bourne is something much more serious, much more disastrous. It is revolution.