|
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fuck
|
|
|
suck
|
me
|
|
|
... |
|
|
andrew@benicetobears.com
|
the man. fuck you. fuck off. fuck that noise. fuck it all. etcetera etcetera etcetera ad nausem.
|
980819
|
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... |
|
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lisa
|
shit up
|
980901
|
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... |
|
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jeff
|
fuck this goddamned hole in my head. emptiness, pain, and loneliness are all that i feel. can you blame me? fuck is an expression of total hopelessness - the feeling that the world conspires against you, robs you of any life you may have once had. fuck - is there any other word?
|
980905
|
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... |
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emma
|
my favorite word
|
980914
|
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... |
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francesca
|
it is never tired or weak or black or white
|
981023
|
|
... |
|
|
fuck you very much :)
|
a truly fully functional word. that's so fucking funny. man, this is pretty fucked up right here. i'm fucked if i don't get that paper in. wow, you fucked her? i'm so fucking tired. fuck you. stop fucking around. fuck, i forgot my password. fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!
|
990121
|
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... |
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adam
|
she keeps fucking up my life
|
990211
|
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... |
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jen
|
everything is fucked up
fuck fuck fuck
no one gives a flying fuck
|
990218
|
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... |
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katherine
|
everything. especially latin.
|
990228
|
|
... |
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jacob
|
is a naughty word.
|
990301
|
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... |
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Chris
|
a duck
|
990307
|
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... |
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Owen Ty Kahle
|
There are two ways to destroy something:
1) Never use it.
2) Use it so much it loses all meaning.
|
990309
|
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... |
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|
angsty-artist
|
is a very versatile word.
|
990607
|
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... |
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uncle aussie
|
Fuckledy-uppedy
|
990622
|
|
... |
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Chas
|
Don't fuck with the finite, either...
|
990705
|
|
... |
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|
Sphinxy
|
Somebody's got some issues. Ok, they're problems. Straight up. Some major therapy, fucked in the head, crazier than a loon problems. They need help. Help them....fucking HELP THEM! Before they get Columbine on our ass.
|
990817
|
|
... |
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Ali
|
Such a strong word always seems so powerful. Fuck you.
|
990903
|
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... |
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jessica
|
fuck compounds: dumbfuck. mindfuck.
|
990922
|
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... |
|
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the Rock
|
know your damn role!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
you little jabroni candy ass
|
990928
|
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... |
|
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mathias
|
overused
meaningless
sign of stupidity
mature much?
|
991006
|
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... |
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Drennan
|
I hate that word but I use it a lot, (especially during party political broadcasts by the conservative party).
|
991010
|
|
... |
|
|
motherfucker
|
Fuck my ass
|
991104
|
|
... |
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Kali
|
oh baby! fuck me! Yes! Yes! Yes!
|
991104
|
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... |
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lokkust
|
it just makes sense. (also) i enjoyed using it often as a child because it made me feel special.
|
991107
|
|
... |
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|
vincent m artman
|
fuck.
a way to pleasure
a way to pain
a way to make kids
a way to make money
a way to score
a way to score a hit
fuck.
orgasm.
|
991109
|
|
... |
|
|
hstain
|
fuck me over
|
991112
|
|
... |
|
|
Me
|
WHO GIVES A FUCK!
|
991113
|
|
... |
|
|
NeonNinja
|
Fuck a duck!
|
991113
|
|
... |
|
|
paul
|
ass
|
991121
|
|
... |
|
|
|sCaRReD*disTrOyeD|
|
People don't use the word fuck in front of eachother because it is "vulgar". Well, society is fucked up. Who the fuck said we can't say fuck? Fuck is the best word in the English language, and if it's in the English language, why not use it?
|
991127
|
|
... |
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Zero
|
fuck you, fuck me, fuck em, fuck them before they fuck us; oh sweetie, cum here and fuck my brains out, I love to fuck you, baby; you fuck me so good; so what the fuck is your fucking problem, could you shut your fucking mouth for 5 fucking minutes.....what a fucking work, I fucking love it, and oh yeah, I love to fuck too. fuck you very much :-Þ
|
991202
|
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... |
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valis
|
yes ... remember when you were a kid and this word had black magic powers?
|
991208
|
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... |
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|
Pavlovs Cat
|
is kcuf backwards.
|
991210
|
|
... |
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Douglas
|
it all.
www.i-work-with-fucking-idiots.com
fucking bitch
|
991210
|
|
... |
|
|
E-Kris
|
www.fuck.co.uk - The world's #1 fucking fuck site!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! FUCK!
Fuck you, fuck off, FUCK! It Slipped!
In 10 years we will have Internet fucking and porn sites will become I-whorehouses. You will be able to have cybersex at work, with your spouse or significant other, WITHOUT getting fired! Well, you might get reprimanded...
Any girls wanna fuck?
|
991230
|
|
... |
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king kai
|
i want - i wish - she won't - she leaves
i fucked up again!
|
991230
|
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... |
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coolM
|
seems to be a word lots talk about.
|
000105
|
|
... |
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|
meli
|
means sex, means violence. It is anger, pain, awe and pleasure rolled into one. Fuck is an old, old word, but what it says is even older.
Anything can be fucked, or fucked with.
If someone is mumbling incoherently and you can't discern any other word, "fuck" is the one you will be able to pick out.
Fuck sticks out like a sore thumb, like an erection,
like a
gun.
|
000105
|
|
... |
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Zanth
|
Can be used many time in one sentence and still make sense..example
Shit fuck this stupid fucked up fucking moronic fucker and its fucking loud mouthed fucked pansy arsed fucker of a fuck! FUCK! FUCK! FUCKING FUCK! FUCK!oh well fucked it...
|
000106
|
|
... |
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koti
|
just fuck it all
|
000108
|
|
... |
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Rob
|
fuck people who hate you
for being yourself
they're all assholes anyway
|
000113
|
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... |
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deb
|
hey, rob, that was highschool
for me
the very reason i graduated
a full year early
i hate people
sometimes
}:(
|
000113
|
|
... |
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lotusflower
|
something to do on a sunday.
|
000212
|
|
... |
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Fucked
|
a word to describe life, living, death, and everything in between.
|
000220
|
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... |
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DEATH
|
I AM THE ESSANCE OF ALL THAT WAS AND WILL BE,I AM BEFORE BEFORE,I AM ETERNITY AND AFTER DEATH THERE IS ONLY ETERNITY,I AM
|
000222
|
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... |
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briana.
|
why am i so ready to fuck myself over every time i think of you?
|
000225
|
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... |
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dizzy
|
have you been following me?
|
000302
|
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... |
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elimeny
|
No, you know what? Just shut up. Fuck you, fuck everyone, fuck all of you! I don't need this kind of shit, I can't even tell what's wrong anymore, so don't ask me, jsut know that everything feels wrong. This, this, this you and me thing, it's just wrong. You are not within me, and I can never cross that border of no return until you are within me. I don't want to survive, I want to fucking live! Let me live! I want fields, and rivers and trees, and you want rooftops. DOn't you see that? I can't be pissed at you, you've done nothing wrong. I'm pissed at reality for smacking me so hard. Fuck, I need a cigarette.
|
000303
|
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... |
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BoofPixie
|
it always makes me happy to say it to someone in anger while they walk away from me, and they pretend they didn't hear it.
|
000308
|
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... |
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miniver
|
Fuck me. Hard.
And, eh...everything they said, too. That sounds like fun.
|
000311
|
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... |
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Daniel
|
For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge...fuck is perhaps the world's most frequently used acronymn...across the globe.
|
000322
|
|
... |
|
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lufwalnu
|
It's not an acronym, and what it means is not always unlawful.
|
000322
|
|
... |
|
|
Daniel
|
is many things to many different people...fuck fuck fuck...fuck you. fuck me. fuck this shit. fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK fuck fuck
|
000322
|
|
... |
|
|
rufus
|
sudden, statick, precise a word; a tenderly violent deep-then...-deep-then...it's the only true connection between two people
|
000330
|
|
... |
|
|
birdmad
|
...me running backwards.
...-in A" (is that by Mozart?)
...me gently with a chainsaw
...you if you think that it's all that i was after
|
000416
|
|
... |
|
|
marina
|
fuck you if you think that is all that it was
|
000508
|
|
... |
|
|
magan cason
|
i like it says i
not as much as i do says me
uping and downing
til screams fill the house
i
you
me
who knows
but it sure is fun
|
000508
|
|
... |
|
|
blather
|
NATURE (the art whereby God
hath made and governs the
world) is by the art of man, as
in many other things, so in this
also imitated, that it can make
an artificial animal. For seeing
life is but a motion of limbs, the
beginning whereof is in some
principal part within, why may
we not say that all automata
(engines that move themselves
by springs and wheels as doth a
watch) have an artificial life?
For what is the heart, but a
spring; and the nerves, but so
many strings; and the joints,
but so many wheels, giving
motion to the whole body, such
as was intended by the
Artificer? Art goes yet further,
imitating that rational and
most excellent work of Nature,
man. For by art is created that
great LEVIATHAN called a
COMMONWEALTH, or
STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS),
which is but an artificial man,
though of greater stature and
strength than the natural, for
whose protection and defence it
was intended; and in which the
sovereignty is an artificial soul,
as giving life and motion to the
whole body; the magistrates
and other officers of judicature
and execution, artificial joints;
reward and punishment (by
which fastened to the seat of
the sovereignty, every joint and
member is moved to perform
his duty) are the nerves, that
do the same in the body
natural; the wealth and riches
of all the particular members
are the strength; salus populi
(the people's safety) its
business; counsellors, by whom
all things needful for it to know
are suggested unto it, are the
memory; equity and laws, an
artificial reason and will;
concord, health; sedition,
sickness; and civil war, death.
Lastly, the pacts and
covenants, by which the parts
of this body politic were at first
made, set together, and united,
resemble that fiat, or the Let us
make man, pronounced by God
in the Creation.
To describe the nature of this
artificial man, I will consider
First, the matter thereof,
and the artificer; both
which is man.
Secondly, how, and by
what covenants it is
made; what are the rights
and just power or
authority of a sovereign;
and what it is that
preserveth and dissolveth
it.
Thirdly, what is a
Christian Commonwealth.
Lastly, what is the
Kingdom of Darkness.
Concerning the first, there is a
saying much usurped of late,
that wisdom is acquired, not by
reading of books, but of men.
Consequently whereunto, those
persons, that for the most part
can give no other proof of being
wise, take great delight to show
what they think they have read
in men, by uncharitable
censures of one another behind
their backs. But there is
another saying not of late
understood, by which they
might learn truly to read one
another, if they would take the
pains; and that is, Nosce
teipsum, Read thyself: which
was not meant, as it is now
used, to countenance either the
barbarous state of men in
power towards their inferiors,
or to encourage men of low
degree to a saucy behaviour
towards their betters; but to
teach us that for the similitude
of the thoughts and passions of
one man, to the thoughts and
passions of another, whosoever
looketh into himself and
considereth what he doth when
he does think, opine, reason,
hope, fear, etc., and upon what
grounds; he shall thereby read
and know what are the
thoughts and passions of all
other men upon the like
occasions. I say the similitude
of passions, which are the same
in all men,- desire, fear, hope,
etc.; not the similitude of the
objects of the passions, which
are the things desired, feared,
hoped, etc.: for these the
constitution individual, and
particular education, do so vary,
and they are so easy to be kept
from our knowledge, that the
characters of man's heart,
blotted and confounded as they
are with dissembling, lying,
counterfeiting, and erroneous
doctrines, are legible only to
him that searcheth hearts. And
though by men's actions we do
discover their design
sometimes; yet to do it without
comparing them with our own,
and distinguishing all
circumstances by which the
case may come to be altered, is
to decipher without a key, and
be for the most part deceived,
by too much trust or by too
much diffidence, as he that
reads is himself a good or evil
man.
But let one man read another
by his actions never so
perfectly, it serves him only
with his acquaintance, which
are but few. He that is to
govern a whole nation must
read in himself, not this, or that
particular man; but mankind:
which though it be hard to do,
harder than to learn any
language or science; yet, when I
shall have set down my own
reading orderly and
perspicuously, the pains left
another will be only to consider
if he also find not the same in
himself. For this kind of
doctrine admitteth no other
demonstration.
THE FIRST PART
OF MAN
CHAPTER I
OF SENSE
CONCERNING the thoughts of
man, I will consider them first
singly, and afterwards in train
or dependence upon one
another. Singly, they are every
one a representation or
appearance of some quality, or
other accident of a body
without us, which is commonly
called an object. Which object
worketh on the eyes, ears, and
other parts of man's body, and
by diversity of working
produceth diversity of
appearances.
The original of them all is that
which we call sense, (for there
is no conception in a man's
mind which hath not at first,
totally or by parts, been
begotten upon the organs of
sense). The rest are derived
from that original.
To know the natural cause of
sense is not very necessary to
the business now in hand; and I
have elsewhere written of the
same at large. Nevertheless, to
fill each part of my present
method, I will briefly deliver
the same in this place.
The cause of sense is the
external body, or object, which
presseth the organ proper to
each sense, either immediately,
as in the taste and touch; or
mediately, as in seeing,
hearing, and smelling: which
pressure, by the mediation of
nerves and other strings and
membranes of the body,
continued inwards to the brain
and heart, causeth there a
resistance, or counter-pressure,
or endeavour of the heart to
deliver itself: which endeavour,
because outward, seemeth to be
some matter without. And this
seeming, or fancy, is that which
men call sense; and consisteth,
as to the eye, in a light, or
colour figured; to the ear, in a
sound; to the nostril, in an
odour; to the tongue and palate,
in a savour; and to the rest of
the body, in heat, cold,
hardness, softness, and such
other qualities as we discern by
feeling. All which qualities
called sensible are in the object
that causeth them but so many
several motions of the matter,
by which it presseth our organs
diversely. Neither in us that are
pressed are they anything else
but diverse motions (for motion
produceth nothing but motion).
But their appearance to us is
fancy, the same waking that
dreaming. And as pressing,
rubbing, or striking the eye
makes us fancy a light, and
pressing the ear produceth a
din; so do the bodies also we
see, or hear, produce the same
by their strong, though
unobserved action. For if those
colours and sounds were in the
bodies or objects that cause
them, they could not be severed
from them, as by glasses and in
echoes by reflection we see they
are: where we know the thing
we see is in one place; the
appearance, in another. And
though at some certain
distance the real and very
object seem invested with the
fancy it begets in us; yet still
the object is one thing, the
image or fancy is another. So
that sense in all cases is
nothing else but original fancy
caused (as I have said) by the
pressure that is, by the motion
of external things upon our
eyes, ears, and other organs,
thereunto ordained.
But the philosophy schools,
through all the universities of
Christendom, grounded upon
certain texts of Aristotle, teach
another doctrine; and say, for
the cause of vision, that the
thing seen sendeth forth on
every side a visible species, (in
English) a visible show,
apparition, or aspect, or a being
seen; the receiving whereof into
the eye is seeing. And for the
cause of hearing, that the thing
heard sendeth forth an audible
species, that is, an audible
aspect, or audible being seen;
which, entering at the ear,
maketh hearing. Nay, for the
cause of understanding also,
they say the thing understood
sendeth forth an intelligible
species, that is, an intelligible
being seen; which, coming into
the understanding, makes us
understand. I say not this, as
disapproving the use of
universities: but because I am
to speak hereafter of their office
in a Commonwealth, I must let
you see on all occasions by the
way what things would be
amended in them; amongst
which the frequency of
insignificant speech is one.
CHAPTER II
OF IMAGINATION
THAT when a thing lies still,
unless somewhat else stir it, it
will lie still for ever, is a truth
that no man doubts of. But that
when a thing is in motion, it
will eternally be in motion,
unless somewhat else stay it,
though the reason be the same
(namely, that nothing can
change itself), is not so easily
assented to. For men measure,
not only other men, but all
other things, by themselves:
and because they find
themselves subject after
motion to pain and lassitude,
think everything else grows
weary of motion, and seeks
repose of its own accord; little
considering whether it be not
some other motion wherein
that desire of rest they find in
themselves consisteth. From
hence it is that the schools say,
heavy bodies fall downwards
out of an appetite to rest, and to
conserve their nature in that
place which is most proper for
them; ascribing appetite, and
knowledge of what is good for
their conservation (which is
more than man has), to things
inanimate, absurdly.
When a body is once in motion,
it moveth (unless something
else hinder it) eternally; and
whatsoever hindreth it, cannot
in an instant, but in time, and
by degrees, quite extinguish it:
and as we see in the water,
though the wind cease, the
waves give not over rolling for a
long time after; so also it
happeneth in that motion
which is made in the internal
parts of a man, then, when he
sees, dreams, etc. For after the
object is removed, or the eye
shut, we still retain an image of
the thing seen, though more
obscure than when we see it.
And this is it the Latins call
imagination, from the image
made in seeing, and apply the
same, though improperly, to all
the other senses. But the
Greeks call it fancy, which
signifies appearance, and is as
proper to one sense as to
another. Imagination,
therefore, is nothing but
decaying sense; and is found in
men and many other living
creatures, as well sleeping as
waking.
The decay of sense in men
waking is not the decay of the
motion made in sense, but an
obscuring of it, in such manner
as the light of the sun
obscureth the light of the stars;
which stars do no less exercise
their virtue by which they are
visible in the day than in the
night. But because amongst
many strokes which our eyes,
ears, and other organs receive
from external bodies, the
predominant only is sensible;
therefore the light of the sun
being predominant, we are not
affected with the action of the
stars. And any object being
removed from our eyes, though
the impression it made in us
remain, yet other objects more
present succeeding, and
working on us, the imagination
of the past is obscured and
made weak, as the voice of a
man is in the noise of the day.
From whence it followeth that
the longer the time is, after the
sight or sense of any object, the
weaker is the imagination. For
the continual change of man's
body destroys in time the parts
which in sense were moved: so
that distance of time, and of
place, hath one and the same
effect in us. For as at a great
distance of place that which we
look at appears dim, and
without distinction of the
smaller parts, and as voices
grow weak and inarticulate: so
also after great distance of time
our imagination of the past is
weak; and we lose, for example,
of cities we have seen, many
particular streets; and of
actions, many particular
circumstances. This decaying
sense, when we would express
the thing itself (I mean fancy
itself), we call imagination, as I
said before. But when we would
express the decay, and signify
that the sense is fading, old,
and past, it is called memory.
So that imagination and
memory are but one thing,
which for diverse
considerations hath diverse
names.
Much memory, or memory of
many things, is called
experience. Again, imagination
being only of those things
which have been formerly
perceived by sense, either all at
once, or by parts at several
times; the former (which is the
imagining the whole object, as
it was presented to the sense)
is simple imagination, as when
one imagineth a man, or horse,
which he hath seen before. The
other is compounded, when
from the sight of a man at one
time, and of a horse at another,
we conceive in our mind a
centaur. So when a man
compoundeth the image of his
own person with the image of
the actions of another man, as
when a man imagines himself a
Hercules or an Alexander
(which happeneth often to them
that are much taken with
reading of romances), it is a
compound imagination, and
properly but a fiction of the
mind. There be also other
imaginations that rise in men,
though waking, from the great
impression made in sense: as
from gazing upon the sun, the
impression leaves an image of
the sun before our eyes a long
time after; and from being long
and vehemently attent upon
geometrical figures, a man shall
in the dark, though awake,
have the images of lines and
angles before his eyes; which
kind of fancy hath no particular
name, as being a thing that
doth not commonly fall into
men's discourse.
The imaginations of them that
sleep are those we call dreams.
And these also (as all other
imaginations) have been before,
either totally or by parcels, in
the sense. And because in
sense, the brain and nerves,
which are the necessary organs
of sense, are so benumbed in
sleep as not easily to be moved
by the action of external
objects, there can happen in
sleep no imagination, and
therefore no dream, but what
proceeds from the agitation of
the inward parts of man's body;
which inward parts, for the
connexion they have with the
brain and other organs, when
they be distempered do keep
the same in motion; whereby
the imaginations there
formerly made, appear as if a
man were waking; saving that
the organs of sense being now
benumbed, so as there is no
new object which can master
and obscure them with a more
vigorous impression, a dream
must needs be more clear, in
this silence of sense, than are
our waking thoughts. And
hence it cometh to pass that it
is a hard matter, and by many
thought impossible, to
distinguish exactly between
sense and dreaming. For my
part, when I consider that in
dreams I do not often nor
constantly think of the same
persons, places, objects, and
actions that I do waking, nor
remember so long a train of
coherent thoughts dreaming as
at other times; and because
waking I often observe the
absurdity of dreams, but never
dream of the absurdities of my
waking thoughts, I am well
satisfied that, being awake, I
know I dream not; though when
I dream, I think myself awake.
And seeing dreams are caused
by the distemper of some of the
inward parts of the body,
diverse distempers must needs
cause different dreams. And
hence it is that lying cold
breedeth dreams of fear, and
raiseth the thought and image
of some fearful object, the
motion from the brain to the
inner parts, and from the inner
parts to the brain being
reciprocal; and that as anger
causeth heat in some parts of
the body when we are awake, so
when we sleep the overheating
of the same parts causeth
anger, and raiseth up in the
brain the imagination of an
enemy. In the same manner, as
natural kindness when we are
awake causeth desire, and
desire makes heat in certain
other parts of the body; so also
too much heat in those parts,
while we sleep, raiseth in the
brain an imagination of some
kindness shown. In sum, our
dreams are the reverse of our
waking imaginations; the
motion when we are awake
beginning at one end, and when
we dream, at another.
The most difficult discerning of
a man's dream from his waking
thoughts is, then, when by
some accident we observe not
that we have slept: which is
easy to happen to a man full of
fearful thoughts; and whose
conscience is much troubled;
and that sleepeth without the
circumstances of going to bed,
or putting off his clothes, as one
that noddeth in a chair. For he
that taketh pains, and
industriously lays himself to
sleep, in case any uncouth and
exorbitant fancy come unto
him, cannot easily think it
other than a dream. We read of
Marcus Brutus (one that had
his life given him by Julius
Caesar, and was also his
favorite, and notwithstanding
murdered him), how at Philippi,
the night before he gave battle
to Augustus Caesar, he saw a
fearful apparition, which is
commonly related by historians
as a vision, but, considering the
circumstances, one may easily
judge to have been but a short
dream. For sitting in his tent,
pensive and troubled with the
horror of his rash act, it was not
hard for him, slumbering in the
cold, to dream of that which
most affrighted him; which
fear, as by degrees it made him
wake, so also it must needs
make the apparition by degrees
to vanish: and having no
assurance that he slept, he
could have no cause to think it
a dream, or anything but a
vision. And this is no very rare
accident: for even they that be
perfectly awake, if they be
timorous and superstitious,
possessed with fearful tales,
and alone in the dark, are
subject to the like fancies, and
believe they see spirits and
dead men's ghosts walking in
churchyards; whereas it is
either their fancy only, or else
the knavery of such persons as
make use of such superstitious
fear to pass disguised in the
night to places they would not
be known to haunt.
From this ignorance of how to
distinguish dreams, and other
strong fancies, from vision and
sense, did arise the greatest
part of the religion of the
Gentiles in time past, that
worshipped satyrs, fauns,
nymphs, and the like; and
nowadays the opinion that rude
people have of fairies, ghosts,
and goblins, and of the power of
witches. For, as for witches, I
think not that their witchcraft
is any real power, but yet that
they are justly punished for the
false belief they have that they
can do such mischief, joined
with their purpose to do it if
they can, their trade being
nearer to a new religion than to
a craft or science. And for
fairies, and walking ghosts, the
opinion of them has, I think,
been on purpose either taught,
or not confuted, to keep in
credit the use of exorcism, of
crosses, of holy water, and other
such inventions of ghostly men.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt
but God can make unnatural
apparitions: but that He does it
so often as men need to fear
such things more than they
fear the stay, or change, of the
course of Nature, which he also
can stay, and change, is no
point of Christian faith. But
evil men, under pretext that
God can do anything, are so
bold as to say anything when it
serves their turn, though they
think it untrue; it is the part of
a wise man to believe them no
further than right reason
makes that which they say
appear credible. If this
superstitious fear of spirits
were taken away, and with it
prognostics from dreams, false
prophecies, and many other
things depending thereon, by
which crafty ambitious persons
abuse the simple people, men
would be would be much more
fitted than they are for civil
obedience.
And this ought to be the work
of the schools, but they rather
nourish such doctrine. For (not
knowing what imagination, or
the senses are) what they
receive, they teach: some saying
that imaginations rise of
themselves, and have no cause;
others that they rise most
commonly from the will; and
that good thoughts are blown
(inspired) into a man by God,
and evil thoughts, by the Devil;
or that good thoughts are
poured (infused) into a man by
God, and evil ones by the Devil.
Some say the senses receive the
species of things, and deliver
them to the common sense; and
the common sense delivers
them over to the fancy, and the
fancy to the memory, and the
memory to the judgement, like
handing of things from one to
another, with many words
making nothing understood.
The imagination that is raised
in man (or any other creature
endued with the faculty of
imagining) by words, or other
voluntary signs, is that we
generally call understanding,
and is common to man and
beast. For a dog by custom will
understand the call or the
rating of his master; and so will
many other beasts. That
understanding which is
peculiar to man is the
understanding not only his will,
but his conceptions and
thoughts, by the sequel and
contexture of the names of
things into affirmations,
negations, and other forms of
speech: and of this kind of
understanding I shall speak
hereafter.
CHAPTER III
OF THE CONSEQUENCE
OR TRAIN OF
IMAGINATIONS
BY CONSEQUENCE, or train
of thoughts, I understand that
succession of one thought to
another which is called, to
distinguish it from discourse in
words, mental discourse.
When a man thinketh on
anything whatsoever, his next
thought after is not altogether
so casual as it seems to be. Not
every thought to every thought
succeeds indifferently. But as
we have no imagination,
whereof we have not formerly
had sense, in whole or in parts;
so we have no transition from
one imagination to another,
whereof we never had the like
before in our senses. The reason
whereof is this. All fancies are
motions within us, relics of
those made in the sense; and
those motions that
immediately succeeded one
another in the sense continue
also together after sense: in so
much as the former coming
again to take place and be
predominant, the latter
followeth, by coherence of the
matter moved, in such manner
as water upon a plain table is
drawn which way any one part
of it is guided by the finger. But
because in sense, to one and the
same thing perceived,
sometimes one thing,
sometimes another, succeedeth,
it comes to pass in time that in
the imagining of anything,
there is no certainty what we
shall imagine next; only this is
certain, it shall be something
that succeeded the same before,
at one time or another.
This train of thoughts, or
mental discourse, is of two
sorts. The first is unguided,
without design, and inconstant;
wherein there is no passionate
thought to govern and direct
those that follow to itself as the
end and scope of some desire, or
other passion; in which case the
thoughts are said to wander,
and seem impertinent one to
another, as in a dream. Such
are commonly the thoughts of
men that are not only without
company, but also without care
of anything; though even then
their thoughts are as busy as at
other times, but without
harmony; as the sound which a
lute out of tune would yield to
any man; or in tune, to one that
could not play. And yet in this
wild ranging of the mind, a
man may oft-times perceive
the way of it, and the
dependence of one thought
upon another. For in a discourse
of our present civil war, what
could seem more impertinent
than to ask, as one did, what
was the value of a Roman
penny? Yet the coherence to me
was manifest enough. For the
thought of the war introduced
the thought of the delivering up
the King to his enemies; the
thought of that brought in the
thought of the delivering up of
Christ; and that again the
thought of the 30 pence, which
was the price of that treason:
and thence easily followed that
malicious question; and all this
in a moment of time, for
thought is quick.
The second is more constant, as
being regulated by some desire
and design. For the impression
made by such things as we
desire, or fear, is strong and
permanent, or (if it cease for a
time) of quick return: so strong
it is sometimes as to hinder
and break our sleep. From
desire ariseth the thought of
some means we have seen
produce the like of that which
we aim at; and from the
thought of that, the thought of
means to that mean; and so
continually, till we come to
some beginning within our own
power. And because the end, by
the greatness of the impression,
comes often to mind, in case our
thoughts begin to wander they
are quickly again reduced into
the way: which, observed by one
of the seven wise men, made
him give men this precept,
which is now worn out: respice
finem; that is to say, in all your
actions, look often upon what
you would have, as the thing
that directs all your thoughts
in the way to attain it.
The train of regulated thoughts
is of two kinds: one, when of an
effect imagined we seek the
causes or means that produce
it; and this is common to man
and beast. The other is, when
imagining anything
whatsoever, we seek all the
possible effects that can by it be
produced; that is to say, we
imagine what we can do with it
when we have it. Of which I
have not at any time seen any
sign, but in man only; for this is
a curiosity hardly incident to
the nature of any living
creature that has no other
passion but sensual, such as are
hunger, thirst, lust, and anger.
In sum, the discourse of the
mind, when it is governed by
design, is nothing but seeking,
or the faculty of invention,
which the Latins call sagacitas,
and solertia; a hunting out of
the causes of some effect,
present or past; or of the effects
of some present or past cause.
Sometimes a man seeks what
he hath lost; and from that
place, and time, wherein he
misses it, his mind runs back,
from place to place, and time to
time, to find where and when
he had it; that is to say, to find
some certain and limited time
and place in which to begin a
method of seeking. Again, from
thence, his thoughts run over
the same places and times to
find what action or other
occasion might make him lose
it. This we call remembrance, or
calling to mind: the Latins call
it reminiscentia, as it were a
re-conning of our former
actions.
Sometimes a man knows a
place determinate, within the
compass whereof he is to seek;
and then his thoughts run over
all the parts thereof in the
same manner as one would
sweep a room to find a jewel; or
as a spaniel ranges the field till
he find a scent; or as a man
should run over the alphabet to
start a rhyme.
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Sometimes a man desires to
know the event of an action;
and then he thinketh of some
like action past, and the events
thereof one after another,
supposing like events will
follow like actions. As he that
foresees what will become of a
criminal re-cons what he has
seen follow on the like crime
before, having this order of
thoughts; the crime, the officer,
the prison, the judge, and the
gallows. Which kind of
thoughts is called foresight,
and prudence, or providence,
and sometimes wisdom; though
such conjecture, through the
difficulty of observing all
circumstances, be very
fallacious. But this is certain:
by how much one man has more
experience of things past than
another; by so much also he is
more prudent, and his
expectations the seldomer fail
him. The present only has a
being in nature; things past
have a being in the memory
only; but things to come have
no being at all, the future being
but a fiction of the mind,
applying the sequels of actions
past to the actions that are
present; which with most
certainty is done by him that
has most experience, but not
with certainty enough. And
though it be called prudence
when the event answereth our
expectation; yet in its own
nature it is but presumption.
For the foresight of things to
come, which is providence,
belongs only to him by whose
will they are to come. From him
only, and supernaturally,
proceeds prophecy. The best
prophet naturally is the best
guesser; and the best guesser,
he that is most versed and
studied in the matters he
guesses at, for he hath most
signs to guess by.
A sign is the event antecedent
of the consequent; and
contrarily, the consequent of
the antecedent, when the like
consequences have been
observed before: and the oftener
they have been observed, the
less uncertain is the sign. And
therefore he that has most
experience in any kind of
business has most signs
whereby to guess at the future
time, and consequently is the
most prudent: and so much
more prudent than he that is
new in that kind of business, as
not to be equalled by any
advantage of natural and
extemporary wit, though
perhaps many young men think
the contrary.
Nevertheless, it is not prudence
that distinguisheth man from
beast. There be beasts that at a
year old observe more and
pursue that which is for their
good more prudently than a
child can do at ten.
As prudence is a presumption of
the future, contracted from the
experience of time past: so there
is a presumption of things past
taken from other things, not
future, but past also. For he
that hath seen by what courses
and degrees a flourishing state
hath first come into civil war,
and then to ruin; upon the sight
of the ruins of any other state
will guess the like war and the
like courses have been there
also. But this conjecture has
the same uncertainty almost
with the conjecture of the
future, both being grounded
only upon experience.
There is no other act of man's
mind, that I can remember,
naturally planted in him, so as
to need no other thing to the
exercise of it but to be born a
man, and live with the use of
his five senses. Those other
faculties, of which I shall speak
by and by, and which seem
proper to man only, are
acquired and increased by
study and industry, and of
most men learned by
instruction and discipline, and
proceed all from the invention
of words and speech. For
besides sense, and thoughts,
and the train of thoughts, the
mind of man has no other
motion; though by the help of
speech, and method, the same
faculties may be improved to
such a height as to distinguish
men from all other living
creatures.
Whatsoever we imagine is
finite. Therefore there is no idea
or conception of anything we
call infinite. No man can have
in his mind an image of infinite
magnitude; nor conceive
infinite swiftness, infinite time,
or infinite force, or infinite
power. When we say anything
is infinite, we signify only that
we are not able to conceive the
ends and bounds of the thing
named, having no conception of
the thing, but of our own
inability. And therefore the
name of God is used, not to
make us conceive Him (for He
is incomprehensible, and His
greatness and power are
unconceivable), but that we
may honour Him. Also because
whatsoever, as I said before, we
conceive has been perceived
first by sense, either all at once,
or by parts, a man can have no
thought representing anything
not subject to sense. No man
therefore can conceive
anything, but he must conceive
it in some place; and endued
with some determinate
magnitude; and which may be
divided into parts; nor that
anything is all in this place, and
all in another place at the same
time; nor that two or more
things can be in one and the
same place at once: for none of
these things ever have or can be
incident to sense, but are
absurd speeches, taken upon
credit, without any
signification at all, from
deceived philosophers and
deceived, or deceiving,
Schoolmen.
CHAPTER IV
OF SPEECH
THE INVENTION of printing,
though ingenious, compared
with the invention of letters is
no great matter. But who was
the first that found the use of
letters is not known. He that
first brought them into Greece,
men say, was Cadmus, the son
of Agenor, King of Phoenicia. A
profitable invention for
continuing the memory of time
past, and the conjunction of
mankind dispersed into so
many and distant regions of
the earth; and withal difficult,
as proceeding from a watchful
observation of the diverse
motions of the tongue, palate,
lips, and other organs of speech;
whereby to make as many
differences of characters to
remember them. But the most
noble and profitable invention
of all other was that of speech,
consisting of names or
appellations, and their
connexion; whereby men
register their thoughts, recall
them when they are past, and
also declare them one to
another for mutual utility and
conversation; without which
there had been amongst men
neither Commonwealth, nor
society, nor contract, nor peace,
no more than amongst lions,
bears, and wolves. The first
author of speech was God
himself, that instructed Adam
how to name such creatures as
He presented to his sight; for
the Scripture goeth no further
in this matter. But this was
sufficient to direct him to add
more names, as the experience
and use of the creatures should
give him occasion; and to join
them in such manner by
degrees as to make himself
understood; and so by
succession of time, so much
language might be gotten as he
had found use for, though not
so copious as an orator or
philosopher has need of. For I
do not find anything in the
Scripture out of which, directly
or by consequence, can be
gathered that Adam was
taught the names of all figures,
numbers, measures, colours,
sounds, fancies, relations; much
less the names of words and
speech, as general, special,
affirmative, negative,
interrogative, optative,
infinitive, all which are useful;
and least of all, of entity,
intentionality, quiddity, and
other insignificant words of the
school.
But all this language gotten,
and augmented by Adam and
his posterity, was again lost at
the tower of Babel, when by the
hand of God every man was
stricken for his rebellion with
an oblivion of his former
language. And being hereby
forced to disperse themselves
into several parts of the world,
it must needs be that the
diversity of tongues that now
is, proceeded by degrees from
them in such manner as need,
the mother of all inventions,
taught them, and in tract of
time grew everywhere more
copious.
The general use of speech is to
transfer our mental discourse
into verbal, or the train of our
thoughts into a train of words,
and that for two commodities;
whereof one is the registering of
the consequences of our
thoughts, which being apt to
slip out of our memory and put
us to a new labour, may again
be recalled by such words as
they were marked by. So that
the first use of names is to
serve for marks or notes of
remembrance. Another is when
many use the same words to
signify, by their connexion and
order one to another, what they
conceive or think of each
matter; and also what they
desire, fear, or have any other
passion for. And for this use
they are called signs. Special
uses of speech are these: first,
to register what by cogitation
we find to be the cause of
anything, present or past; and
what we find things present or
past may produce, or effect;
which, in sum, is acquiring of
arts. Secondly, to show to
others that knowledge which
we have attained; which is to
counsel and teach one another.
Thirdly, to make known to
others our wills and purposes
that we may have the mutual
help of one another. Fourthly, to
please and delight ourselves,
and others, by playing with our
words, for pleasure or
ornament, innocently.
To these uses, there are also
four correspondent abuses.
First, when men register their
thoughts wrong by the
inconstancy of the signification
of their words; by which they
register for their conceptions
that which they never
conceived, and so deceive
themselves. Secondly, when
they use words metaphorically;
that is, in other sense than that
they are ordained for, and
thereby deceive others. Thirdly,
when by words they declare
that to be their will which is
not. Fourthly, when they use
them to grieve one another: for
seeing nature hath armed
living creatures, some with
teeth, some with horns, and
some with hands, to grieve an
enemy, it is but an abuse of
speech to grieve him with the
tongue, unless it be one whom
we are obliged to govern; and
then it is not to grieve, but to
correct and amend.
The manner how speech
serveth to the remembrance of
the consequence of causes and
effects consisteth in the
imposing of names, and the
connexion of them.
Of names, some are proper, and
singular to one only thing; as
Peter, John, this man, this tree:
and some are common to many
things; as man, horse, tree;
every of which, though but one
name, is nevertheless the name
of diverse particular things; in
respect of all which together, it
is called a universal, there
being nothing in the world
universal but names; for the
things named are every one of
them individual and singular.
One universal name is imposed
on many things for their
similitude in some quality, or
other accident: and whereas a
proper name bringeth to mind
one thing only, universals recall
any one of those many.
And of names universal, some
are of more and some of less
extent, the larger
comprehending the less large;
and some again of equal extent,
comprehending each other
reciprocally. As for example, the
name body is of larger
signification than the word
man, and comprehendeth it;
and the names man and
rational are of equal extent,
comprehending mutually one
another. But here we must take
notice that by a name is not
always understood, as in
grammar, one only word, but
sometimes by circumlocution
many words together. For all
these words, He that in his
actions observeth the laws of
his country, make but one
name, equivalent to this one
word, just.
By this imposition of names,
some of larger, some of stricter
signification, we turn the
reckoning of the consequences
of things imagined in the mind
into a reckoning of the
consequences of appellations.
For example, a man that hath
no use of speech at all, (such as
is born and remains perfectly
deaf and dumb), if he set before
his eyes a triangle, and by it
two right angles (such as are
the corners of a square figure),
he may by meditation compare
and find that the three angles
of that triangle are equal to
those two right angles that
stand by it. But if another
triangle be shown him different
in shape from the former, he
cannot know without a new
labour whether the three angles
of that also be equal to the
same. But he that hath the use
of words, when he observes that
such equality was consequent,
not to the length of the sides,
nor to any other particular
thing in his triangle; but only to
this, that the sides were
straight, and the angles three,
and that that was all, for which
he named it a triangle; will
boldly conclude universally that
such equality of angles is in all
triangles whatsoever, and
register his invention in these
general terms: Every triangle
hath its three angles equal to
two right angles. And thus the
consequence found in one
particular comes to be
registered and remembered as
a universal rule; and discharges
our mental reckoning of time
and place, and delivers us from
all labour of the mind, saving
the first; and makes that which
was found true here, and now,
to be true in all times and
places.
But the use of words in
registering our thoughts is in
nothing so evident as in
numbering. A natural fool that
could never learn by heart the
order of numeral words, as one,
two, and three, may observe
every stroke of the clock, and
nod to it, or say one, one, one,
but can never know what hour
it strikes. And it seems there
was a time when those names
of number were not in use; and
men were fain to apply their
fingers of one or both hands to
those things they desired to
keep account of; and that
thence it proceeded that now
our numeral words are but ten,
in any nation, and in some but
five, and then they begin again.
And he that can tell ten, if he
recite them out of order, will
lose himself, and not know
when he has done: much less
will he be able to add, and
subtract, and perform all other
operations of arithmetic. So
that without words there is no
possibility of reckoning of
numbers; much less of
magnitudes, of swiftness, of
force, and other things, the
reckonings whereof are
necessary to the being or
well-being of mankind.
When two names are joined
together into a consequence, or
affirmation, as thus, A man is a
living creature; or thus, If he be
a man, he is a living creature; if
the latter name living creature
signify all that the former
name man signifieth, then the
affirmation, or consequence, is
true; otherwise false. For true
and false are attributes of
speech, not of things. And
where speech is not, there is
neither truth nor falsehood.
Error there may be, as when we
expect that which shall not be,
or suspect what has not been;
but in neither case can a man
be charged with untruth.
Seeing then that truth
consisteth in the right ordering
of names in our affirmations, a
man that seeketh precise truth
had need to remember what
every name he uses stands for,
and to place it accordingly; or
else he will find himself
entangled in words, as a bird in
lime twigs; the more he
struggles, the more belimed.
And therefore in geometry
(which is the only science that
it hath pleased God hitherto to
bestow on mankind), men begin
at settling the significations of
their words; which settling of
significations, they call
definitions, and place them in
the beginning of their
reckoning.
By this it appears how
necessary it is for any man that
aspires to true knowledge to
examine the definitions of
former authors; and either to
correct them, where they are
negligently set down, or to
make them himself. For the
errors of definitions multiply
themselves, according as the
reckoning proceeds, and lead
men into absurdities, which at
last they see, but cannot avoid,
without reckoning anew from
the beginning; in which lies the
foundation of their errors. From
whence it happens that they
which trust to books do as they
that cast up many little sums
into a greater, without
considering whether those little
sums were rightly cast up or
not; and at last finding the
error visible, and not
mistrusting their first grounds,
know not which way to clear
themselves, spend time in
fluttering over their books; as
birds that entering by the
chimney, and finding
themselves enclosed in a
chamber, flutter at the false
light of a glass window, for
want of wit to consider which
way they came in. So that in
the right definition of names
lies the first use of speech;
which is the acquisition of
science: and in wrong, or no
definitions, lies the first abuse;
from which proceed all false
and senseless tenets; which
make those men that take their
instruction from the authority
of books, and not from their
own meditation, to be as much
below the condition of ignorant
men as men endued with true
science are above it. For
between true science and
erroneous doctrines, ignorance
is in the middle. Natural sense
and imagination are not subject
to absurdity. Nature itself
cannot err: and as men abound
in copiousness of language; so
they become more wise, or more
mad, than ordinary. Nor is it
possible without letters for any
man to become either
excellently wise or (unless his
memory be hurt by disease, or
ill constitution of organs)
excellently foolish. For words
are wise men's counters; they
do but reckon by them: but they
are the money of fools, that
value them by the authority of
an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a
Thomas, or any other doctor
whatsoever, if but a man.
Subject to names is whatsoever
can enter into or be considered
in an account, and be added one
to another to make a sum, or
subtracted one from another
and leave a remainder. The
Latins called accounts of money
rationes, and accounting,
ratiocinatio: and that which we
in bills or books of account call
items, they called nomina; that
is, names: and thence it seems
to proceed that they extended
the word ratio to the faculty of
reckoning in all other things.
The Greeks have but one word,
logos, for both speech and
reason; not that they thought
there was no speech without
reason, but no reasoning
without speech; and the act of
reasoning they called syllogism;
which signifieth summing up of
the consequences of one saying
to another. And because the
same things may enter into
account for diverse accidents,
their names are (to show that
diversity) diversely wrested
and diversified. This diversity
of names may be reduced to
four general heads.
First, a thing may enter into
account for matter, or body; as
living, sensible, rational, hot,
cold, moved, quiet; with all
which names the word matter,
or body, is understood; all such
being names of matter.
Secondly, it may enter into
account, or be considered, for
some accident or quality which
we conceive to be in it; as for
being moved, for being so long,
for being hot, etc.; and then, of
the name of the thing itself, by
a little change or wresting, we
make a name for that accident
which we consider; and for
living put into the account life;
for moved, motion; for hot, heat;
for long, length, and the like:
and all such names are the
names of the accidents and
properties by which one matter
and body is distinguished from
another. These are called
names abstract, because
severed, not from matter, but
from the account of matter.
Thirdly, we bring into account
the properties of our own
bodies, whereby we make such
distinction: as when anything
is seen by us, we reckon not the
thing itself, but the sight, the
colour, the idea of it in the
fancy; and when anything is
heard, we reckon it not, but the
hearing or sound only, which is
our fancy or conception of it by
the ear: and such are names of
fancies.
Fourthly, we bring into account,
consider, and give names, to
names themselves, and to
speeches: for, general,
universal, special, equivocal, are
names of names. And
affirmation, interrogation,
commandment, narration,
syllogism, sermon, oration, and
many other such are names of
speeches. And this is all the
variety of names positive;
which are put to mark
somewhat which is in nature, or
may be feigned by the mind of
man, as bodies that are, or may
be conceived to be; or of bodies,
the properties that are, or may
be feigned to be; or words and
speech.
There be also other names,
called negative; which are notes
to signify that a word is not the
name of the thing in question;
as these words: nothing, no
man, infinite, indocible, three
want four, and the like; which
are nevertheless of use in
reckoning, or in correcting of
reckoning, and call to mind our
past cogitations, though they be
not names of anything; because
they make us refuse to admit of
names not rightly used.
All other names are but
insignificant sounds; and those
of two sorts. One, when they
are new, and yet their meaning
not explained by definition;
whereof there have been
abundance coined by Schoolmen
and puzzled philosophers.
Another, when men make a
name of two names, whose
significations are contradictory
and inconsistent; as this name,
an incorporeal body, or, which is
all one, an incorporeal
substance, and a great number
more. For whensoever any
affirmation is false, the two
names of which it is composed,
put together and made one,
signify nothing at all. For
example, if it be a false
affirmation to say a quadrangle
is round, the word round
quadrangle signifies nothing,
but is a mere sound. So likewise
if it be false to say that virtue
can be poured, or blown up and
down, the words inpoured
virtue, inblown virtue, are as
absurd and insignificant as a
round quadrangle. And
therefore you shall hardly meet
with a senseless and
insignificant word that is not
made up of some Latin or Greek
names. Frenchman seldom
hears our Saviour called by the
name of Parole, but by the
name of Verbe often; yet Verbe
and Parole differ no more but
that one is Latin, the other
French.
When a man, upon the hearing
of any speech, hath those
thoughts which the words of
that speech, and their
connexion, were ordained and
constituted to signify, then he
is said to understand it:
understanding being nothing
else but conception caused by
speech. And therefore if speech
be peculiar to man, as for ought
I know it is, then is
understanding peculiar to him
also. And therefore of absurd
and false affirmations, in case
they be universal, there can be
no understanding; though
many think they understand
then, when they do but repeat
the words softly, or con them in
their mind.
What kinds of speeches signify
the appetites, aversions, and
passions of man's mind, and of
their use and abuse, I shall
speak when I have spoken of
the passions.
The names of such things as
affect us, that is, which please
and displease us, because all
men be not alike affected with
the same thing, nor the same
man at all times, are in the
common discourses of men of
inconstant signification. For
seeing all names are imposed to
signify our conceptions, and all
our affections are but
conceptions; when we conceive
the same things differently, we
can hardly avoid different
naming of them. For though the
nature of that we conceive be
the same; yet the diversity of
our reception of it, in respect of
different constitutions of body
and prejudices of opinion, gives
everything a tincture of our
different passions. And
therefore in reasoning, a man
must take heed of words;
which, besides the signification
of what we imagine of their
nature, have a signification also
of the nature, disposition, and
interest of the speaker; such as
are the names of virtues and
vices: for one man calleth
wisdom what another calleth
fear; and one cruelty what
another justice; one prodigality
what another magnanimity;
and one gravity what another
stupidity, etc. And therefore
such names can never be true
grounds of any ratiocination.
No more can metaphors and
tropes of speech: but these are
less dangerous because they
profess their inconstancy,
which the other do not.
CHAPTER V
OF REASON AND SCIENCE
WHEN man reasoneth, he does
nothing else but conceive a sum
total, from addition of parcels;
or conceive a remainder, from
subtraction of one sum from
another: which, if it be done by
words, is conceiving of the
consequence of the names of all
the parts, to the name of the
whole; or from the names of the
whole and one part, to the name
of the other part. And though in
some things, as in numbers,
besides adding and
subtracting, men name other
operations, as multiplying and
dividing; yet they are the same:
for multiplication is but adding
together of things equal; and
division, but subtracting of one
thing, as often as we can. These
operations are not incident to
numbers only, but to all
manner of things that can be
added together, and taken one
out of another. For as
arithmeticians teach to add
and subtract in numbers, so the
geometricians teach the same
in lines, figures (solid and
superficial), angles, proportions,
times, degrees of swiftness,
force, power, and the like; the
logicians teach the same in
consequences of words, adding
together two names to make an
affirmation, and two
affirmations to make a
syllogism, and many syllogisms
to make a demonstration; and
from the sum, or conclusion of a
syllogism, they subtract one
proposition to find the other.
Writers of politics add together
pactions to find men's duties;
and lawyers, laws and facts to
find what is right and wrong in
the actions of private men. In
sum, in what matter soever
there is place for addition and
subtraction, there also is place
for reason; and where these
have no place, there reason has
nothing at all to do.
Out of all which we may define
(that is to say determine) what
that is which is meant by this
word reason when we reckon it
amongst the faculties of the
mind. For reason, in this sense,
is nothing but reckoning (that
is, adding and subtracting) of
the consequences of general
names agreed upon for the
marking and signifying of our
thoughts; I say marking them,
when we reckon by ourselves;
and signifying, when we
demonstrate or approve our
reckonings to other men.
And as in arithmetic
unpractised men must, and
professors themselves may
often, err, and cast up false; so
also in any other subject of
reasoning, the ablest, most
attentive, and most practised
men may deceive themselves,
and infer false conclusions; not
but that reason itself is always
right reason, as well as
arithmetic is a certain and
infallible art: but no one man's
reason, nor the reason of any
one number of men, makes the
certainty; no more than an
account is therefore well cast up
because a great many men have
unanimously approved it. And
therefore, as when there is a
controversy in an account, the
parties must by their own
accord set up for right reason
the reason of some arbitrator,
or judge, to whose sentence
they will both stand, or their
controversy must either come
to blows, or be undecided, for
want of a right reason
constituted by Nature; so is it
also in all debates of what kind
soever: and when men that
think themselves wiser than all
others clamour and demand
right reason for judge, yet seek
no more but that things should
be determined by no other
men's reason but their own, it is
as intolerable in the society of
men, as it is in play after trump
is turned to use for trump on
every occasion that suit
whereof they have most in their
hand. For they do nothing else,
that will have every of their
passions, as it comes to bear
sway in them, to be taken for
right reason, and that in their
own controversies: bewraying
their want of right reason by
the claim they lay to it.
The use and end of reason is
not the finding of the sum and
truth of one, or a few
consequences, remote from the
first definitions and settled
significations of names; but to
begin at these, and proceed
from one consequence to
another. For there can be no
certainty of the last conclusion
without a certainty of all those
affirmations and negations on
which it was grounded and
inferred. As when a master of a
family, in taking an account,
casteth up the sums of all the
bills of expense into one sum;
and not regarding how each bill
is summed up, by those that
give them in account, nor what
it is he pays for, he advantages
himself no more than if he
allowed the account in gross,
trusting to every of the
accountant's skill and honesty:
so also in reasoning of all other
things, he that takes up
conclusions on the trust of
authors, and doth not fetch
them from the first items in
every reckoning (which are the
significations of names settled
by definitions), loses his labour,
and does not know anything,
but only believeth.
When a man reckons without
the use of words, which may be
done in particular things, as
when upon the sight of any one
thing, we conjecture what was
likely to have preceded, or is
likely to follow upon it; if that
which he thought likely to
follow follows not, or that which
he thought likely to have
preceded it hath not preceded
it, this is called error; to which
even the most prudent men are
subject. But when we reason in
words of general signification,
and fall upon a general
inference which is false; though
it be commonly called error, it is
indeed an absurdity, or
senseless speech. For error is
but a deception, in presuming
that somewhat is past, or to
come; of which, though it were
not past, or not to come, yet
there was no impossibility
discoverable. But when we
make a general assertion,
unless it be a true one, the
possibility of it is inconceivable.
And words whereby we conceive
nothing but the sound are those
we call absurd, insignificant,
and nonsense. And therefore if
a man should talk to me of a
round quadrangle; or accidents
of bread in cheese; or
immaterial substances; or of a
free subject; a free will; or any
free but free from being
hindered by opposition; I should
not say he were in an error, but
that his words were without
meaning; that is to say, absurd.
I have said before, in the second
chapter, that a man did excel
all other animals in this
faculty, that when he conceived
anything whatsoever, he was
apt to enquire the consequences
of it, and what effects he could
do with it. And now I add this
other degree of the same
excellence, that he can by words
reduce the consequences he
finds to general rules, called
theorems, or aphorisms; that is,
he can reason, or reckon, not
only in number, but in all other
things whereof one may be
added unto or subtracted from
another.
But this privilege is allayed by
another; and that is by the
privilege of absurdity, to which
no living creature is subject, but
men only. And of men, those are
of all most subject to it that
profess philosophy. For it is
most true that Cicero saith of
them somewhere; that there
can be nothing so absurd but
may be found in the books of
philosophers. And the reason is
manifest. For there is not one of
them that begins his
ratiocination from the
definitions or explications of
the names they are to use;
which is a method that hath
been used only in geometry,
whose conclusions have thereby
been made indisputable.
1.The first cause of absurd
conclusions I ascribe to
the want of method; in
that they begin not their
ratiocination from
definitions; that is, from
settled significations of
their words: as if they
could cast account without
knowing the value of the
numeral words, one, two,
and three.
2.And whereas all bodies
enter into account upon
diverse considerations,
which I have mentioned in
the precedent chapter,
these considerations being
diversely named, diverse
absurdities proceed from
the confusion and unfit
connexion of their names
into assertions. And
therefore,
3.The second cause of
absurd assertions, I
ascribe to the giving of
names of bodies to
accidents; or of accidents
to bodies; as they do that
say, faith is infused, or
inspired; when nothing
can be poured, or breathed
into anything, but body;
and that extension is
body; that phantasms are
spirits, etc.
4.The third I ascribe to the
giving of the names of the
accidents of bodies
without us to the
accidents of our own
bodies; as they do that
say, the colour is in the
body; the sound is in the
air, etc.
5.The fourth, to the giving
of the names of bodies to
names, or speeches; as
they do that say that
there be things universal;
that a living creature is
genus, or a general thing,
etc.
6.The fifth, to the giving of
the names of accidents to
names and speeches; as
they do that say, the
nature of a thing is its
definition; a man's
command is his will; and
the like.
7.The sixth, to the use of
metaphors, tropes, and
other rhetorical figures,
instead of words proper.
For though it be lawful to
say, for example, in
common speech, the way
goeth, or leadeth hither, or
thither; the proverb says
this or that (whereas
ways cannot go, nor
proverbs speak); yet in
reckoning, and seeking of
truth, such speeches are
not to be admitted.
8.The seventh, to names
that signify nothing, but
are taken up and learned
by rote from the Schools,
as hypostatical,
transubstantiate,
consubstantiate,
eternal-now, and the like
canting of Schoolmen.
To him that can avoid these
things, it is not easy to fall into
any absurdity, unless it be by
the length of an account;
wherein he may perhaps forget
what went before. For all men
by nature reason alike, and
well, when they have good
principles. For who is so stupid
as both to mistake in geometry,
and also to persist in it, when
another detects his error to
him?
By this it appears that reason
is not, as sense and memory,
born with us; nor gotten by
experience only, as prudence is;
but attained by industry: first
in apt imposing of names; and
secondly by getting a good and
orderly method in proceeding
from the elements, which are
names, to assertions made by
connexion of one of them to
another; and so to syllogisms,
which are the connexions of one
assertion to another, till we
come to a knowledge of all the
consequences of names
appertaining to the subject in
hand; and that is it, men call
science. And whereas sense and
memory are but knowledge of
fact, which is a thing past and
irrevocable, science is the
knowledge of consequences, and
dependence of one fact upon
another; by which, out of that
we can presently do, we know
how to do something else when
we will, or the like, another
time: because when we see how
anything comes about, upon
what causes, and by what
manner; when the like causes
come into our power, we see
how to make it produce the like
effects.
Children therefore are not
endued with reason at all, till
they have attained the use of
speech, but are called
reasonable creatures for the
possibility apparent of having
the use of reason in time to
come. And the most part of
men, though they have the use
of reasoning a little way, as in
numbering to some degree; yet
it serves them to little use in
common life, in which they
govern themselves, some
better, some worse, according to
their differences of experience,
quickness of memory, and
inclinations to several ends; but
specially according to good or
evil fortune, and the errors of
one another. For as for science,
or certain rules of their actions,
they are so far from it that they
know not what it is. Geometry
they have thought conjuring:
but for other sciences, they who
have not been taught the
beginnings, and some progress
in them, that they may see how
they be acquired and generated,
are in this point like children
that, having no thought of
generation, are made believe by
the women that their brothers
and sisters are not born, but
found in the garden.
But yet they that have no
science are in better and nobler
condition with their natural
prudence than men that, by
misreasoning, or by trusting
them that reason wrong, fall
upon false and absurd general
rules. For ignorance of causes,
and of rules, does not set men
so far out of their way as
relying on false rules, and
taking for causes of what they
aspire to, those that are not so,
but rather causes of the
contrary.
To conclude, the light of
humane minds is perspicuous
words, but by exact definitions
first snuffed, and purged from
ambiguity; reason is the pace;
increase of science, the way;
and the benefit of mankind, the
end. And, on the contrary,
metaphors, and senseless and
ambiguous words are like ignes
fatui; and reasoning upon them
is wandering amongst
innumerable absurdities; and
their end, contention and
sedition, or contempt.
As much experience is
prudence, so is much science
sapience. For though we usually
have one name of wisdom for
them both; yet the Latins did
always distinguish between
prudentia and sapientia;
ascribing the former to
experience, the latter to science.
But to make their difference
appear more clearly, let us
suppose one man endued with
an excellent natural use and
dexterity in handling his arms;
and another to have added to
that dexterity an acquired
science of where he can offend,
or be offended by his adversary,
in every possible posture or
guard: the ability of the former
would be to the ability of the
latter, as prudence to sapience;
both useful, but the latter
infallible. But they that,
trusting only to the authority of
books, follow the blind blindly,
are like him that, trusting to
the false rules of a master of
fence, ventures presumptuously
upon an adversary that either
kills or disgraces him.
The signs of science are some
certain and infallible; some,
uncertain. Certain, when he
that pretendeth the science of
anything can teach the same;
that is to say, demonstrate the
truth thereof perspicuously to
another: uncertain, when only
some particular events answer
to his pretence, and upon many
occasions prove so as he says
they must. Signs of prudence
are all uncertain; because to
observe by experience, and
remember all circumstances
that may alter the success, is
impossible. But in any
business, whereof a man has
not infallible science to proceed
by, to forsake his own natural
judgment, and be guided by
general sentences read in
authors, and subject to many
exceptions, is a sign of folly, and
generally scorned by the name
of pedantry. And even of those
men themselves that in
councils of the Commonwealth
love to show their reading of
politics and history, very few do
it in their domestic affairs
where their particular interest
is concerned, having prudence
enough for their private affairs;
but in public they study more
the reputation of their own wit
than the success of another's
business.
CHAPTER VI
OF THE INTERIOR
BEGINNINGS OF
VOLUNTARY MOTIONS,
COMMONLY CALLED THE
PASSIONS; AND THE
SPEECHES BY WHICH
THEY ARE EXPRESSED
THERE be in animals two sorts
of motions peculiar to them:
One called vital, begun in
generation, and continued
without interruption through
their whole life; such as are the
course of the blood, the pulse,
the breathing, the concoction,
nutrition, excretion, etc.; to
which motions there needs no
help of imagination: the other is
animal motion, otherwise called
voluntary motion; as to go, to
speak, to move any of our limbs,
in such manner as is first
fancied in our minds. That
sense is motion in the organs
and interior parts of man's
body, caused by the action of
the things we see, hear, etc.,
and that fancy is but the relics
of the same motion, remaining
after sense, has been already
said in the first and second
chapters. And because going,
speaking, and the like
voluntary motions depend
always upon a precedent
thought of whither, which way,
and what, it is evident that the
imagination is the first internal
beginning of all voluntary
motion. And although
unstudied men do not conceive
any motion at all to be there,
where the thing moved is
invisible, or the space it is
moved in is, for the shortness of
it, insensible; yet that doth not
hinder but that such motions
are. For let a space be never so
little, that which is moved over
a greater space, whereof that
little one is part, must first be
moved over that. These small
beginnings of motion within the
body of man, before they appear
in walking, speaking, striking,
and other visible actions, are
commonly called endeavour.
This endeavour, when it is
toward something which causes
it, is called appetite, or desire,
the latter being the general
name, and the other oftentimes
restrained to signify the desire
of food, namely hunger and
thirst. And when the endeavour
is from ward something, it is
generally called aversion. These
words appetite and aversion we
have from the Latins; and they
both of them signify the
motions, one of approaching,
the other of retiring. So also do
the Greek words for the same,
which are orme and aphorme.
For Nature itself does often
press upon men those truths
which afterwards, when they
look for somewhat beyond
Nature, they stumble at. For
the Schools find in mere
appetite to go, or move, no
actual motion at all; but
because some motion they must
acknowledge, they call it
metaphorical motion, which is
but an absurd speech; for
though words may be called
metaphorical, bodies and
motions cannot.
That which men desire they are
said to love, and to hate those
things for which they have
aversion. So that desire and
love are the same thing; save
that by desire, we signify the
absence of the object; by love,
most commonly the presence of
the same. So also by aversion,
we signify the absence; and by
hate, the presence of the object.
Of appetites and aversions,
some are born with men; as
appetite of food, appetite of
excretion, and exoneration
(which may also and more
properly be called aversions,
from somewhat they feel in
their bodies), and some other
appetites, not many. The rest,
which are appetites of
particular things, proceed from
experience and trial of their
effects upon themselves or
other men. For of things we
know not at all, or believe not to
be, we can have no further
desire than to taste and try.
But aversion we have for
things, not only which we know
have hurt us, but also that we
do not know whether they will
hurt us, or not.
Those things which we neither
desire nor hate, we are said to
contemn: contempt being
nothing else but an immobility
or contumacy of the heart in
resisting the action of certain
things; and proceeding from
that the heart is already moved
otherwise, by other more potent
objects, or from want of
experience of them.
And because the constitution of
a man's body is in continual
mutation, it is impossible that
all the same things should
always cause in him the same
appetites and aversions: much
less can all men consent in the
desire of almost any one and
the same object.
But whatsoever is the object of
any man's appetite or desire,
that is it which he for his part
calleth good; and the object of
his hate and aversion, evil; and
of his contempt, vile and
inconsiderable. For these words
of good, evil, and contemptible
are ever used with relation to
the person that useth them:
there being nothing simply and
absolutely so; nor any common
rule of good and evil to be taken
from the nature of the objects
themselves; but from the
person of the man, where there
is no Commonwealth; or, in a
Commonwealth, from the
person that representeth it; or
from an arbitrator or judge,
whom men disagreeing shall by
consent set up and make his
sentence the rule thereof.
The Latin tongue has two
words whose significations
approach to those of good and
evil, but are not precisely the
same; and those are pulchrum
and turpe. Whereof the former
signifies that which by some
apparent signs promiseth good;
and the latter, that which
promiseth evil. But in our
tongue we have not so general
names to express them by. But
for pulchrum we say in some
things, fair; in others, beautiful,
or handsome, or gallant, or
honourable, or comely, or
amiable: and for turpe; foul,
deformed, ugly, base, nauseous,
and the like, as the subject
shall require; all which words,
in their proper places, signify
nothing else but the mien, or
countenance, that promiseth
good and evil. So that of good
there be three kinds: good in
the promise, that is pulchrum;
good in effect, as the end
desired, which is called
jucundum, delightful; and good
as the means, which is called
utile, profitable; and as many of
evil: for evil in promise is that
they call turpe; evil in effect
and end is molestum,
unpleasant, troublesome; and
evil in the means, inutile,
unprofitable, hurtful.
As in sense that which is really
within us is, as I have said
before, only motion, caused by
the action of external objects
but in appearance; to the sight,
light and colour; to the ear,
sound; to the nostril, odour, etc.:
so, when the action of the same
object is continued from the
eyes, ears, and other organs to
the heart, the real effect there
is nothing but motion, or
endeavour; which consisteth in
appetite or aversion to or from
the object moving. But the
appearance or sense of that
motion is that we either call
delight or trouble of mind.
This motion, which is called
appetite, and for the
appearance of it delight and
pleasure, seemeth to be a
corroboration of vital motion,
and a help thereunto; and
therefore such things as caused
delight were not improperly
called jucunda (a juvando),
from helping or fortifying; and
the contrary, molesta, offensive,
from hindering and troubling
the motion vital.
Pleasure therefore, or delight, is
the appearance or sense of good;
and molestation or displeasure,
the appearance or sense of evil.
And consequently all appetite,
desire, and love is accompanied
with some delight more or less;
and all hatred and aversion
with more or less displeasure
and offence.
Of pleasures, or delights, some
arise from the sense of an object
present; and those may be
called pleasures of sense (the
word sensual, as it is used by
those only that condemn them,
having no place till there be
laws). Of this kind are all
onerations and exonerations of
the body; as also all that is
pleasant, in the sight, hearing,
smell, taste, or touch. Others
arise from the expectation that
proceeds from foresight of the
end or consequence of things,
whether those things in the
sense please or displease: and
these are pleasures of the mind
of him that draweth in those
consequences, and are generally
called joy. In the like manner,
displeasures are some in the
sense, and called pain; others,
in the expectation of
consequences, and are called
grief.
These simple passions called
appetite, desire, love, aversion,
hate, joy, and grief have their
names for diverse
considerations diversified. At
first, when they one succeed
another, they are diversely
called from the opinion men
have of the likelihood of
attaining what they desire.
Secondly, from the object loved
or hated. Thirdly, from the
consideration of many of them
together. Fourthly, from the
alteration or succession itself.
For appetite with an opinion of
attaining is called hope.
The same, without such
opinion, despair.
Aversion, with opinion of hurt
from the object, fear.
The same, with hope of
avoiding that hurt by
resistence, courage.
Sudden courage, anger.
Constant hope, confidence of
ourselves.
Constant despair, diffidence of
ourselves.
Anger for great hurt done to
another, when we conceive the
same to be done by injury,
indignation.
Desire of good to another,
benevolence, good will, charity.
If to man generally, good
nature.
Desire of riches, covetousness: a
name used always in
signification of blame, because
men contending for them are
displeased with one another's
attaining them; though the
desire in itself be to be blamed,
or allowed, according to the
means by which those riches
are sought.
Desire of office, or precedence,
ambition: a name used also in
the worse sense, for the reason
before mentioned.
Desire of things that conduce
but a little to our ends, and fear
of things that are but of little
hindrance, pusillanimity.
Contempt of little helps, and
hindrances, magnanimity.
Magnanimity in danger of
death, or wounds, valour,
fortitude.
Magnanimity in the use of
riches, liberality.
Pusillanimity in the same,
wretchedness, miserableness,
or parsimony, as it is liked, or
disliked.
Love of persons for society,
kindness.
Love of persons for pleasing the
sense only, natural lust.
Love of the same acquired from
rumination, that is,
imagination of pleasure past,
luxury.
Love of one singularly, with
desire to be singularly beloved,
the passion of love. The same,
with fear that the love is not
mutual, jealousy.
Desire by doing hurt to another
to make him condemn some
fact of his own, revengefulness.
Desire to know why, and how,
curiosity; such as is in no living
creature but man: so that man
is distinguished, not only by his
reason, but also by this singular
passion from other animals; in
whom the appetite of food, and
other pleasures of sense, by
predominance, take away the
care of knowing causes; which
is a lust of the mind, that by a
perseverance of delight in the
continual and indefatigable
generation of knowledge,
exceedeth the short vehemence
of any carnal pleasure.
Fear of power invisible, feigned
by the mind, or imagined from
tales publicly allowed, religion;
not allowed, superstition. And
when the power imagined is
truly such as we imagine, true
religion.
Fear without the apprehension
of why, or what, panic terror;
called so from the fables that
make Pan the author of them;
whereas in truth there is
always in him that so feareth,
first, some apprehension of the
cause, though the rest run
away by example; every one
supposing his fellow to know
why. And therefore this passion
happens to none but in a
throng, or multitude of people.
Joy from apprehension of
novelty, admiration; proper to
man, because it excites the
appetite of knowing the cause.
Joy arising from imagination of
a man's own power and ability
is that exultation of the mind
which is called glorying: which,
if grounded upon the experience
of his own former actions, is the
same with confidence: but if
grounded on the flattery of
others, or only supposed by
himself, for delight in the
consequences of it, is called
vainglory: which name is
properly given; because a
well-grounded confidence
begetteth attempt; whereas the
supposing of power does not,
and is therefore rightly called
vain.
Grief, from opinion of want of
power, is called dejection of
mind.
The vainglory which consisteth
in the feigning or supposing of
abilities in ourselves, which we
know are not, is most incident
to young men, and nourished by
the histories or fictions of
gallant persons; and is
corrected oftentimes by age and
employment.
Sudden glory is the passion
which maketh those grimaces
called laughter; and is caused
either by some sudden act of
their own that pleaseth them;
or by the apprehension of some
deformed thing in another, by
comparison whereof they
suddenly applaud themselves.
And it is incident most to them
that are conscious of the fewest
abilities in themselves; who are
forced to keep themselves in
their own favour by observing
the imperfections of other men.
And therefore much laughter at
the defects of others is a sign of
pusillanimity. For of great
minds one of the proper works
is to help and free others from
scorn, and compare themselves
only with the most able.
On the contrary, sudden
dejection is the passion that
causeth weeping; and is caused
by such accidents as suddenly
take away some vehement
hope, or some prop of their
power: and they are most
subject to it that rely
principally on helps external,
such as are women and
children. Therefore, some weep
for the loss of friends; others for
their unkindness; others for the
sudden stop made to their
thoughts of revenge, by
reconciliation. But in all cases,
both laughter and weeping are
sudden motions, custom taking
them both away. For no man
laughs at old jests, or weeps for
an old calamity.
Grief for the discovery of some
defect of ability is shame, or the
passion that discovereth itself
in blushing, and consisteth in
the apprehension of something
dishonourable; and in young
men is a sign of the love of good
reputation, and commendable:
in old men it is a sign of the
same; but because it comes too
late, not commendable.
The contempt of good
reputation is called impudence.
Grief for the calamity of
another is pity; and ariseth
from the imagination that the
like calamity may befall
himself; and therefore is called
also compassion, and in the
phrase of this present time a
fellow-feeling: and therefore for
calamity arriving from great
wickedness, the best men have
the least pity; and for the same
calamity, those have least pity
that think themselves least
obnoxious to the same.
Contempt, or little sense of the
calamity of others, is that
which men call cruelty;
proceeding from security of
their own fortune. For, that any
man should take pleasure in
other men's great harms,
without other end of his own, I
do not conceive it possible.
Grief for the success of a
competitor in wealth, honour, or
other good, if it be joined with
endeavour to enforce our own
abilities to equal or exceed him,
is called emulation: but joined
with endeavour to supplant or
hinder a competitor, envy.
When in the mind of man
appetites and aversions, hopes
and fears, concerning one and
the same thing, arise
alternately; and diverse good
and evil consequences of the
doing or omitting the thing
propounded come successively
into our thoughts; so that
sometimes we have an appetite
to it, sometimes an aversion
from it; sometimes hope to be
able to do it, sometimes
despair, or fear to attempt it;
the whole sum of desires,
aversions, hopes and fears,
continued till the thing be
either done, or thought
impossible, is that we call
deliberation.
Therefore of things past there
is no deliberation, because
manifestly impossible to be
changed; nor of things known to
be impossible, or thought so;
because men know or think
such deliberation vain. But of
things impossible, which we
think possible, we may
deliberate, not knowing it is in
vain. And it is called
deliberation; because it is a
putting an end to the liberty we
had of doing, or omitting,
according to our own appetite,
or aversion.
This alternate succession of
appetites, aversions, hopes and
fears is no less in other living
creatures than in man; and
therefore beasts also deliberate.
Every deliberation is then said
to end when that whereof they
deliberate is either done or
thought impossible; because till
then we retain the liberty of
doing, or omitting, according to
our appetite, or aversion.
In deliberation, the last
appetite, or aversion,
immediately adhering to the
action, or to the omission
thereof, is that we call the will;
the act, not the faculty, of
willing. And beasts that have
deliberation must necessarily
also have will. The definition of
the will, given commonly by the
Schools, that it is a rational
appetite, is not good. For if it
were, then could there be no
voluntary act against reason.
For a voluntary act is that
which proceedeth from the will,
and no other. But if instead of a
rational appetite, we shall say
an appetite resulting from a
precedent deliberation, then the
definition is the same that I
have given here. Will, therefore,
is the last appetite in
deliberating. And though we
say in common discourse, a
man had a will once to do a
thing, that nevertheless he
forbore to do; yet that is
properly but an inclination,
which makes no action
voluntary; because the action
depends not of it, but of the last
inclination, or appetite. For if
the intervenient appetites
make any action voluntary,
then by the same reason all
intervenient aversions should
make the same action
involuntary; and so one and the
same action should be both
voluntary and involuntary.
By this it is manifest that, not
only actions that have their
beginning from covetousness,
ambition, lust, or other
appetites to the thing
propounded, but also those that
have their beginning from
aversion, or fear of those
consequences that follow the
omission, are voluntary actions.
The forms of speech by which
the passions are expressed are
partly the same and partly
different from those by which
we express our thoughts. And
first generally all passions may
be expressed indicatively; as, I
love, I fear, I joy, I deliberate, I
will, I command: but some of
them have particular
expressions by themselves,
which nevertheless are not
affirmations, unless it be when
they serve to make other
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CHAPTER VII
OF THE ENDS OR
RESOLUTIONS OF
DISCOURSE
OF ALL discourse governed by
desire of knowledge, there is at
last an end, either by attaining
or by giving over. And in the
chain of discourse, wheresoever
it be interrupted, there is an
end for that time.
If the discourse be merely
mental, it consisteth of
thoughts that the thing will be,
and will not be; or that it has
been, and has not been,
alternately. So that
wheresoever you break off the
chain of a man's discourse, you
leave him in a presumption of it
will be, or, it will not be; or it
has been, or, has not been. All
which is opinion. And that
which is alternate appetite, in
deliberating concerning good
and evil, the same is alternate
opinion in the enquiry of the
truth of past and future. And
as the last appetite in
deliberation is called the will, so
the last opinion in search of the
truth of past and future is
called the judgement, or
resolute and final sentence of
him that discourseth. And as
the whole chain of appetites
alternate in the question of
good or bad is called
deliberation; so the whole chain
of opinions alternate in the
question of true or false is
called doubt.
No discourse whatsoever can
end in absolute knowledge of
fact, past or to come. For, as for
the knowledge of fact, it is
originally sense, and ever after
memory. And for the knowledge
of consequence, which I have
said before is called science, it is
not absolute, but conditional.
No man can know by discourse
that this, or that, is, has been,
or will be; which is to know
absolutely: but only that if this
be, that is; if this has been, that
has been; if this shall be, that
shall be; which is to know
conditionally: and that not the
consequence of one thing to
another, but of one name of a
thing to another name of the
same thing.
And therefore, when the
discourse is put into speech,
and begins with the definitions
of words, and proceeds by
connexion of the same into
general affirmations, and of
these again into syllogisms, the
end or last sum is called the
conclusion; and the thought of
the mind by it signified is that
conditional knowledge, or
knowledge of the consequence
of words, which is commonly
called science. But if the first
ground of such discourse be not
definitions, or if the definitions
be not rightly joined together
into syllogisms, then the end or
conclusion is again opinion,
namely of the truth of
somewhat said, though
sometimes in absurd and
senseless words, without
possibility of being understood.
When two or more men know of
one and the same fact, they are
said to be conscious of it one to
another; which is as much as to
know it together. And because
such are fittest witnesses of the
facts of one another, or of a
third, it was and ever will be
reputed a very evil act for any
man to speak against his
conscience; or to corrupt or force
another so to do: insomuch that
the plea of conscience has been
always hearkened unto very
diligently in all times.
Afterwards, men made use of
the same word metaphorically
for the knowledge of their own
secret facts and secret
thoughts; and therefore it is
rhetorically said that the
conscience is a thousand
witnesses. And last of all, men,
vehemently in love with their
own new opinions, though never
so absurd, and obstinately bent
to maintain them, gave those
their opinions also that
reverenced name of conscience,
as if they would have it seem
unlawful to change or speak
against them; and so pretend to
know they are true, when they
know at most but that they
think so.
When a man's discourse
beginneth not at definitions, it
beginneth either at some other
contemplation of his own, and
then it is still called opinion, or
it beginneth at some saying of
another, of whose ability to
know the truth, and of whose
honesty in not deceiving, he
doubteth not; and then the
discourse is not so much
concerning the thing, as the
person; and the resolution is
called belief, and faith: faith, in
the man; belief, both of the
man, and of the truth of what
he says. So that in belief are
two opinions; one of the saying
of the man, the other of his
virtue. To have faith in, or trust
to, or believe a man, signify the
same thing; namely, an opinion
of the veracity of the man: but
to believe what is said
signifieth only an opinion of the
truth of the saying. But we are
to observe that this phrase, I
believe in; as also the Latin,
credo in; and the Greek, piseno
eis, are never used but in the
writings of divines. Instead of
them, in other writings are put:
I believe him; I trust him; I
have faith in him; I rely on him;
and in Latin, credo illi; fido illi;
and in Greek, piseno anto; and
that this singularity of the
ecclesiastic use of the word
hath raised many disputes
about the right object of the
Christian faith.
But by believing in, as it is in
the Creed, is meant, not trust
in the person, but confession
and acknowledgement of the
doctrine. For not only
Christians, but all manner of
men do so believe in God as to
hold all for truth they hear Him
say, whether they understand
it or not, which is all the faith
and trust can possibly be had in
any person whatsoever; but
they do not all believe the
doctrine of the Creed.
From whence we may infer that
when we believe any saying,
whatsoever it be, to be true,
from arguments taken, not
from the thing itself, or from
the principles of natural reason,
but from the authority and
good opinion we have of him
that hath said it; then is the
speaker, or person we believe in,
or trust in, and whose word we
take, the object of our faith; and
the honour done in believing is
done to him only. And
consequently, when we believe
that the Scriptures are the
word of God, having no
immediate revelation from God
Himself, our belief, faith, and
trust is in the Church; whose
word we take, and acquiesce
therein. And they that believe
that which a prophet relates
unto them in the name of God
take the word of the prophet, do
honour to him, and in him trust
and believe, touching the truth
of what he relateth, whether he
be a true or a false prophet. And
so it is also with all other
history. For if I should not
believe all that is written by
historians of the glorious acts of
Alexander or Caesar, I do not
think the ghost of Alexander or
Caesar had any just cause to be
offended, or anybody else but
the historian. If Livy say the
gods made once a cow speak,
and we believe it not, we
distrust not God therein, but
Livy. So that it is evident that
whatsoever we believe, upon no
other reason than what is
drawn from authority of men
only, and their writings,
whether they be sent from God
or not, is faith in men only.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE VIRTUES
COMMONLY CALLED
INTELLECTUAL; AND
THEIR CONTRARY
DEFECTS
VIRTUE generally, in all sorts
of subjects, is somewhat that is
valued for eminence; and
consisteth in comparison. For if
all things were equally in all
men, nothing would be prized.
And by virtues intellectual are
always understood such
abilities of the mind as men
praise, value, and desire should
be in themselves; and go
commonly under the name of a
good wit; though the same
word, wit, be used also to
distinguish one certain ability
from the rest.
These virtues are of two sorts;
natural and acquired. By
natural, I mean not that which
a man hath from his birth: for
that is nothing else but sense;
wherein men differ so little one
from another, and from brute
beasts, as it is not to be
reckoned amongst virtues. But
I mean that wit which is gotten
by use only, and experience,
without method, culture, or
instruction. This natural wit
consisteth principally in two
things: celerity of imagining
(that is, swift succession of one
thought to another); and steady
direction to some approved end.
On the contrary, a slow
imagination maketh that
defect or fault of the mind
which is commonly called
dullness, stupidity, and
sometimes by other names that
signify slowness of motion, or
difficulty to be moved.
And this difference of
quickness is caused by the
difference of men's passions;
that love and dislike, some one
thing, some another: and
therefore some men's thoughts
run one way, some another, and
are held to, observe differently
the things that pass through
their imagination. And whereas
in this succession of men's
thoughts there is nothing to
observe in the things they
think on, but either in what
they be like one another, or in
what they be unlike, or what
they serve for, or how they
serve to such a purpose; those
that observe their similitudes,
in case they be such as are but
rarely observed by others, are
said to have a good wit; by
which, in this occasion, is
meant a good fancy. But they
that observe their differences,
and dissimilitudes, which is
called distinguishing, and
discerning, and judging
between thing and thing, in
case such discerning be not
easy, are said to have a good
judgement: and particularly in
matter of conversation and
business, wherein times, places,
and persons are to be discerned,
this virtue is called discretion.
The former, that is, fancy,
without the help of judgement,
is not commended as a virtue;
but the latter which is
judgement, and discretion, is
commended for itself, without
the help of fancy. Besides the
discretion of times, places, and
persons, necessary to a good
fancy, there is required also an
often application of his
thoughts to their end; that is to
say, to some use to be made of
them. This done, he that hath
this virtue will be easily fitted
with similitudes that will
please, not only by illustration
of his discourse, and adorning it
with new and apt metaphors,
but also, by the rarity of their
invention. But without
steadiness, and direction to
some end, great fancy is one
kind of madness; such as they
have that, entering into any
discourse, are snatched from
their purpose by everything
that comes in their thought,
into so many and so long
digressions and parentheses,
that they utterly lose
themselves: which kind of folly
I know no particular name for:
but the cause of it is sometimes
want of experience; whereby
that seemeth to a man new and
rare which doth not so to
others: sometimes
pusillanimity; by which that
seems great to him which other
men think a trifle: and
whatsoever is new, or great,
and therefore thought fit to be
told, withdraws a man by
degrees from the intended way
of his discourse.
In a good poem, whether it be
epic or dramatic, as also in
sonnets, epigrams, and other
pieces, both judgement and
fancy are required: but the
fancy must be more eminent;
because they please for the
extravagancy, but ought not to
displease by indiscretion.
In a good history, the
judgement must be eminent;
because the goodness
consisteth in the choice of the
method, in the truth, and in the
choice of the actions that are
most profitable to be known.
Fancy has no place, but only in
adorning the style.
In orations of praise, and in
invectives, the fancy is
predominant; because the
design is not truth, but to
honour or dishonour; which is
done by noble or by vile
comparisons. The judgement
does but suggest what
circumstances make an action
laudable or culpable.
In hortatives and pleadings, as
truth or disguise serveth best
to the design in hand, so is the
judgement or the fancy most
required.
In demonstration, in council,
and all rigorous search of truth,
sometimes does all; except
sometimes the understanding
have need to be opened by some
apt similitude, and then there
is so much use of fancy. But for
metaphors, they are in this case
utterly excluded. For seeing
they openly profess deceit, to
admit them into council, or
reasoning, were manifest folly.
And in any discourse
whatsoever, if the defect of
discretion be apparent, how
extravagant soever the fancy
be, the whole discourse will be
taken for a sign of want of wit;
and so will it never when the
discretion is manifest, though
the fancy be never so ordinary.
The secret thoughts of a man
run over all things holy,
prophane, clean, obscene, grave,
and light, without shame, or
blame; which verbal discourse
cannot do, farther than the
judgement shall approve of the
time, place, and persons. An
anatomist or physician may
speak or write his judgement of
unclean things; because it is not
to please, but profit: but for
another man to write his
extravagant and pleasant
fancies of the same is as if a
man, from being tumbled into
the dirt, should come and
present himself before good
company. And it is the want of
discretion that makes the
difference. Again, in professed
remissness of mind, and
familiar company, a man may
play with the sounds and
equivocal significations of
words, and that many times
with encounters of
extraordinary fancy; but in a
sermon, or in public, or before
persons unknown, or whom we
ought to reverence, there is no
jingling of words that will not
be accounted folly: and the
difference is only in the want of
discretion. So that where wit is
wanting, it is not fancy that is
wanting, but discretion.
Judgement, therefore, without
fancy is wit, but fancy without
judgement, not.
When the thoughts of a man
that has a design in hand,
running over a multitude of
things, observes how they
conduce to that design, or what
design they may conduce unto;
if his observations be such as
are not easy, or usual, this wit
of his is called prudence, and
dependeth on much experience,
and memory of the like things
and their consequences
heretofore. In which there is not
so much difference of men as
there is in their fancies and
judgements; because the
experience of men equal in age
is not much unequal as to the
quantity, but lies in different
occasions, every one having his
private designs. To govern well
a family and a kingdom are not
different degrees of prudence,
but different sorts of business;
no more than to draw a picture
in little, or as great or greater
than the life, are different
degrees of art. A plain
husbandman is more prudent
in affairs of his own house than
a Privy Counsellor in the affairs
of another man.
To prudence, if you add the use
of unjust or dishonest means,
such as usually are prompted to
men by fear or want, you have
that crooked wisdom which is
called craft; which is a sign of
pusillanimity. For
magnanimity is contempt of
unjust or dishonest helps. And
that which the Latins call
versutia (translated into
English, shifting), and is a
putting off of a present danger
or incommodity by engaging
into a greater, as when a man
robs one to pay another, is but a
shorter-sighted craft; called
versutia, from versura, which
signifies taking money at usury
for the present payment of
interest.
As for acquired wit (I mean
acquired by method and
instruction), there is none but
reason; which is grounded on
the right use of speech, and
produceth the sciences. But of
reason and science, I have
already spoken in the fifth and
sixth chapters.
The causes of this difference of
wits are in the passions, and
the difference of passions
proceedeth partly from the
different constitution of the
body, and partly from different
education. For if the difference
proceeded from the temper of
the brain, and the organs of
sense, either exterior or
interior, there would be no less
difference of men in their sight,
hearing, or other senses than in
their fancies and discretions. It
proceeds, therefore, from the
passions; which are different,
not only from the difference of
men's complexions, but also
from their difference of customs
and education.
The passions that most of all
cause the differences of wit are
principally the more or less
desire of power, of riches, of
knowledge, and of honour. All
which may be reduced to the
first, that is, desire of power.
For riches, knowledge and
honour are but several sorts of
power.
And therefore, a man who has
no great passion for any of
these things, but is as men
term it indifferent; though he
may be so far a good man as to
be free from giving offence, yet
he cannot possibly have either a
great fancy or much judgement.
For the thoughts are to the
desires as scouts and spies to
range abroad and find the way
to the things desired, all
steadiness of the mind's
motion, and all quickness of the
same, proceeding from thence.
For as to have no desire is to be
dead; so to have weak passions
is dullness; and to have
passions indifferently for
everything, giddiness and
distraction; and to have
stronger and more vehement
passions for anything than is
ordinarily seen in others is that
which men call madness.
Whereof there be almost as
may kinds as of the passions
themselves. Sometimes the
extraordinary and extravagant
passion proceedeth from the
evil constitution of the organs
of the body, or harm done them;
and sometimes the hurt, and
indisposition of the organs, is
caused by the vehemence or
long continuance of the passion.
But in both cases the madness
is of one and the same nature.
The passion whose violence or
continuance maketh madness
is either great vainglory, which
is commonly called pride and
self-conceit, or great dejection
of mind.
Pride subjecteth a man to
anger, the excess whereof is the
madness called rage, and fury.
And thus it comes to pass that
excessive desire of revenge,
when it becomes habitual,
hurteth the organs, and
becomes rage: that excessive
love, with jealousy, becomes
also rage: excessive opinion of a
man's own self, for divine
inspiration, for wisdom,
learning, form, and the like,
becomes distraction and
giddiness: the same, joined
with envy, rage: vehement
opinion of the truth of
anything, contradicted by
others, rage.
Dejection subjects a man to
causeless fears, which is a
madness commonly called
melancholy apparent also in
diverse manners: as in
haunting of solitudes and
graves; in superstitious
behaviour; and in fearing some
one, some another, particular
thing. In sum, all passions that
produce strange and unusual
behaviour are called by the
general name of madness. But
of the several kinds of
madness, he that would take
the pains might enrol a legion.
And if the excesses be madness,
there is no doubt but the
passions themselves, when
they tend to evil, are degrees of
the same.
For example, though the effect
of folly, in them that are
possessed of an opinion of being
inspired, be not visible always
in one man by any very
extravagant action that
proceedeth from such passion,
yet when many of them
conspire together, the rage of
the whole multitude is visible
enough. For what argument of
madness can there be greater
than to clamour, strike, and
throw stones at our best
friends? Yet this is somewhat
less than such a multitude will
do. For they will clamour, fight
against, and destroy those by
whom all their lifetime before
they have been protected and
secured from injury. And if this
be madness in the multitude, it
is the same in every particular
man. For as in the midst of the
sea, though a man perceive no
sound of that part of the water
next him, yet he is well assured
that part contributes as much
to the roaring of the sea as any
other part of the same quantity:
so also, though we perceive no
great unquietness in one or two
men, yet we may be well
assured that their singular
passions are parts of the
seditious roaring of a troubled
nation. And if there were
nothing else that bewrayed
their madness, yet that very
arrogating such inspiration to
themselves is argument
enough. If some man in Bedlam
should entertain you with sober
discourse, and you desire in
taking leave to know what he
were that you might another
time requite his civility, and he
should tell you he were God the
Father; I think you need expect
no extravagant action for
argument of his madness.
This opinion of inspiration,
called commonly, private spirit,
begins very often from some
lucky finding of an error
generally held by others; and
not knowing, or not
remembering, by what conduct
of reason they came to so
singular a truth, as they think
it, though it be many times an
untruth they light on, they
presently admire themselves as
being in the special grace of God
Almighty, who hath revealed
the same to them
supernaturally by his Spirit.
Again, that madness is nothing
else but too much appearing
passion may be gathered out of
the effects of wine, which are
the same with those of the evil
disposition of the organs. For
the variety of behaviour in men
that have drunk too much is
the same with that of madmen:
some of them raging, others
loving, others laughing, all
extravagantly, but according to
their several domineering
passions: for the effect of the
wine does but remove
dissimulation, and take from
them the sight of the deformity
of their passions. For, I believe,
the most sober men, when they
walk alone without care and
employment of the mind, would
be unwilling the vanity and
extravagance of their thoughts
at that time should be publicly
seen, which is a confession that
passions unguided are for the
most part mere madness.
The opinions of the world, both
in ancient and later ages,
concerning the cause of
madness have been two. Some,
deriving them from the
passions; some, from demons or
spirits, either good or bad,
which they thought might
enter into a man, possess him,
and move his organs in such
strange and uncouth manner as
madmen use to do. The former
sort, therefore, called such men,
madmen: but the latter called
them sometimes demoniacs
(that is, possessed with spirits);
sometimes energumeni (that is,
agitated or moved with spirits);
and now in Italy they are called
not only pazzi, madmen; but
also spiritati, men possessed.
There was once a great conflux
of people in Abdera, a city of the
Greeks, at the acting of the
tragedy of Andromeda, upon an
extreme hot day: whereupon a
great many of the spectators,
falling into fevers, had this
accident from the heat and
from the tragedy together, that
they did nothing but pronounce
iambics, with the names of
Perseus and Andromeda;
which, together with the fever,
was cured by the coming on of
winter: and this madness was
thought to proceed from the
passion imprinted by the
tragedy. Likewise there reigned
a fit of madness in another
Grecian city which seized only
the young maidens, and caused
many of them to hang
themselves. This was by most
then thought an act of the
devil. But one that suspected
that contempt of life in them
might proceed from some
passion of the mind, and
supposing they did not contemn
also their honour, gave counsel
to the magistrates to strip such
as so hanged themselves, and
let them hang out naked. This,
the story says, cured that
madness. But on the other side,
the same Grecians did often
ascribe madness to the
operation of the Eumenides, or
Furies; and sometimes of Ceres,
Phoebus, and other gods: so
much did men attribute to
phantasms as to think them
aerial living bodies, and
generally to call them spirits.
And as the Romans in this held
the same opinion with the
Greeks, so also did the Jews; for
they called madmen prophets,
or, according as they thought
the spirits good or bad,
demoniacs; and some of them
called both prophets and
demoniacs madmen; and some
called the same man both
demoniac and madman. But for
the Gentiles, it is no wonder;
because diseases and health,
vices and virtues, and many
natural accidents were with
them termed and worshipped
as demons. So that a man was
to understand by demon as well
sometimes an ague as a devil.
But for the Jews to have such
opinion is somewhat strange.
For neither Moses nor Abraham
pretended to prophesy by
possession of a spirit, but from
the voice of God, or by a vision
or dream: nor is there anything
in his law, moral or ceremonial,
by which they were taught
there was any such
enthusiasm, or any possession.
When God is said to take from
the spirit that was in Moses,
and give to the seventy elders,
the spirit of God, taking it for
the substance of God, is not
divided.* The Scriptures by the
Spirit of God in man mean a
man's spirit, inclined to
godliness. And where it is said,
"Whom I have filled with the
spirit of wisdom to make
garments for Aaron,"*(2) is not
meant a spirit put into them,
that can make garments, but
the wisdom of their own spirits
in that kind of work. In the like
sense, the spirit of man, when it
produceth unclean actions, is
ordinarily called an unclean
spirit; and so other spirits,
though not always, yet as often
as the virtue or vice, so styled,
is extraordinary and eminent.
Neither did the other prophets
of the Old Testament pretend
enthusiasm, or that God spoke
in them, but to them, by voice,
vision, or dream; and the
"burden of the Lord" was not
possession, but command. How
then could the Jews fall into
this opinion of possession? I can
imagine no reason but that
which is common to all men;
namely, the want of curiosity to
search natural causes; and
their placing felicity in the
acquisition of the gross
pleasures of the senses, and the
things that most immediately
conduce thereto. For they that
see any strange and unusual
ability or defect in a man's
mind, unless they see withal
from what cause it may
probably proceed, can hardly
think it natural; and if not
natural, they must needs think
it supernatural; and then what
can it be, but that either God or
the Devil is in him? And hence
it came to pass, when our
Saviour was compassed about
with the multitude, those of the
house doubted he was mad, and
went out to hold him: but the
Scribes said he had Beelzebub,
and that was it, by which he
cast out devils; as if the greater
madman had awed the
lesser.*(3) And that some said,
"He hath a devil, and is mad";
whereas others, holding him for
a prophet, said, "These are not
the words of one that hath a
devil."*(4) So in the Old
Testament he that came to
anoint Jehu was a Prophet; but
some of the company asked
Jehu, "What came that
madman for?"*(5) So that, in
sum, it is manifest that
whosoever behaved himself in
extraordinary manner was
thought by the Jews to be
possessed either with a good or
evil spirit; except by the
Sadducees, who erred so far on
the other hand as not to believe
there were at all any spirits,
which is very near to direct
atheism; and thereby perhaps
the more provoked others to
term such men demoniacs
rather than madmen.
* Numbers, 11. 25
*(2) Exodus, 28. 3
*(3) Mark, 3. 21
*(4) John, 10. 20
*(5) II Kings, 9. 11
But why then does our Saviour
proceed in the curing of them,
as if they were possessed, and
not as it they were mad? To
which I can give no other kind
of answer but that which is
given to those that urge the
Scripture in like manner
against the opinion of the
motion of the earth. The
Scripture was written to show
unto men the kingdom of God,
and to prepare their minds to
become His obedient subjects,
leaving the world, and the
philosophy thereof, to the
disputation of men for the
exercising of their natural
reason. Whether the earth's or
sun's motion make the day and
night, or whether the
exorbitant actions of men
proceed from passion or from
the Devil, so we worship him
not, it is all one, as to our
obedience and subjection to God
Almighty; which is the thing for
which the Scripture was
written. As for that our Saviour
speaketh to the disease as to a
person, it is the usual phrase of
all that cure by words only, as
Christ did, and enchanters
pretend to do, whether they
speak to a devil or not. For is
not Christ also said to have
rebuked the winds?* Is not he
said also to rebuke a fever?*(2)
Yet this does not argue that a
fever is a devil. And whereas
many of those devils are said to
confess Christ, it is not
necessary to interpret those
places otherwise than that
those madmen confessed Him.
And whereas our Saviour
speaketh of an unclean spirit
that, having gone out of a man,
wandereth through dry places,
seeking rest, and finding none,
and returning into the same
man with seven other spirits
worse than himself;*(3) it is
manifestly a parable, alluding
to a man that, after a little
endeavour to quit his lusts, is
vanquished by the strength of
them, and becomes seven times
worse than he was. So that I
see nothing at all in the
Scripture that requireth a belief
that demoniacs were any other
thing but madmen.
* Matthew, 8. 26
*(2) Luke, 4. 39
*(3) Matthew, 12. 43
There is yet another fault in the
discourses of some men, which
may also be numbered amongst
the sorts of madness; namely,
that abuse of words, whereof I
have spoken before in the fifth
chapter by the name of
absurdity. And that is when
men speak such words as, put
together, have in them no
signification at all, but are
fallen upon, by some, through
misunderstanding of the words
they have received and repeat
by rote; by others, from
intention to deceive by
obscurity. And this is incident
to none but those that converse
in questions of matters
incomprehensible, as the
Schoolmen; or in questions of
abstruse philosophy. The
common sort of men seldom
speak insignificantly, and are
therefore, by those other
egregious persons, counted
idiots. But to be assured their
words are without anything
correspondent to them in the
mind, there would need some
examples; which if any man
require, let him take a
Schoolman into his hands and
see if he can translate any one
chapter concerning any difficult
point; as the Trinity, the Deity,
the nature of Christ,
transubstantiation, free will,
etc., into any of the modern
tongues, so as to make the
same intelligible; or into any
tolerable Latin, such as they
were acquainted withal that
lived when the Latin tongue
was vulgar. What is the
meaning of these words: "The
first cause does not necessarily
inflow anything into the
second, by force of the essential
subordination of the second
causes, by which it may help it
to work?" They are the
translation of the title of the
sixth chapter of Suarez's first
book, Of the Concourse, Motion,
and Help of God. When men
write whole volumes of such
stuff, are they not mad, or
intend to make others so? And
particularly, in the question of
transubstantiation; where after
certain words spoken they that
say, the whiteness, roundness,
magnitude, quality,
corruptibility, all which are
incorporeal, etc., go out of the
wafer into the body of our
blessed Saviour, do they not
make those nesses, tudes, and
ties to be so many spirits
possessing his body? For by
spirits they mean always
things that, being incorporeal,
are nevertheless movable from
one place to another. So that
this kind of absurdity may
rightly be numbered amongst
the many sorts of madness; and
all the time that, guided by
clear thoughts of their worldly
lust, they forbear disputing or
writing thus, but lucid
intervals. And thus much of the
virtues and defects intellectual.
CHAPTER IX
OF THE SEVERAL
SUBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE
THERE are of are of knowledge
two kinds, whereof one is
knowledge of fact; the other,
knowledge of the consequence
of one affirmation to another.
The former is nothing else but
sense and memory, and is
absolute knowledge; as when
we see a fact doing, or
remember it done; and this is
the knowledge required in a
witness. The latter is called
science, and is conditional; as
when we know that: if the
figure shown be a circle, then
any straight line through the
center shall divide it into two
equal parts. And this is the
knowledge required in a
philosopher; that is to say, of
him that pretends to reasoning.
The register of knowledge of
fact is called history, whereof
there be two sorts: one called
natural history; which is the
history of such facts, or effects
of Nature, as have no
dependence on man's will; such
as are the histories of metals,
plants, animals, regions, and
the like. The other is civil
history, which is the history of
the voluntary actions of men in
Commonwealths.
The registers of science are
such books as contain the
demonstrations of
consequences of one affirmation
to another; and are commonly
called books of philosophy;
whereof the sorts are many,
according to the diversity of the
matter; and may be divided in
such manner as I have divided
them in the following table.
1.SCIENCE, that is,
knowledge of
consequences; which is
called also PHILOSOPHY
1.Consequences from
accidents of bodies
natural; which is
called
NATURAL
PHILOSOPHY
1.Consequences
from accidents
common to all
bodies natural;
which are
quantity, and
motion.
1.Consequences
from
quantity,
and
motion
indeterminate;
which,
being the
principles
or first
foundation
of
philosophy,
is called
philosophia
prima
PHILOSOPHIA
PRIMA
2.Consequences
from
motion,
and
quantity
determined
1.Consequences
from
quantity,
and
motion
determined
By
figure,
By
number
Mathematics,
GEOMETRY
ARITHMETIC
2.Consequences
from
motion,
and
quantity
of
bodies
in
special
1.Consequences
from
motion,
and
quantity
of
the
great
parts
of
the
world,
as
the
earth
and
stars,
Cosmography
ASTRONOMY
GEOGRAPHY
2.Consequences
from
motion
of
special
kinds,
and
figures
of
body,
Mechanics,
doctrine
of
weight
Science
of
ENGINEERS
ARCHITECTURE
NAVIGATION
2.PHYSICS, or
consequences
from qualities
1.Consequences
from
qualities
of bodies
transient,
such as
sometimes
appear,
sometimes
vanish
METEOROLOGY
2.Consequences
from
qualities
of bodies
permanent
1.Consequences
from
qualities
of
stars
1.Consequences
from
the
light
of
the
stars.
Out
of
this,
and
the
motion
of
the
sun,
is
made
the
science
of
SCIOGRAPHY
2.Consequences
from
the
influence
of
the
stars,
ASTROLOGY
2.Consequences
of
qualities
from
liquid
bodies
that
fill
the
space
between
the
stars;
such
as
are
the
air,
or
substance
etherial
3.Consequences
from
qualities
of
bodies
terrestrial
1.Consequences
from
parts
of
the
earth
that
are
without
sense,
1.Consequences
from
qualities
of
minerals,
as
stones,
metals,
etc.
2.Consequences
from
the
qualities
of
vegetables
2.Consequences
from
qualities
of
animals
1.Consequences
from
qualities
of
animals
in
general
1.Consequences
from
vision,
OPTICS
2.Consequences
from
sounds,
MUSIC
3.Consequences
from
the
rest
of
the
senses
2.Consequences
from
qualities
of
men
in
special
1.Consequences
from
passions
of
men,
ETHICS
2.Consequences
from
speech,
1.In
magnifying,
vilifying,
etc.
POETRY
2.In
persuading,
RHETORIC
3.In
reasoning,
LOGIC
4.In
contracting,
The
Science
of
JUST
and
UNJUST
2.Consequences from
accidents of politic
bodies; which is
called POLITICS,
AND CIVIL
PHILOSOPHY
1.Of
consequences
from the
institution of
COMMONWEALTHS,
to the rights,
and duties of
the body politic,
or sovereign
2.Of
consequences
from the same,
to the duty and
right of the
subjects
CHAPTER X
OF POWER, WORTH,
DIGNITY, HONOUR AND
WORTHINESS
THE POWER of a man, to take
it universally, is his present
means to obtain some future
apparent good, and is either
original or instrumental.
Natural power is the eminence
of the faculties of body, or mind;
as extraordinary strength,
form, prudence, arts, eloquence,
liberality, nobility.
Instrumental are those powers
which, acquired by these, or by
fortune, are means and
instruments to acquire more; as
riches, reputation, friends, and
the secret working of God,
which men call good luck. For
the nature of power is, in this
point, like to fame, increasing
as it proceeds; or like the
motion of heavy bodies, which,
the further they go, make still
the more haste.
The greatest of human powers
is that which is compounded of
the powers of most men, united
by consent, in one person,
natural or civil, that has the
use of all their powers
depending on his will; such as is
the power of a Commonwealth:
or depending on the wills of
each particular; such as is the
power of a faction, or of diverse.
factions leagued. Therefore to
have servants is power; to have
friends is power: for they are
strengths united.
Also, riches joined with
liberality is power; because it
procureth friends and servants:
without liberality, not so;
because in this case they
defend not, but expose men to
envy, as a prey.
Reputation of power is power;
because it draweth with it the
adherence of those that need
protection.
So is reputation of love of a
man's country, called
popularity, for the same reason.
Also, what quality soever
maketh a man beloved or
feared of many, or the
reputation of such quality, is
power; because it is a means to
have the assistance and service
of many.
Good success is power; because
it maketh reputation of wisdom
or good fortune, which makes
men either fear him or rely on
him.
Affability of men already in
power is increase of power;
because it gaineth love.
Reputation of prudence in the
conduct of peace or war is
power; because to prudent men
we commit the government of
ourselves more willingly than
to others.
Nobility is power, not in all
places, but only in those
Commonwealths where it has
privileges; for in such privileges
consisteth their power.
Eloquence is power; because it
is seeming prudence.
Form is power; because being a
promise of good, it
recommendeth men to the
favour of women and strangers.
The sciences are small powers;
because not eminent, and
therefore, not acknowledged in
any man; nor are at all, but in a
few, and in them, but of a few
things. For science is of that
nature, as none can understand
it to be, but such as in a good
measure have attained it.
Arts of public use, as
fortification, making of engines,
and other instruments of war,
because they confer to defence
and victory, are power; and
though the true mother of them
be science, namely, the
mathematics yet, because they
are brought into the light by
the hand of the artificer, they
be esteemed (the midwife
passing with the vulgar for the
mother) as his issue.
The value or worth of a man is,
as of all other things, his price;
that is to say, so much as would
be given for the use of his
power, and therefore is not
absolute, but a thing dependent
on the need and judgement of
another. An able conductor of
soldiers is of great price in time
of war present or imminent, but
in peace not so. A learned and
uncorrupt judge is much worth
in time of peace, but not so
much in war. And as in other
things, so in men, not the seller,
but the buyer determines the
price. For let a man, as most
men do, rate themselves at the
highest value they can, yet
their true value is no more than
it is esteemed by others.
The manifestation of the value
we set on one another is that
which is commonly called
honouring and dishonouring. To
value a man at a high rate is to
honour him; at a low rate is to
dishonour him. But high and
low, in this case, is to be
understood by comparison to
the rate that each man setteth
on himself.
The public worth of a man,
which is the value set on him by
the Commonwealth, is that
which men commonly call
dignity. And this value of him
by the Commonwealth is
understood by offices of
command, judicature, public
employment; or by names and
titles introduced for distinction
of such value.
To pray to another for aid of
any kind is to honour; because a
sign we have an opinion he has
power to help; and the more
difficult the aid is, the more is
the honour.
To obey s to honour; because no
man obeys them who they
think have no power to help or
hurt them. And consequently to
disobey is to dishonour.
To give great gifts to a man is
to honour him; because it is
buying of protection, and
acknowledging of power. To
give little gifts is to dishonour;
because it is but alms, and
signifies an opinion of the need
of small helps.
To be sedulous in promoting
another's good, also to flatter, is
to honour; as a sign we seek his
protection or aid. To neglect is
to dishonour.
To give way or place to another,
in any commodity, is to honour;
being a confession of greater
power. To arrogate is to
dishonour.
To show any sign of love or fear
of another is honour; for both to
love and to fear is to value. To
contemn, or less to love or fear
than he expects, is to
dishonour; for it is
undervaluing.
To praise, magnify, or call
happy is to honour; because
nothing but goodness, power,
and felicity is valued. To revile,
mock, or pity is to dishonour.
To speak to another with
consideration, to appear before
him with decency and humility,
is to honour him; as signs of
fear to offend. To speak to him
rashly, to do anything before
him obscenely, slovenly,
impudently is to dishonour.
To believe, to trust, to rely on
another, is to honour him; sign
of opinion of his virtue and
power. To distrust, or not
believe, is to dishonour.
To hearken to a man's counsel,
or discourse of what kind
soever, is to honour; as a sign
we think him wise, or eloquent,
or witty. To sleep, or go forth, or
talk the while, is to dishonour.
To do those things to another
which he takes for signs of
honour, or which the law or
custom makes so, is to honour;
because in approving the
honour done by others, he
acknowledgeth the power which
others acknowledge. To refuse
to do them is to dishonour.
To agree with in opinion is to
honour; as being a sign of
approving his judgement and
wisdom. To dissent is
dishonour, and an upbraiding of
error, and, if the dissent be in
many things, of folly.
To imitate is to honour; for it is
vehemently to approve. To
imitate one's enemy is to
dishonour.
To honour those another
honours is to honour him; as a
sign of approbation of his
judgement. To honour his
enemies is to dishonour him.
To employ in counsel, or in
actions of difficulty, is to
honour; as a sign of opinion of
his wisdom or other power. To
deny employment in the same
cases to those that seek it is to
dishonour.
All these ways of honouring are
natural, and as well within, as
without Commonwealths. But
in Commonwealths where he or
they that have the supreme
authority can make whatsoever
they please to stand for signs of
honour, there be other honours.
A sovereign doth honour a
subject with whatsoever title,
or office, or employment, or
action that he himself will have
taken for a sign of his will to
honour him.
The king of Persia honoured
Mordecai when he appointed he
should be conducted through
the streets in the king's
garment, upon one of the king's
horses, with a crown on his
head, and a prince before him,
proclaiming, "Thus shall it be
done to him that the king will
honour." And yet another king
of Persia, or the same another
time, to one that demanded for
some great service to wear one
of the king's robes, gave him
leave so to do; but with this
addition, that he should wear it
as the king's fool; and then it
was dishonour. So that of civil
honour, the fountain is in the
person of the Commonwealth,
and dependeth on the will of
the sovereign, and is therefore
temporary and called civil
honour; such as are magistracy,
offices, titles, and in some
places coats and scutcheons
painted: and men honour such
as have them, as having so
many signs of favour in the
Commonwealth, which favour
is power.
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Honourable is whatsoever
possession, action, or quality is
an argument and sign of power.
And therefore to be honoured,
loved, or feared of many is
honourable, as arguments of
power. To be honoured of few or
none, dishonourable.
Dominion and victory is
honourable because acquired by
power; and servitude, for need
or fear, is dishonourable.
Good fortune, if lasting,
honourable; as a sign of the
favour of God. Ill and losses,
dishonourable. Riches are
honourable, for they are power.
Poverty, dishonourable.
Magnanimity, liberality, hope,
courage, confidence, are
honourable; for they proceed
from the conscience of power.
Pusillanimity, parsimony, fear,
diffidence, are dishonourable.
Timely resolution, or
determination of what a man is
to do, is honourable, as being
the contempt of small
difficulties and dangers. And
irresolution, dishonourable, as a
sign of too much valuing of
little impediments and little
advantages: for when a man
has weighed things as long as
the time permits, and resolves
not, the difference of weight is
but little; and therefore if he
resolve not, he overvalues little
things, which is pusillanimity.
All actions and speeches that
proceed, or seem to proceed,
from much experience, science,
discretion, or wit are
honourable; for all these are
powers. Actions or words that
proceed from error, ignorance,
or folly, dishonourable.
Gravity, as far forth as it seems
to proceed from a mind
employed on something else, is
honourable; because
employment is a sign of power.
But if it seem to proceed from a
purpose to appear grave, it is
dishonourable. For the gravity
of the former is like the
steadiness of a ship laden with
merchandise; but of the like the
steadiness of a ship ballasted
with sand and other trash.
To be conspicuous, that is to
say, to be known, for wealth,
office, great actions, or any
eminent good is honourable; as
a sign of the power for which he
is conspicuous. On the contrary,
obscurity is dishonourable.
To be descended from
conspicuous parents is
honourable; because they the
more easily attain the aids and
friends of their ancestors. On
the contrary, to be descended
from obscure parentage is
dishonourable.
Actions proceeding from equity,
joined with loss, are
honourable; as signs of
magnanimity: for magnanimity
is a sign of power. On the
contrary, craft, shifting, neglect
of equity, is dishonourable.
Covetousness of great riches,
and ambition of great honours,
are honourable; as signs of
power to obtain them.
Covetousness, and ambition of
little gains, or preferments, is
dishonourable.
Nor does it alter the case of
honour whether an action (so it
be great and difficult, and
consequently a sign of much
power) be just or unjust: for
honour consisteth only in the
opinion of power. Therefore, the
ancient heathen did not think
they dishonoured, but greatly
honoured the gods, when they
introduced them in their poems
committing rapes, thefts, and
other great, but unjust or
unclean acts; in so much as
nothing is so much celebrated
in Jupiter as his adulteries; nor
in Mercury as his frauds and
thefts; of whose praises, in a
hymn of Homer, the greatest is
this, that being born in the
morning, he had invented
music at noon, and before night
stolen away the cattle of Apollo
from his herdsmen.
Also amongst men, till there
were constituted great
Commonwealths, it was
thought no dishonour to be a
pirate, or a highway thief; but
rather a lawful trade, not only
amongst the Greeks, but also
amongst all other nations; as is
manifest by the of ancient time.
And at this day, in this part of
the world, private duels are,
and always will be, honourable,
though unlawful, till such time
as there shall be honour
ordained for them that refuse,
and ignominy for them that
make the challenge. For duels
also are many times effects of
courage, and the ground of
courage is always strength or
skill, which are power; though
for the most part they be effects
of rash speaking, and of the
fear of dishonour, in one or both
the combatants; who, engaged
by rashness, are driven into the
lists to avoid disgrace.
Scutcheons and coats of arms
hereditary, where they have
any their any eminent
privileges, are honourable;
otherwise not for their power
consisteth either in such
privileges, or in riches, or some
such thing as is equally
honoured in other men. This
kind of honour, commonly
called gentry, has been derived
from the ancient Germans. For
there never was any such thing
known where the German
customs were unknown. Nor is
it now anywhere in use where
the Germans have not
inhabited. The ancient Greek
commanders, when they went
to war, had their shields
painted with such devices as
they pleased; insomuch as an
unpainted buckler was a sign of
poverty, and of a common
soldier; but they transmitted
not the inheritance of them.
The Romans transmitted the
marks of their families; but
they were the images, not the
devices of their ancestors.
Amongst the people of Asia,
Africa, and America, there is
not, nor was ever, any such
thing. Germans only had that
custom; from whom it has been
derived into England, France,
Spain and Italy, when in great
numbers they either aided the
Romans or made their own
conquests in these western
parts of the world.
For Germany, being anciently,
as all other countries in their
beginnings, divided amongst an
infinite number of little lords,
or masters of families, that
continually had wars one with
another, those masters, or
lords, principally to the end
they might, when they were
covered with arms, be known by
their followers, and partly for
ornament, both painted their
armor, or their scutcheon, or
coat, with the picture of some
beast, or other thing, and also
put some eminent and visible
mark upon the crest of their
helmets. And this ornament
both of the arms and crest
descended by inheritance to
their children; to the eldest
pure, and to the rest with some
note of diversity, such as the
old master, that is to say in
Dutch, the Here-alt, thought
fit. But when many such
families, joined together, made
a greater monarchy, this duty
of the herald to distinguish
scutcheons was made a private
office apart. And the issue of
these lords is the great and
ancient gentry; which for the
most part bear living creatures
noted for courage and rapine; or
castles, battlements, belts,
weapons, bars, palisades, and
other notes of war; nothing
being then in honour, but virtue
military. Afterwards, not only
kings, but popular
Commonwealths, gave diverse
manners of scutcheons to such
as went forth to the war, or
returned from it, for
encouragement or recompense
to their service. All which, by an
observing reader, may be found
in such ancient histories, Greek
and Latin, as make mention of
the German nation and
manners in their times.
Titles of honour, such as are
duke, count, marquis, and
baron, are honourable; as
signifying the value set upon
them by the sovereign power of
the Commonwealth: which
titles were in old time titles of
office and command derived
some from the Romans, some
from the Germans and French.
Dukes, in Latin, duces, being
generals in war; counts,
comites, such as bore the
general company out of
friendship, and were left to
govern and defend places
conquered and pacified;
marquises, marchioness, were
counts that governed the
marches, or bounds of the
Empire. Which titles of duke,
count, and marquis came into
the Empire about the time of
Constantine the Great, from
the customs of the German
militia. But baron seems to
have been a title of the Gauls,
and signifies a great man; such
as were the kings' or princes'
men whom they employed in
war about their persons; and
seems to be derived from vir, to
ber, and bar, that signified the
same in the language of the
Gauls, that vir in Latin; and
thence to bero and baro: so that
such men were called berones,
and after barones; and (in
Spanish) varones. But he that
would know more, particularly
the original of titles of honour,
may find it, as I have done this,
in Mr. Selden's most excellent
treatise of that subject. In
process of time these offices of
honour, by occasion of trouble,
and for reasons of good and
peaceable government, were
turned into mere titles, serving,
for the most part, to
distinguish the precedence,
place, and order of subjects in
the Commonwealth: and men
were made dukes, counts,
marquises, and barons of
places, wherein they had
neither possession nor
command, and other titles also
were devised to the same end.
Worthiness is a thing different
from the worth or value of a
man, and also from his merit or
desert, and consisteth in a
particular power or ability for
that whereof he is said to be
worthy; which particular ability
is usually named fitness, or
aptitude.
For he is worthiest to be a
commander, to be a judge, or to
have any other charge, that is
best fitted with the qualities
required to the well discharging
of it; and worthiest of riches,
that has the qualities most
requisite for the well using of
them: any of which qualities
being absent, one may
nevertheless be a worthy man,
and valuable for something
else. Again, a man may be
worthy of riches, office, and
employment that nevertheless
can plead no right to have it
before another, and therefore
cannot be said to merit or
deserve it. For merit
presupposeth a right, and that
the thing deserved is due by
promise, of which I shall say
more hereafter when I shall
speak of contracts.
CHAPTER XI
OF THE DIFFERENCE OF
MANNERS
BY MANNERS, I mean not
here decency of behaviour; as
how one man should salute
another, or how a man should
wash his mouth, or pick his
teeth before company, and such
other points of the small
morals; but those qualities of
mankind that concern their
living together in peace and
unity. To which end we are to
consider that the felicity of this
life consisteth not in the repose
of a mind satisfied. For there is
no such finis ultimus (utmost
aim) nor summum bonum
(greatest good) as is spoken of
in the books of the old moral
philosophers. Nor can a man
any more live whose desires are
at an end than he whose senses
and imaginations are at a
stand. Felicity is a continual
progress of the desire from one
object to another, the attaining
of the former being still but the
way to the latter. The cause
whereof is that the object of
man's desire is not to enjoy once
only, and for one instant of
time, but to assure forever the
way of his future desire. And
therefore the voluntary actions
and inclinations of all men tend
not only to the procuring, but
also to the assuring of a
contented life, and differ only in
the way, which ariseth partly
from the diversity of passions
in diverse men, and partly from
the difference of the knowledge
or opinion each one has of the
causes which produce the effect
desired.
So that in the first place, I put
for a general inclination of all
mankind a perpetual and
restless desire of power after
power, that ceaseth only in
death. And the cause of this is
not always that a man hopes
for a more intensive delight
than he has already attained
to, or that he cannot be content
with a moderate power, but
because he cannot assure the
power and means to live well,
which he hath present, without
the acquisition of more. And
from hence it is that kings,
whose power is greatest, turn
their endeavours to the
assuring it at home by laws, or
abroad by wars: and when that
is done, there succeedeth a new
desire; in some, of fame from
new conquest; in others, of ease
and sensual pleasure; in others,
of admiration, or being
flattered for excellence in some
art or other ability of the mind.
Competition of riches, honour,
command, or other power
inclineth to contention, enmity,
and war, because the way of one
competitor to the attaining of
his desire is to kill, subdue,
supplant, or repel the other.
Particularly, competition of
praise inclineth to a reverence
of antiquity. For men contend
with the living, not with the
dead; to these ascribing more
than due, that they may
obscure the glory of the other.
Desire of ease, and sensual
delight, disposeth men to obey
a common power: because by
such desires a man doth
abandon the protection that
might be hoped for from his
own industry and labour. Fear
of death and wounds disposeth
to the same, and for the same
reason. On the contrary, needy
men and hardy, not contented
with their present condition, as
also all men that are ambitious
of military command, are
inclined to continue the causes
of war and to stir up trouble
and sedition: for there is no
honour military but by war; nor
any such hope to mend an ill
game as by causing a new
shuffle.
Desire of knowledge, and arts
of peace, inclineth men to obey a
common power: for such desire
containeth a desire of leisure,
and consequently protection
from some other power than
their own.
Desire of praise disposeth to
laudable actions, such as please
them whose judgement they
value; for of those men whom
we contemn, we contemn also
the praises. Desire of fame after
death does the same. And
though after death there be no
sense of the praise given us on
earth, as being joys that are
either swallowed up in the
unspeakable joys of heaven or
extinguished in the extreme
torments of hell: yet is not such
fame vain; because men have a
present delight therein, from
the foresight of it, and of the
benefit that may redound
thereby to their posterity:
which though they now see not,
yet they imagine; and anything
that is pleasure in the sense,
the same also is pleasure in the
imagination.
To have received from one, to
whom we think ourselves equal,
greater benefits than there is
hope to requite, disposeth to
counterfeit love, but really
secret hatred, and puts a man
into the estate of a desperate
debtor that, in declining the
sight of his creditor, tacitly
wishes him there where he
might never see him more. For
benefits oblige; and obligation
is thraldom; and unrequitable
obligation, perpetual thraldom;
which is to one's equal, hateful.
But to have received benefits
from one whom we
acknowledge for superior
inclines to love; because the
obligation is no new depression:
and cheerful acceptation (which
men call gratitude) is such an
honour done to the obliger as is
taken generally for retribution.
Also to receive benefits, though
from an equal, or inferior, as
long as there is hope of requital,
disposeth to love: for in the
intention of the receiver, the
obligation is of aid and service
mutual; from whence
proceedeth an emulation of who
shall exceed in benefiting; the
most noble and profitable
contention possible, wherein
the victor is pleased with his
victory, and the other revenged
by confessing it.
To have done more hurt to a
man than he can or is willing to
expiate inclineth the doer to
hate the sufferer. For he must
expect revenge or forgiveness;
both which are hateful.
Fear of oppression disposeth a
man to anticipate or to seek aid
by society: for there is no other
way by which a man can secure
his life and liberty.
Men that distrust their own
subtlety are in tumult and
sedition better disposed for
victory than they that suppose
themselves wise or crafty. For
these love to consult; the other,
fearing to be circumvented to
strike first. And in sedition,
men being always in the
precincts of battle, to hold
together and use all
advantages of force is a better
stratagem than any that can
proceed from subtlety of wit.
Vainglorious men, such as
without being conscious to
themselves of great sufficiency,
delight in supposing
themselves gallant men, are
inclined only to ostentation, but
not to attempt; because when
danger or difficulty appears,
they look for nothing but to
have their insufficiency
discovered.
Vain, glorious men, such as
estimate their sufficiency by
the flattery of other men, or the
fortune of some precedent
action, without assured ground
of hope from the true
knowledge of themselves, are
inclined to rash engaging; and
in the approach of danger, or
difficulty, to retire if they can:
because not seeing the way of
safety they will rather hazard
their honour, which may be
salved with an excuse, than
their lives, for which no salve is
sufficient.
Men that have a strong opinion
of their own wisdom in matter
of government are disposed to
ambition. Because without
public employment in counsel or
magistracy, the honour of their
wisdom is lost. And therefore
eloquent speakers are inclined
to ambition; for eloquence
seemeth wisdom, both to
themselves and others.
Pusillanimity disposeth men to
irresolution, and consequently
to lose the occasions and fittest
opportunities of action. For
after men have been in
deliberation till the time of
action approach, if it be not
then manifest what is best to
be done, it is a sign the
difference of motives the one
way and the other are not
great: therefore not to resolve
then is to lose the occasion by
weighing of trifles, which is
pusillanimity.
Frugality, though in poor men a
virtue, maketh a man unapt to
achieve such actions as require
the strength of many men at
once: for it weakeneth their
endeavour, which to be
nourished and kept in vigour by
reward.
Eloquence, with flattery,
disposeth men to confide in
them that have it; because the
former is seeming wisdom, the
latter seeming kindness. Add
to them military reputation
and it disposeth men to adhere
and subject themselves to those
men that have them. The two
former, having given them
caution against danger from
him, the latter gives them
caution against danger from
others.
Want of science, that is,
ignorance of causes, disposeth
or rather constraineth a man to
rely on the advice and authority
of others. For all men whom the
truth concerns, if they rely not
on their own, must rely on the
opinion of some other whom
they think wiser than
themselves, and see not why he
should deceive them.
Ignorance of the signification of
words, is want of
understanding, disposeth men
to take on trust, not only the
truth they know not, but also
the errors; and which is more,
the nonsense of them they
trust: for neither error nor
nonsense can, without a perfect
understanding of words, be
detected.
From the same it proceedeth
that men give different names
to one and the same thing from
the difference of their own
passions: as they that approve a
private opinion call it opinion;
but they that mislike it, heresy:
and yet heresy signifies no
more than private opinion; but
has only a greater tincture of
choler.
From the same also it
proceedeth that men cannot
distinguish, without study and
great understanding between
one action of many men and
many actions of one multitude;
as for example, between the one
action of all the senators of
Rome in killing Catiline, and
the many actions of a number
of senators in killing Caesar;
and therefore are disposed to
take for the action of the people
that which is a multitude of
actions done by a multitude of
men, led perhaps by the
persuasion of one.
Ignorance of the causes, and
original constitution of right,
equity, law, and justice,
disposeth a man to make
custom and example the rule of
his actions; in such manner as
to think that unjust which it
hath been the custom to
punish; and that just, of the
impunity and approbation
whereof they can produce an
example or (as the lawyers
which only use this false
measure of justice barbarously
call it) a precedent; like little
children that have no other rule
of good and evil manners but
the correction they receive from
their parents and masters; save
that children are constant to
their rule, whereas men are not
so; because grown strong and
stubborn, they appeal from
custom to reason, and from
reason to custom, as it serves
their turn, receding from
custom when their interest
requires it, and setting
themselves against reason as
oft as reason is against them:
which is the cause that the
doctrine of right and wrong is
perpetually disputed, both by
the pen and the sword: whereas
the doctrine of lines and figures
is not so; because men care not,
in that subject, what be truth,
as a thing that crosses no man's
ambition, profit, or lust. For I
doubt not, but if it had been a
thing contrary to any man's
right of dominion, or to the
interest of men that have
dominion, that the three angles
of a triangle should be equal to
two angles of a square, that
doctrine should have been, if
not disputed, yet by the
burning of all books of geometry
suppressed, as far as he whom
it concerned was able.
Ignorance of remote causes
disposeth men to attribute all
events to the causes immediate
and instrumental: for these are
all the causes they perceive.
And hence it comes to pass that
in all places men that are
grieved with payments to the
public discharge their anger
upon the publicans, that is to
say, farmers, collectors, and
other officers of the public
revenue, and adhere to such as
find fault with the public
government; and thereby, when
they have engaged themselves
beyond hope of justification, fall
also upon the supreme
authority, for fear of
punishment, or shame of
receiving pardon.
Ignorance of natural causes
disposeth a man to credulity, so
as to believe many times
impassibilities: for such know
nothing to the contrary, but
that they may be true, being
unable to detect the
impossibility. And credulity,
because men love to be
hearkened unto in company,
disposeth them to lying: so that
ignorance itself, without malice,
is able to make a man both to
believe lies and tell them, and
sometimes also to invent them.
Anxiety for the future time
disposeth men to inquire into
the causes of things: because
the knowledge of them maketh
men the better able to order the
present to their best advantage.
Curiosity, or love of the
knowledge of causes, draws a
man from consideration of the
effect to seek the cause; and
again, the cause of that cause;
till of necessity he must come to
this thought at last, that there
is some cause whereof there is
no former cause, but is eternal;
which is it men call God. So
that it is impossible to make
any profound inquiry into
natural causes without being
inclined thereby to believe there
is one God eternal; though they
cannot have any idea of Him in
their mind answerable to His
nature. For as a man that is
born blind, hearing men talk of
warming themselves by the
fire, and being brought to warm
himself by the same, may easily
conceive, and assure himself,
there is somewhat there which
men call fire and is the cause of
the heat he feels, but cannot
imagine what it is like, nor
have an idea of it in his mind
such as they have that see it: so
also, by the visible things of
this world, and their admirable
order, a man may conceive
there is a cause of them, which
men call God, and yet not have
an idea or image of Him in his
mind.
And they that make little or no
inquiry into the natural causes
of things, yet from the fear that
proceeds from the ignorance
itself of what it is that hath the
power to do them much good or
harm are inclined to suppose,
and feign unto themselves,
several kinds of powers
invisible, and to stand in awe of
their own imaginations, and in
time of distress to invoke them;
as also in the time of an
expected good success, to give
them thanks, making the
creatures of their own fancy
their gods. By which means it
hath come to pass that from the
innumerable variety of fancy,
men have created in the world
innumerable sorts of gods. And
this fear of things invisible is
the natural seed of that which
every one in himself calleth
religion; and in them that
worship or fear that power
otherwise than they do,
superstition.
And this seed of religion,
having been observed by many,
some of those that have
observed it have been inclined
thereby to nourish, dress, and
form it into laws; and to add to
it, of their own invention, any
opinion of the causes of future
events by which they thought
they should best be able to
govern others and make unto
themselves the greatest use of
their powers.
CHAPTER XII
OF RELIGION
SEEING there are no signs nor
fruit of religion but in man only,
there is no cause to doubt but
that the seed of religion is also
only in man; and consisteth in
some peculiar quality, or at
least in some eminent degree
thereof, not to be found in other
living creatures.
And first, it is peculiar to the
nature of man to be inquisitive
into the causes of the events
they see, some more, some less,
but all men so much as to be
curious in the search of the
causes of their own good and
evil fortune.
Secondly, upon the sight of
anything that hath a
beginning, to think also it had a
cause which determined the
same to begin then when it did,
rather than sooner or later.
Thirdly, whereas there is no
other felicity of beasts but the
enjoying of their quotidian food,
ease, and lusts; as having little
or no foresight of the time to
come for want of observation
and memory of the order,
consequence, and dependence of
the things they see; man
observeth how one event hath
been produced by another, and
remembereth in them
antecedence and consequence;
and when he cannot assure
himself of the true causes of
things (for the causes of good
and evil fortune for the most
part are invisible), he supposes
causes of them, either such as
his own fancy suggesteth, or
trusteth to the authority of
other men such as he thinks to
be his friends and wiser than
himself.
The two first make anxiety. For
being assured that there be
causes of all things that have
arrived hitherto, or shall arrive
hereafter, it is impossible for a
man, who continually
endeavoureth to secure himself
against the evil he fears, and
procure the good he desireth,
not to be in a perpetual
solicitude of the time to come;
so that every man, especially
those that are over-provident,
are in an estate like to that of
Prometheus. For as
Prometheus (which,
interpreted, is the prudent
man) was bound to the hill
Caucasus, a place of large
prospect, where an eagle,
feeding on his liver, devoured in
the day as much as was
repaired in the night: so that
man, which looks too far before
him in the care of future time,
hath his heart all the day long
gnawed on by fear of death,
poverty, or other calamity; and
has no repose, nor pause of his
anxiety, but in sleep.
This perpetual fear, always
accompanying mankind in the
ignorance of causes, as it were
in the dark, must needs have
for object something. And
therefore when there is nothing
to be seen, there is nothing to
accuse either of their good or
evil fortune but some power or
agent invisible: in which sense
perhaps it was that some of the
old poets said that the gods
were at first created by human
fear: which, spoken of the gods
(that is to say, of the many
gods of the Gentiles), is very
true. But the acknowledging of
one God eternal, infinite, and
omnipotent may more easily be
derived from the desire men
have to know the causes of
natural bodies, and their
several virtues and operations,
than from the fear of what was
to befall them in time to come.
For he that, from any effect he
seeth come to pass, should
reason to the next and
immediate cause thereof, and
from thence to the cause of that
cause, and plunge himself
profoundly in the pursuit of
causes, shall at last come to
this, that there must be (as
even the heathen philosophers
confessed) one First Mover;
that is, a first and an eternal
cause of all things; which is
that which men mean by the
name of God: and all this
without thought of their
fortune, the solicitude whereof
both inclines to fear and
hinders them from the search
of the causes of other things;
and thereby gives occasion of
feigning of as many gods as
there be men that feign them.
And for the matter, or
substance, of the invisible
agents, so fancied, they could
not by natural cogitation fall
upon any other concept but that
it was the same with that of
the soul of man; and that the
soul of man was of the same
substance with that which
appeareth in a dream to one
that sleepeth; or in a
looking-glass to one that is
awake; which, men not knowing
that such apparitions are
nothing else but creatures of
the fancy, think to be real and
external substances, and
therefore call them ghosts; as
the Latins called them
imagines and umbrae and
thought them spirits (that is,
thin aerial bodies), and those
invisible agents, which they
feared, to be like them, save
that they appear and vanish
when they please. But the
opinion that such spirits were
incorporeal, or immaterial,
could never enter into the mind
of any man by nature; because,
though men may put together
words of contradictory
signification, as spirit and
incorporeal, yet they can never
have the imagination of
anything answering to them:
and therefore, men that by
their own meditation arrive to
the acknowledgement of one
infinite, omnipotent, and
eternal God choose rather to
confess He is incomprehensible
and above their understanding
than to define His nature by
spirit incorporeal, and then
confess their definition to be
unintelligible: or if they give
him such a title, it is not
dogmatically, with intention to
make the Divine Nature
understood, but piously, to
honour Him with attributes of
significations as remote as they
can from the grossness of
bodies visible.
Then, for the way by which they
think these invisible agents
wrought their effects; that is to
say, what immediate causes
they used in bringing things to
pass, men that know not what
it is that we call causing (that
is, almost all men) have no
other rule to guess by but by
observing and remembering
what they have seen to precede
the like effect at some other
time, or times before, without
seeing between the antecedent
and subsequent event any
dependence or connexion at all:
and therefore from the like
things past, they expect the like
things to come; and hope for
good or evil luck,
superstitiously, from things
that have no part at all in the
causing of it: as the Athenians
did for their war at Lepanto
demand another Phormio; the
Pompeian faction for their war
in Africa, another Scipio; and
others have done in diverse
other occasions since. In like
manner they attribute their
fortune to a stander by, to a
lucky or unlucky place, to words
spoken, especially if the name
of God be amongst them, as
charming, and conjuring (the
liturgy of witches); insomuch as
to believe they have power to
turn a stone into bread, bread
into a man, or anything into
anything.
Thirdly, for the worship which
naturally men exhibit to powers
invisible, it can be no other but
such expressions of their
reverence as they would use
towards men; gifts, petitions,
thanks, submission of body,
considerate addresses, sober
behaviour, premeditated words,
swearing (that is, assuring one
another of their promises), by
invoking them. Beyond that,
reason suggesteth nothing, but
leaves them either to rest there,
or for further ceremonies to rely
on those they believe to be
wiser than themselves.
Lastly, concerning how these
invisible powers declare to men
the things which shall
hereafter come to pass,
especially concerning their good
or evil fortune in general, or
good or ill success in any
particular undertaking, men
are naturally at a stand; save
that using to conjecture of the
time to come by the time past,
they are very apt, not only to
take casual things, after one or
two encounters, for prognostics
of the like encounter ever after,
but also to believe the like
prognostics from other men of
whom they have once conceived
a good opinion.
And in these four things,
opinion of ghosts, ignorance of
second causes, devotion
towards what men fear, and
taking of things casual for
prognostics, consisteth the
natural seed of religion; which,
by reason of the different
fancies, judgements, and
passions of several men, hath
grown up into ceremonies so
different that those which are
used by one man are for the
most part ridiculous to another.
For these seeds have received
culture from two sorts of men.
One sort have been they that
have nourished and ordered
them, according to their own
invention. The other have done
it by God's commandment and
direction. But both sorts have
done it with a purpose to make
those men that relied on them
the more apt to obedience, laws,
peace, charity, and civil society.
So that the religion of the
former sort is a part of human
politics; and teacheth part of
the duty which earthly kings
require of their subjects. And
the religion of the latter sort is
divine politics; and containeth
precepts to those that have
yielded themselves subjects in
the kingdom of God. Of the
former sort were all the
founders of Commonwealths,
and the lawgivers of the
Gentiles: of the latter sort were
Abraham, Moses, and our
blessed Saviour, by whom have
been derived unto us the laws
of the kingdom of God.
And for that part of religion
which consisteth in opinions
concerning the nature of powers
invisible, there is almost
nothing that has a name that
has not been esteemed amongst
the Gentiles, in one place or
another, a god or devil; or by
their poets feigned to be
animated, inhabited, or
possessed by some spirit or
other.
The unformed matter of the
world was a god by the name of
Chaos.
The heaven, the ocean, the
planets, the fire, the earth, the
winds, were so many gods.
Men, women, a bird, a crocodile,
a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion,
a leek, were deified. Besides
that, they filled almost all
places with spirits called
demons: the plains, with Pan
and Panises, or Satyrs; the
woods, with Fauns and
Nymphs; the sea, with Tritons
and other Nymphs; every river
and fountain, with a ghost of
his name and with Nymphs;
every house, with its Lares, or
familiars; every man, with his
Genius; Hell, with ghosts and
spiritual officers, as Charon,
Cerberus, and the Furies; and
in the night time, all places
with larvae, lemures, ghosts of
men deceased, and a whole
kingdom of fairies and
bugbears. They have also
ascribed divinity, and built
temples, to mere accidents and
qualities; such as are time,
night, day, peace, concord, love,
contention, virtue, honour,
health, rust, fever, and the like;
which when they prayed for, or
against, they prayed to as if
there were ghosts of those
names hanging over their
heads, and letting fall or
withholding that good, or evil,
for or against which they
prayed. They invoked also their
own wit, by the name of Muses;
their own ignorance, by the
name of Fortune; their own
lust, by the name of Cupid;
their own rage, by the name
Furies; their own privy
members by the name of
Priapus; and attributed their
pollutions to incubi and
succubae: insomuch as there
was nothing which a poet could
introduce as a person in his
poem which they did not make
either a god or a devil.
The same authors of the
religion of the Gentiles,
observing the second ground for
religion, which is men's
ignorance of causes, and
thereby their aptness to
attribute their fortune to
causes on which there was no
dependence at all apparent,
took occasion to obtrude on
their ignorance, instead of
second causes, a kind of second
and ministerial gods; ascribing
the cause of fecundity to Venus,
the cause of arts to Apollo, of
subtlety and craft to Mercury,
of tempests and storms to
Aeolus, and of other effects to
other gods; insomuch as there
was amongst the heathen
almost as great variety of gods
as of business.
And to the worship which
naturally men conceived fit to
be used towards their gods,
namely, oblations, prayers,
thanks, and the rest formerly
named, the same legislators of
the Gentiles have added their
images, both in picture and
sculpture, that the more
ignorant sort (that is to say, the
most part or generality of the
people), thinking the gods for
whose representation they were
made were really included and
as it were housed within them,
might so much the more stand
in fear of them: and endowed
them with lands, and houses,
and officers, and revenues, set
apart from all other human
uses; that is, consecrated, made
holy to those their idols; as
caverns, groves, woods,
mountains, and whole islands;
and have attributed to them,
not only the shapes, some of
men, some of beasts, some of
monsters, but also the faculties
and passions of men and
beasts; as sense, speech, sex,
lust, generation, and this not
only by mixing one with
another to propagate the kind
of gods, but also by mixing with
men and women to beget
mongrel gods, and but inmates
of heaven, as Bacchus,
Hercules, and others; besides,
anger, revenge, and other
passions of living creatures,
and the actions proceeding from
them, as fraud, theft, adultery,
sodomy, and any vice that may
be taken for an effect of power
or a cause of pleasure; and all
such vices as amongst men are
taken to be against law rather
than against honour.
Lastly, to the prognostics of
time to come, which are
naturally but conjectures upon
the experience of time past, and
supernaturally, divine
revelation, the same authors of
the religion of the Gentiles,
partly upon pretended
experience, partly upon
pretended revelation, have
added innumerable other
superstitious ways of
divination, and made men
believe they should find their
fortunes, sometimes in the
ambiguous or senseless
answers of the priests at
Delphi, Delos, Ammon, and
other famous oracles; which
answers were made ambiguous
by design, to own the event
both ways; or absurd, by the
intoxicating vapour of the place,
which is very frequent in
sulphurous caverns: sometimes
in the leaves of the Sibyls, of
whose prophecies, like those
perhaps of Nostradamus (for
the fragments now extant seem
to be the invention of later
times), there were some books
in reputation in the time of the
Roman republic: sometimes in
the insignificant speeches of
madmen, supposed to be
possessed with a divine spirit,
which possession they called
enthusiasm; and these kinds of
foretelling events were
accounted theomancy, or
prophecy: sometimes in the
aspect of the stars at their
nativity, which was called
horoscopy, and esteemed a part
of judiciary astrology:
sometimes in their own hopes
and fears, called and fears,
called thumomancy, or presage:
sometimes in the prediction of
witches that pretended
conference with the dead, which
is called necromancy, conjuring,
and witchcraft, and is but
juggling and confederate
knavery: sometimes in the
casual flight or feeding of birds,
called augury: sometimes in the
entrails of a sacrificed beast,
which was haruspicy:
sometimes in dreams:
sometimes in croaking of
ravens, or chattering of birds:
sometimes in the lineaments of
the face, which was called
metoposcopy; or by palmistry in
the lines of the hand, in casual
words called omina: sometimes
in monsters or unusual
accidents; as eclipses, comets,
rare meteors, earthquakes,
inundations, uncouth births,
and the like, which they called
portenta, and ostenta, because
they thought them to portend
or foreshow some great
calamity to come: sometimes in
mere lottery, as cross and pile;
counting holes in a sieve;
dipping of verses in Homer and
Virgil; and innumerable other
such vain conceits. So easy are
men to be drawn to believe
anything from such men as
have gotten credit with them;
and can with gentleness, and
dexterity, take hold of their
fear and ignorance.
And therefore the first
founders and legislators of
Commonwealths amongst the
Gentiles, whose ends were only
to keep the people in obedience
and peace, have in all places
taken care: first, to imprint
their minds a belief that those
precepts which they gave
concerning religion might not
be thought to proceed from
their own device, but from the
dictates of some god or other
spirit; or else that they
themselves were of a higher
nature than mere mortals, that
their laws might the more
easily be received; so Numa
Pompilius pretended to receive
the ceremonies he instituted
amongst the Romans from the
nymph Egeria and the first
king and founder of the
kingdom of Peru pretended
himself and his wife to be the
children of the sun; and
Mahomet, to set up his new
religion, pretended to have
conferences with the Holy
Ghost in form of a dove.
Secondly, they have had a care
to make it believed that the
same things were displeasing
to the gods which were
forbidden by the laws. Thirdly,
to prescribe ceremonies,
supplications, sacrifices, and
festivals by which they were to
believe the anger of the gods
might be appeased; and that ill
success in war, great contagions
of sickness, earthquakes, and
each man's private misery came
from the anger of the gods; and
their anger from the neglect of
their worship, or the forgetting
or mistaking some point of the
ceremonies required. And
though amongst the ancient
Romans men were not
forbidden to deny that which in
the poets is written of the pains
and pleasures after this life,
which divers of great authority
and gravity in that state have
in their harangues openly
derided, yet that belief was
always more cherished, than
the contrary.
And by these, and such other
institutions, they obtained in
order to their end, which was
the peace of the
Commonwealth, that the
common people in their
misfortunes, laying the fault on
neglect, or error in their
ceremonies, or on their own
disobedience to the laws, were
the less apt to mutiny against
their governors. And being
entertained with the pomp and
pastime of festivals and public
games made in honour of the
gods, needed nothing else but
bread to keep them from
discontent, murmuring, and
commotion against the state.
And therefore the Romans, that
had conquered the greatest
part of the then known world,
made no scruple of tolerating
any religion whatsoever in the
city of Rome itself, unless it
had something in it that could
not consist with their civil
government; nor do we read
that any religion was there
forbidden but that of the Jews,
who (being the peculiar
kingdom of God) thought it
unlawful to acknowledge
subjection to any mortal king or
state whatsoever. And thus you
see how the religion of the
Gentiles was a part of their
policy.
But where God himself by
supernatural revelation planted
religion, there he also made to
himself a peculiar kingdom,
and gave laws, not only of
behaviour towards himself, but
also towards one another; and
thereby in the kingdom of God,
the policy and laws civil are a
part of religion; and therefore
the distinction of temporal and
spiritual domination hath there
no place. It is true that God is
king of all the earth; yet may
He be king of a peculiar and
chosen nation. For there is no
more incongruity therein than
that he that hath the general
command of the whole army
should have withal a peculiar
regiment or company of his
own. God is king of all the earth
by His power, but of His chosen
people, He is king by covenant.
But to speak more largely of the
kingdom of God, both by nature
and covenant, I have in the
following discourse assigned
another place.
From the propagation of
religion, it is not hard to
understand the causes of the
resolution of the same into its
first seeds or principles; which
are only an opinion of a deity,
and powers invisible and
supernatural; that can never be
so abolished out of human
nature, but that new religions
may again be made to spring
out of them by the culture of
such men as for such purpose
are in reputation.
For seeing all formed religion is
founded at first upon the faith
which a multitude hath in some
one person, whom they believe
not only to be a wise man and
to labour to procure their
happiness, but also to be a holy
man to whom God Himself
vouchsafeth to declare His will
supernaturally, it followeth
necessarily when they that
have the government of religion
shall come to have either the
wisdom of those men, their
sincerity, or their love
suspected, or that they shall be
unable to show any probable
token of divine revelation, that
the religion which they desire
to uphold must be suspected
likewise and (without the fear
of the civil sword) contradicted
and rejected.
That which taketh away the
reputation of wisdom in him
that formeth a religion, or
addeth to it when it is already
formed, is the enjoining of a
belief of contradictories: for
both parts of a contradiction
cannot possibly be true, and
therefore to enjoin the belief of
them is an argument of
ignorance, which detects the
author in that, and discredits
him in all things else he shall
propound as from revelation
supernatural: which revelation
a man may indeed have of
many things above, but of
nothing against natural reason.
That which taketh away the
reputation of sincerity is the
doing or saying of such things
as appear to be signs that what
they require other men to
believe is not believed by
themselves; all which doings or
sayings are therefore called
scandalous because they be
stumbling-blocks that make
men to fall in the way of
religion: as injustice, cruelty,
profaneness, avarice, and
luxury. For who can believe
that he that doth ordinarily
such actions, as proceed from
any of these roots, believeth
there is any such invisible
power to be feared as he
affrighteth other men withal
for lesser faults?
That which taketh away the
reputation of love is the being
detected of private ends: as
when the belief they require of
others conduceth, or seemeth to
conduce, to the acquiring of
dominion, riches, dignity, or
secure pleasure to themselves
only or specially. For that which
men reap benefit by to
themselves they are thought to
do for their own sakes, and not
for love of others.
Lastly, the testimony that men
can render of divine calling can
be no other than the operation
of miracles, or true prophecy
(which also is a miracle), or
extraordinary felicity. And
therefore, to those points of
religion which have been
received from them that did
such miracles, those that are
added by such as approve not
their calling by some miracle
obtain no greater belief than
what the custom and laws of
the places in which they be
educated have wrought into
them. For as in natural things
men of judgement require
natural signs and arguments,
so in supernatural things they
require signs supernatural
(which are miracles) before they
consent inwardly and from
their hearts.
All which causes of the
weakening of men's faith do
manifestly appear in the
examples following. First, we
have the example of the
children of Israel, who, when
Moses that had approved his
calling to them by miracles, and
by the happy conduct of them
out of Egypt, was absent but
forty days, revolted from the
worship of the true God
recommended to them by him,
and, setting up* a golden calf
for their god, relapsed into the
idolatry of the Egyptians from
whom they had been so lately
delivered. And again, after
Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and that
generation which had seen the
great works of God in Israel
were dead, another generation
arose and served Baal.*(2) So
that Miracles failing, faith also
failed.
* Exodus, 32. 1, 2
*(2) Judges, 2. 11
Again, when the sons of
Samuel, being constituted by
their father judges in
Beer-sheba, received bribes
and judged unjustly, the people
of Israel refused any more to
have God to be their king in
other manner than He was king
of other people, and therefore
cried out to Samuel to choose
them a king after the manner
of the nations.* So that justice
failing, faith also failed,
insomuch as they deposed their
God from reigning over them.
* I Samuel, 8. 3
And whereas in the planting of
Christian religion the oracles
ceased in all parts of the Roman
Empire, and the number of
Christians increased
wonderfully every day and in
every place by the preaching of
the Apostles and Evangelists, a
great part of that success may
reasonably be attributed to the
contempt into which the priests
of the Gentiles of that time had
brought themselves by their
uncleanness, avarice, and
juggling between princes. Also
the religion of the Church of
Rome was partly for the same
cause abolished in England and
many other parts of
Christendom, insomuch as the
failing of virtue in the pastors
maketh faith fail in the people,
and partly from bringing of the
philosophy and doctrine of
Aristotle into religion by the
Schoolmen; from whence there
arose so many contradictions
and absurdities as brought the
clergy into a reputation both of
ignorance and of fraudulent
intention, and inclined people to
revolt from them, either
against the will of their own
princes as in France and
Holland, or with their will as in
England.
Lastly, amongst the points by
the Church of Rome declared
necessary for salvation, there
be so many manifestly to the
advantage of the Pope so many
of his spiritual subjects
residing in the territories of
other Christian princes that,
were it not for the mutual
emulation of those princes, they
might without war or trouble
exclude all foreign authority, as
easily as it has been excluded in
England. For who is there that
does not see to whose benefit it
conduceth to have it believed
that a king hath not his
authority from Christ unless a
bishop crown him? That a king,
if he be a priest, cannot marry?
That whether a prince be born
in lawful marriage, or not, must
be judged by authority from
Rome? That subjects may be
freed from their allegiance if by
the court of Rome the king be
judged a heretic? That a king,
as Childeric of France, may be
deposed by a Pope, as Pope
Zachary, for no cause, and his
kingdom given to one of his
subjects? That the clergy, and
regulars, in what country
soever, shall be exempt from
the jurisdiction of their king in
cases criminal? Or who does not
see to whose profit redound the
fees of private Masses, and
vales of purgatory, with other
signs of private interest enough
to mortify the most lively faith,
if, as I said, the civil magistrate
and custom did not more
sustain it than any opinion
they have of the sanctity,
wisdom, or probity of their
teachers? So that I may
attribute all the changes of
religion in the world to one and
the same cause, and that is
unpleasing priests; and those
not only amongst catholics, but
even in that Church that hath
presumed most of reformation.
CHAPTER XIII
OF THE NATURAL
CONDITION OF MANKIND
AS CONCERNING THEIR
FELICITY AND MISERY
NATURE hath made men so
equal in the faculties of body
and mind as that, though there
be found one man sometimes
manifestly stronger in body or
of quicker mind than another,
yet when all is reckoned
together the difference between
man and man is not so
considerable as that one man
can thereupon claim to himself
any benefit to which another
may not pretend as well as he.
For as to the strength of body,
the weakest has strength
enough to kill the strongest,
either by secret machination or
by confederacy with others that
are in the same danger with
himself.
And as to the faculties of the
mind, setting aside the arts
grounded upon words, and
especially that skill of
proceeding upon general and
infallible rules, called science,
which very few have and but in
few things, as being not a
native faculty born with us, nor
attained, as prudence, while we
look after somewhat else, I find
yet a greater equality amongst
men than that of strength. For
prudence is but experience,
which equal time equally
bestows on all men in those
things they equally apply
themselves unto. That which
may perhaps make such
equality incredible is but a vain
conceit of one's own wisdom,
which almost all men think
they have in a greater degree
than the vulgar; that is, than
all men but themselves, and a
few others, whom by fame, or
for concurring with themselves,
they approve. For such is the
nature of men that howsoever
they may acknowledge many
others to be more witty, or more
eloquent or more learned, yet
they will hardly believe there be
many so wise as themselves; for
they see their own wit at hand,
and other men's at a distance.
But this proveth rather that
men are in that point equal,
than unequal. For there is not
ordinarily a greater sign of the
equal distribution of anything
than that every man is
contented with his share.
From this equality of ability
ariseth equality of hope in the
attaining of our ends. And
therefore if any two men desire
the same thing, which
nevertheless they cannot both
enjoy, they become enemies;
and in the way to their end
(which is principally their own
conservation, and sometimes
their delectation only)
endeavour to destroy or subdue
one another. And from hence it
comes to pass that where an
invader hath no more to fear
than another man's single
power, if one plant, sow, build,
or possess a convenient seat,
others may probably be
expected to come prepared with
forces united to dispossess and
deprive him, not only of the
fruit of his labour, but also of
his life or liberty. And the
invader again is in the like
danger of another.
And from this diffidence of one
another, there is no way for any
man to secure himself so
reasonable as anticipation; that
is, by force, or wiles, to master
the persons of all men he can so
long till he see no other power
great enough to endanger him:
and this is no more than his
own conservation requireth,
and is generally allowed. Also,
because there be some that,
taking pleasure in
contemplating their own power
in the acts of conquest, which
they pursue farther than their
security requires, if others, that
otherwise would be glad to be
at ease within modest bounds,
should not by invasion increase
their power, they would not be
able, long time, by standing
only on their defence, to
subsist. And by consequence,
such augmentation of dominion
over men being necessary to a
man's conservation, it ought to
be allowed him.
Again, men have no pleasure
(but on the contrary a great
deal of grief) in keeping
company where there is no
power able to overawe them all.
For every man looketh that his
companion should value him at
the same rate he sets upon
himself, and upon all signs of
contempt or undervaluing
naturally endeavours, as far as
he dares (which amongst them
that have no common power to
keep them in quiet is far
enough to make them destroy
each other), to extort a greater
value from his contemners, by
damage; and from others, by
the example.
So that in the nature of man,
we find three principal causes
of quarrel. First, competition;
secondly, diffidence; thirdly,
glory.
The first maketh men invade
for gain; the second, for safety;
and the third, for reputation.
The first use violence, to make
themselves masters of other
men's persons, wives, children,
and cattle; the second, to
defend them; the third, for
trifles, as a word, a smile, a
different opinion, and any other
sign of undervalue, either direct
in their persons or by reflection
in their kindred, their friends,
their nation, their profession, or
their name.
Hereby it is manifest that
during the time men live
without a common power to
keep them all in awe, they are
in that condition which is called
war; and such a war as is of
every man against every man.
For war consisteth not in battle
only, or the act of fighting, but
in a tract of time, wherein the
will to contend by battle is
sufficiently known: and
therefore the notion of time is
to be considered in the nature
of war, as it is in the nature of
weather. For as the nature of
foul weather lieth not in a
shower or two of rain, but in an
inclination thereto of many
days together: so the nature of
war consisteth not in actual
fighting, but in the known
disposition thereto during all
the time there is no assurance
to the contrary. All other time
is peace.
Whatsoever therefore is
consequent to a time of war,
where every man is enemy to
every man, the same
consequent to the time wherein
men live without other security
than what their own strength
and their own invention shall
furnish them withal. In such
condition there is no place for
industry, because the fruit
thereof is uncertain: and
consequently no culture of the
earth; no navigation, nor use of
th
|
000509
|
|
... |
|
|
calliope
|
what would you say if i said i wanted to fuck you so bad
that i burned and i screamed and i ached for you all the time
i think you'd take care of it
i want you so!
|
000514
|
|
... |
|
|
the shooter
|
someone who wrote that agonizingly long entry above needs to be shot!!
|
000517
|
|
... |
|
|
MollyCule
|
fuck is the only word in the English language that can correctly fit in ang grammatical place.
Examples - That's so fucking ugly! - Adjective
I fucked him. - Verb
Hey, did you know - Oh, fuck! - I didn't tell you! - Interjection.
I could go on, but I think you all took 8th grade English.
Also - supposedly is actually an anagram, when married couples had to have permission to get it on. F U C K stands for Fornication Under Consent of King.
|
000521
|
|
... |
|
|
WoNDERGIRL
|
I want to fuck you like an animal
even though to do so
may cause blindness
or in my case
pregnancy
|
000521
|
|
... |
|
|
lisa_is_bionic
|
Never thought I'd get any higher
Never thought you'd fuck with my brain
Never thought all this could expire
Never thought you'd go break the chain
Me and you baby
Still flush all the pain away
|
000525
|
|
... |
|
|
lancaster
|
when i am in this state.
i will dampen thighs with love.
and the chorus swells.
yes.
maybe.
|
000527
|
|
... |
|
|
moonshine
|
Don't make get the dish soap and wash all your dirty mouths out..
|
000602
|
|
... |
|
|
Liz Phair
|
I woke up alarmed
I didn't know where I was at first
Just that I woke up in your arms
And almost immediately I felt sorry
'Cause I didn't think this would happen again
No matter what I could do or say
Just that I didn't think this would happen again
With or without my best intentions, and
What ever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who tries to win you over, and
What ever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who makes love cause he's in it, and
I want a boyfriend
I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old shit
Like letters and sodas Letters and sodas
You got up out of bed
You said you had a lot of work to do
But I heard the rest in your head
And almost immediately I felt sorry
'Cause I didn't think this would happen again
No matter what I could do or say
Just that I didn't think this would happen again
With or without my best intentions, and
I want a boyfriend I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old shit
Like letters and sodas Letters and sodas
I can feel it in my bones
I'm gonna spend another year alone
It's fuck and run Fuck and run
Even when I was seventeen
Fuck and run Fuck and run
Even when I was twelve
You almost felt bad
You said that I should call you up but
I knew much better than that
And almost immediately I felt sorry
'Cause I didn't think this would happen again
No matter what I could do or say
Just that I didn't think this would happen again
With or without my best intentions
And I can feel it in my bones
I'm gonna spend my whole life alone
It's fuck and run Fuck and run
Even when I was seventeen
Fuck and run Fuck and run
Even when I was twelve
|
000604
|
|
... |
|
|
bob
|
It is a word for people who arn't intelegent enough to know real words
|
000720
|
|
... |
|
|
stan
|
There is no such word as intelegent, perhaps intelligent was meant. Try spelling fuck, it's easier, and a favorite of geniuses throughout the centuries.
|
000731
|
|
... |
|
|
gonut
|
My middle name? Maybe someday.
|
000810
|
|
... |
|
|
sleepless
|
Not a nice word, frankly. I used it a lot when it had the power to shock. I still use it far too much, but it simply doesn't have the power to shock anymore, does it?
|
000822
|
|
... |
|
|
Aaron
|
F.U.C.K
Forbiden Use of Carnal Knowlege
|
000823
|
|
... |
|
|
Aaron
|
F.U.C.K
Forbidden Use of Carnal Knowlege
|
000823
|
|
... |
|
|
claw
|
it
a phrase that has saved me a thousand times. fuck it, you only live once...fuck it, there will be better days...fuck it, she wasn't worth the time...fuck it, i will survive
|
000826
|
|
... |
|
|
firippusan
|
dilapadated elongated forensic phallacy
|
000829
|
|
... |
|
|
Becca
|
It's a noun, part of an adjective, and one of my very favorite "doing words" (verbs).
|
001112
|
|
... |
|
|
kate
|
she up and left one day
living in a blink -
like recovering. eating my life away
like love
like
loss
|
001122
|
|
... |
|
|
ImmogeneAndDahlia
|
I think the anagram for it is Fornication UnderCarnal Knowledge
meaning you are fornication before you are marrige and you know it...i think
|
001210
|
|
... |
|
|
Ariadne
|
it's love making now. it doesn't hurt anymore.
|
001214
|
|
... |
|
|
stupidpunkgirl
|
so i don't want to.
don't leave me.
you're older.
i'm still so young.
don't make me.
|
001218
|
|
... |
|
|
COLDandBLUEkitty
|
something that i would do to:
jesse pearson
jason pearson
(ok.. i'd prefur both, at the same time)
yummy aaron
the old skool boys (the owners of scuz)
but some of them wern't that pretty.. so i'd have to drink a little of rich's band's beer first.
|
001222
|
|
... |
|
|
COLDandBLUEkitty
|
something that i would do to:
jesse pearson
jason pearson
(ok.. i'd prefur both, at the same time)
yummy aaron
the old skool boys (the owners of scuz)
but some of them wern't that pretty.. so i'd have to drink a little of rich's band's beer first.
|
001222
|
|
... |
|
|
J.
|
its a fucking word.
|
001227
|
|
... |
|
|
peyton
|
I want to be the boyfriend that writes the letters, and makes love because he's in it.
I tried that once. They told me I was too nice and that I should be mean. Leave them wanting more, she said.
So does is anyone out there in the market for guy that doesn't want to add another notch to the fuck belt and go on?
Hello? Is anyone out there?
|
010116
|
|
... |
|
|
*Colleen*
|
FUCK FUCK FUCK! MILF-MOM ID LIKE TA FUCK! LAAADEEDAA FUCK YOU
|
010121
|
|
... |
|
|
claus larson
|
GO FUCK YOUR ASS OFF
|
010122
|
|
... |
|
|
depressed
|
since i know that noone will read this, it will not matter what i say. if you do read this please let me know (e-mail me) to make me feel whole again. Fuck it all.
|
010202
|
|
... |
|
|
Lunakittey
|
He fucked her at 609...
|
010222
|
|
... |
|
|
firehunden
|
it is a word and nothing more....it has been twisted by human behaviour into a meaning of something different, something worse, or better, it makes no difference. What is important is that we, have given this simple four letter word a non-existant meaning of power, hate, love, coldness, insensitivity, indifference, and whatever other malformations of meaning that we can think of.
It is only a word.
....and I use it.
|
010223
|
|
... |
|
|
beck
|
shit
|
010301
|
|
... |
|
|
Frizzie
|
If I could do anything I would make everyone feel the pain I feel when I can't do anything about my situation.
Then I say, "Fuck YOU!" and leave and never come back to the shit you gave me.
|
010312
|
|
... |
|
|
mikey
|
me with a spoon backwards and call me george.
dont ask. because i got no clue myself.
|
010312
|
|
... |
|
|
cheeze
|
fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck
|
010312
|
|
... |
|
|
Tangent
|
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 16:46:48 EDT
From: You can look this up yoursellves if you wish
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Etymology of a Dirty Word
A topic that frequently comes up in this newsgroup is word or phrase origins, especially when the origins are obscure or
there are folkloric aspects to the origin. A prime example is the word fuck. Many people think that fuck is derived as an
acronym of For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge or Fornication Under Consent of the King. These people are wrong. The word
fuck is a good 500 years old, with cognates that are much older. For more information on the etymology of fuck, as well as
many other word and phrase origins, please consult the /pub/cathouse/urban.legends/language/ directory at the cathouse
archives. Another good source is the _Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang_, which has pages and pages
of definitions. They quote alt.sex.stories on to fill with fuck, but don't get the definition of flying fuck completely correct.
I chanced upon a reference on the etymology of fuck, and thought that I'd share what I found. The article is "An Obscenity
Symbol," by Allen Walker Read, in _American Speech_, 9 n. 4, (December 1934): 264-278. It's quite an enjoyable read and
only briefly touches on the etymology of the word, which is fine; the main focus is on the history of the word in the language,
in dictionaries, and popular speech. Interestingly, Read always uses "our word" or "the word" instead of "fuck," but it's
pretty obvious what word he's talking about.
The first appearance of the word fuck was in a poem by William Dunbar, entitled Ane [or A] Brash of Wowing or In Secreit
Place. The poem was composed in 1503, at the latest. Dunbar was Scottish, and the other early recorded uses of fuck are
also from Scots. Read concludes that "either the word had little stigma in this resion and was merely a counterpart of
Chaucer's swive, or that the Scots were bolder in speech than their southern neighbors." You be the judge.
I found the poem in _The Poems of William Dunbar_, James Kinsley, ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, 40-42.
Here are the first two stanzas of the poem:
In secreit place this hindir nycht
I hard ane bern say till a bricht:
My hunny, my houp, my hairt, my heill,
I haif bene lang your lufar leill
And can yow gett confort nane;
How lang will ye with denger deill?
Ye brek my hart, my bony ane.
His bony berd wes kemd and croppit
Bot all with kaill it was bedroppit
And he was townsyche, peirt and gukkit. He clappit fast, he kist, he chukkit
As with the glaikkis he were ourgane--
Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane.
Apparently, this is about a romantic liason between a kitchen maid and a smooth-talking city boy. A colleague of Michele
Tepper's has provided a translation. Please email me if you're interested.
Please feel free to follow up to this post. Don't, however, even think about suggesting that you heard that fuck is derived from
an acronym. It isn't, and the idea has absolutely no basis in fact.
Will "you know what we'll do" Wheeler
She was a glorious fuck. Later it rained
|
010319
|
|
... |
|
|
Hardcore
|
http://ShadowSpire.homestead.com/shadowspire.html
|
010321
|
|
... |
|
|
Deniedu
|
Why does this one word discribe everything?
|
010326
|
|
... |
|
|
Habeeb the Defiler
|
Fuck fuckity fuck fuck...modern poetry
|
010403
|
|
... |
|
|
nocturnal
|
fuck you aurora
you took my only friend
you won't catch me behind the wheel of a chrysler ever again
-alkaline trio
|
010403
|
|
... |
|
|
mama
|
why do you have to do the fucky sucky
|
010420
|
|
... |
|
|
crissa
|
he likes to hear me say, F*ck me now, Manny. he thinks i'm naughty... and he likes it.
|
010424
|
|
... |
|
|
yoink
|
I saw her at my castle. Standing, waiting, annoyed. Why should I come talk to her if all she'll do is destroy my beliefs, my perceptions, and my soul? Two-faced sellout bitch. It wasn't me this time.
|
010426
|
|
... |
|
|
god bless
|
I will use this in the imperative as a signal of angry dismissal
then you will fuck off
(ha ha thats funny)
|
010428
|
|
... |
|
|
Caliban Inconnu
|
there were women, once. there were many of them. many over the years. shapes of light and paint-smeared shadows, hard points of memory in an otherwise blurred continuity three decades long, from now until my beginning of time. there were women, once. some a long stretch of honeyed memory ending in glass and smoke, sometimes a brief bright wet flicker, only as long as it took them to take what they needed. there were women, once. they took what they needed. i let them.
|
010429
|
|
... |
|
|
fuck
|
my name
|
010430
|
|
... |
|
|
fart
|
fuck is a simply a word used to add emphasis to anything. Meaning if you are really mad you would say this really FUCKIN pisses me off. But Fuck can be used to emphasise cool things like Fuck ya. Usually this is only used by people who are attpempting to look tuff or something
|
010508
|
|
... |
|
|
James
|
You don't eat or sleep or mow the lawn
|
010511
|
|
... |
|
|
noa
|
you just FUCK your uncle ALL DAY LONG!
|
010512
|
|
... |
|
|
lokje
|
ahhhhh
|
010516
|
|
... |
|
|
pynk
|
mmm . . . sex
nice, hard, growling, quivering, wanting more, wanting it all at once
|
010703
|
|
... |
|
|
plastic
|
sears
|
010706
|
|
... |
|
|
the MAN
|
what the fuck!!! every fucken time
my bitch always wants it in the ass
should i fuck her in the ass?
or should i enpreganent her?
one way or the other...
my life is fucked up already!!
|
010721
|
|
... |
|
|
Casey
|
She wants to fuck everyone but me. In a way I'm grateful that she doesn't.
|
010721
|
|
... |
|
|
TERMINATOR
|
WHO THA FUCK ARE YOU?
|
010801
|
|
... |
|
|
click
|
it's like that dirty contracting tingling feeling you get when you want it bad- so bad you can almost feel it, and then you get it and you even particularly WANT doggy that time, and you want him to pull your hair.
|
010821
|
|
... |
|
|
Qryssi
|
I worship the creator of the word. Thank you Miss/Mr/Mrs. Fuck, whoever you are. You've given us a real gift; the gift of... um.. being able to say fuck. Yeah...
|
010910
|
|
... |
|
|
Marcus
|
Fornication Under Certified Knowledge.
I still wish though...
that I was, bulletproof.
=(
|
010910
|
|
... |
|
|
FUCK:
|
What every guy is after, if he is showing you any attention.
|
010913
|
|
... |
|
|
Scarlet
|
FUCK TERRORISTS. Fuck them to pieces.
|
011003
|
|
... |
|
|
too many chromosomes
|
you, where's my ritalin
|
011004
|
|
... |
|
|
Blah
|
Fuck to police... Good bye morphine... hello cloves... long and black
|
011006
|
|
... |
|
|
father
|
what the fuck is this
|
011106
|
|
... |
|
|
birdmad
|
"...i guess
it's got something
to do with luck..."
violent_femmes
|
011106
|
|
... |
|
|
Aaron
|
something i'd like to do... damn .. it's been a year.. i need a good fuck... fuck, sex, bone, hump, scrump, thump, banging in the bushes, sucking in the shower, screwing on the table, bumping on the couch, all the girls i've fucked all over this house......
|
011107
|
|
... |
|
|
suck
|
tittie fuck!
|
011108
|
|
... |
|
|
piercedjenny
|
something i love to do, and just don't do enough of. fuck me with toys all over the house, in the shower, by the pool in the front bay window.
fuck me and tape it so i can watch us later while i finger fuck myself.
get nasty with me.. i want a loud, hard, screaming moaning biting scratching sloppy fuckfest. i want to beg, or you to beg. i want you to fuck my mind as well as my body.
god i need to get laid.
|
011112
|
|
... |
|
|
m ;-7
|
hey pierced what are you doing later?
|
011116
|
|
... |
|
|
piercedjenny
|
fucking sucking licking kissing... depends on the partner and where the desires lead...
you?
|
011121
|
|
... |
|
|
Bob
|
Finding Uncertain Common Knowledge
|
011123
|
|
... |
|
|
ClairE
|
My favorite word, according to Mim.
It's just : )
So much hype.
I like it.
|
011126
|
|
... |
|
|
grant240
|
fuck says me to you
then who to boo.
hey boo,
you knew you jew!
i cant believe you blew
straight through.
i think i'll sue
your whole crew.
fuck you!
|
011201
|
|
... |
|
|
rip
|
fuck you, fuck me women, and fuck the world
|
011201
|
|
... |
|
|
rip
|
fuck you, fuck me ladies, and fuck the world
|
011201
|
|
... |
|
|
no
|
i think it would be fun if we fucked, don't you?
because fucking is the kind of thing that's lots of fucking fun to do.
freaky folks and funky folks fuck, so do you wanna fuck shit up or fuck my friend or fucking what's it fucking to you?
now what's her name had intercourse with general patton. but whom cares, cause they were married and they used a word derived from latin.
|
020112
|
|
... |
|
|
no
|
wang wang wang wang wang
|
020112
|
|
... |
|
|
Gerald
|
The only word in the English language alternately called the "F" word.
|
020124
|
|
... |
|
|
Boolean
|
As George Carlin once so elloquently put: Say it loudly! And proudly! FUCK YOU!
|
020127
|
|
... |
|
|
fucker
|
fuck you brittany you are a bitch
|
020201
|
|
... |
|
|
J
|
wanna fuck? i dont think ill ever get bored with it.
|
020227
|
|
... |
|
|
pat (from hagerstown)
|
what do a rabbi, a preist, and a duck have in common? not a fucking thing!!! oh yeah, wait, FUCKO
fuck you asshole
shit fuck. fart huffer. man whore bitch shit. satan bitch. cunt turd. cunt shit eater fuck.....dammit hell fuckin....urggg
|
020313
|
|
... |
|
|
Syrope
|
you always have to "accidently" rub up against me when you're hard...no matter what i'm trying to do..all thoughts plummet into the gutter and all i want to do is rip your clothes off and fuck you. i didn't say i didnt like it...
|
020313
|
|
... |
|
|
jim downside
|
man they suck
|
020412
|
|
... |
|
|
brandi
|
is something I'm not allowed to say or do...
inhibited expression
|
020420
|
|
... |
|
|
andy
|
the best time of my life started with a little FUCK
|
020421
|
|
... |
|
|
andy
|
fuck is nice
|
020421
|
|
... |
|
|
me
|
super
|
020423
|
|
... |
|
|
lolabigcups
|
you deserved it.
|
020507
|
|
... |
|
|
indie.chickadee
|
my favorite word. like, ever.
|
020508
|
|
... |
|
|
BrotherDB
|
The very best fucking word in the English fucking language.
|
020509
|
|
... |
|
|
ash
|
- its just a string of four letters, nothing more, nothing less. People who use it to impress need their head examining, with a hammer, or something.
|
020510
|
|
... |
|
|
timmy
|
- its also the worst word that you can say, so just use the word 'mkay'
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
|
020510
|
|
... |
|
|
CRO
|
its also what i'm not getting, and as a result, what i say to myself quite a lot
|
020510
|
|
... |
|
|
Ariadani
|
wow
^-^
|
020518
|
|
... |
|
|
lillithmalaise
|
1 fuck + fuck 2= a threesome
|
020522
|
|
... |
|
|
gypsy72358
|
go get fucked
fuck is my favourite word
un-FUCKING-believable
|
020522
|
|
... |
|
|
Bitch
|
shut the fuck up.
|
020523
|
|
... |
|
|
carl sagan
|
i dont think fucking will help either
|
020527
|
|
... |
|
|
quickie
|
Actually my favorite swearing phrase is "holy shit" because it's what pops out of my mouth when I'm not thinking about it. "Holy shit, I'm late!" But "Fuck, fuck, fuck! Oh, fucker." has a nice ring to it.
|
020620
|
|
... |
|
|
Seed
|
I found this site by doing a search on google for the word fuck.
This page came first.
This was several years ago.
|
020703
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie monster
|
seed.....i want to fuck and fertilize you. im horrible, its late and im just crusin around this site and bein a fuquad. im an artist though,you'll here more from me; PROMISE.
|
020707
|
|
... |
|
|
jessicafletcher
|
in the rain on a very soggy blanket. sometimes i here the squoosh noise from the blanket, not from me.i question if the rain is watching, and i wonder what it would do if i didn't want this. what would he say if i said i didn't want this. the rain put out the fire and we both died.
|
020707
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie monster
|
jessica and liz, you are some weird chicks. i dig you both! do my laundry
|
020721
|
|
... |
|
|
radioactive talking parrot
|
[ [1]fuck
Pronunciation: 'f&k
Function: verb
Etymology: akin to Dutch fokken to breed (cattle), Swedish dialect fokka to copulate
Date: 1503
intransitive senses
1 : usually obscene : COPULATE — sometimes used in the present participle as a meaningless intensive
2 : usually vulgar : MESS 3 — used with with
transitive senses
1 : usually obscene : to engage in coitus with — sometimes used interjectionally with an object (as a personal or reflexive pronoun) to express anger, contempt, or disgust
2 : usually vulgar : to deal with unfairly or harshly : CHEAT, SCREW
2]fuck
Function: noun
Date: 1680
1 : usually obscene : an act of copulation
2 : usually obscene : a sexual partner
3 a : usually vulgar : DAMN 2 b : usually vulgar : — used especially with the as a meaningless intensive
|
020729
|
|
... |
|
|
radioactive talking parrot
|
what the fuck do they want from me
|
020729
|
|
... |
|
|
melissah
|
fuck whoever the fuck wrote that fuckin long ass fucking entry ups there!!!
|
020801
|
|
... |
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|
oppressed_youth
|
"Wanna get you in the backseat / Windows up / That's the way I like to fuck." - the lyrical genious that is Ludacris.
Word.
|
020801
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie monster
|
shut the fuck up lyrical genious my ass
keep that fuckin hippety hoppety dippity dappity bullshit to yourself
seeing that shit on my computer screen at 2 in the morning after busting my ass all day makes me want to put a fist right threw your fucking head go hang out on yo yo yo dot com
|
020801
|
|
... |
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eddie
|
said that
|
020801
|
|
... |
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|
oppressed_youth
|
Oops, I thought my sarcasm was evident. Judging by the silliness and shallowness of the quote itself, I kind of figured it went without saying that I was joking.
Didn't mean to offend anyone on the "fuck" topic...
|
020802
|
|
... |
|
|
lilac_air
|
Fuckity who gives a fuck
|
020802
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie
|
understood
|
020805
|
|
... |
|
|
melissah
|
fuck people with no tolerance for other people's blather! quote ludacris all you want. and this is coming from a metalhead. im not going to hinder you, as long as i can freely quote manson. sankyuu...
|
020808
|
|
... |
|
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EDDIE
|
fuck you too MELISHITHEAD
|
020808
|
|
... |
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|
thea
|
don't you think the r-rated movie thing is stupid? if they say "fuck" twice it's not pg-13 anymore. i know "fuck". i fucking know "fuck." gog.
|
020820
|
|
... |
|
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girl_jane
|
He wanted me to say fuck into the camera. So I did...
|
020820
|
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... |
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eddiespervertedtendencies
|
i wan't you to tell me you want to fuck me.
will you?
|
020823
|
|
... |
|
|
girl_jane
|
Do I have to mean it?
|
020823
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie
|
of course you do!
or what would it mean?
|
020823
|
|
... |
|
|
aww shmack
|
eddie rapes men.
|
020826
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie monster
|
how did you know,
bitch?
|
020826
|
|
... |
|
|
girl_jane
|
It would mean that I'm satisfying one tiny request by lying...
|
020829
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie monster
|
if you did that for me
i might feel so much better
if you lied and i knew
if you tried and i knew
maybe i would feel so much better
|
020901
|
|
... |
|
|
eddie
|
or after a day
i would care anyway
little girl thought she knew
the time of day?
|
020901
|
|
... |
|
|
eeeerrrr
|
fucka!!!!!
|
020916
|
|
... |
|
|
Sensory
|
making love is wonderful, but a quick fuck is usually just fine when short on time
|
021011
|
|
... |
|
|
God Hates Us All
|
Fuck off and Die.
-8BX
|
021015
|
|
... |
|
|
tiphys
|
It was late, almost morning. The party was over. Most of the guests had passed out. He was lying next to her. Quietly he wispered to her, "I want to fuck you." Coyly she replied, "no you don't." With a quiet sense of urgency and purpose he repeated, "I really want to fuck you." She searched inside his pants saying with a soft but painful "ooo, baby" kind of coo, "You're too big." It was late and he was pretty well stoned. Not wanting to be pushy he quietly conceded, "OK, we don't have to." To which she replied, "Yes we do." True story, 1968. Suzanne, you were wonderful.
|
021027
|
|
... |
|
|
tiphys
|
It was late and most of the guests had left, gone to bed, or passed out. He was lying next to her on the floor. He wispered to her, "I want to fuck you." Simple and direct. She coyly replied, "No, you don't." "Yes, I really want to fuck you," he restated with a gentle firmness. She searched inside his pants. "You're too big," she said coyly with an "ooo baby" mock-pain lilt. It was late, he was pretty well stoned and in sort of a "hey, well, what the fuck, I might as well go to sleep" mood anyway. "OK,we don't have to," he quietly sighed. "Yes we do," she wispered. True Story, 1968. Suzanne, you were wonderful.
|
021027
|
|
... |
|
|
Kristopher
|
Sometimes it can be used as almost every word in the entire sentence.
"Fuck the fucking fuckers."
|
021213
|
|
... |
|
|
Kristopher
|
Okay, does anyone else think the term 'an uncomplicated fuck' is an oxymoron? Fucking is quite complicated. First, you kind of need someone else. Sometimes that's the most complex part about it.
|
021213
|
|
... |
|
|
Strideo
|
george carlon!
you rock!
.
|
021213
|
|
... |
|
|
Reverend Lough
|
it didn't turn out the way you wanted it to. it didn't turn out the way you wanted, did it........now you now; this is what it feels like.....
|
021214
|
|
... |
|
|
sterling625
|
oh yeah....
and good times were had by all!!! :)
|
030104
|
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... |
|
|
sterling625
|
oh yeah...
and good times were had by all!!! :)
|
030104
|
|
... |
|
|
no
|
fuck all fucking fuckers
|
030130
|
|
... |
|
|
x
|
fuck away the pain
fuck the pain away
|
030130
|
|
... |
|
|
Motomu
|
fuck our boses!!! Hypocrites, zebras, chamelerons
|
030216
|
|
... |
|
|
anti-fuck
|
Why do people fuckin' use the word fuck in every fuckin' sentence? They just fuckin' randomly stick it in where it doesn't fuckin' belong. It makes them sound so fuckin' stupid...
I've always wondered that...it really doesn't make sense.
|
030222
|
|
... |
|
|
*darkstar*
|
Fantastic things
Usually happen to fantastic
Creaters. So next time you see one,
kick them in the crouch as hards as you can.
|
030223
|
|
... |
|
|
niska
|
'clean up that fucking language', says my dad.
|
030303
|
|
... |
|
|
niska
|
what the...
no don't stop there. i'm awake. continue...
|
030303
|
|
... |
|
|
Erling
|
History of the Western World: the fuckers fuck the fucked.
|
030321
|
|
... |
|
|
beorn
|
FUCK SCHOOL!!!!!
pretty soon i am jetty. well just for the summer. but you know how it is.
|
030510
|
|
... |
|
|
sam
|
haha totally
|
030519
|
|
... |
|
|
god
|
instructions
|
030530
|
|
... |
|
|
Olive
|
my friend says he feels fucked up and I don't know how to help him cuz I am fucked up too
|
030530
|
|
... |
|
|
Big and Awesome
|
it's all about the melons!!!!!!
what's the score???
|
030606
|
|
... |
|
|
Fire&Roses
|
wanna fuck? he says it so casually. and I know what i should think...
That's crude, No way, Pig...
but none of it crosses my mind... I don't think... I feel and as i moosh just a little inside my mind screams yes... but all I ever do is punch you...
How odd
|
030608
|
|
... |
|
|
Sophie
|
take what u want from someone without caring about them
|
030610
|
|
... |
|
|
fodguk
|
fuck. Must be one of my favorite words. i use it daily. i describe tastes with it. sights with it. feelings. eh. fuck it. the fuck do i know anyfuckways?
|
030614
|
|
... |
|
|
Mahayana
|
...life
[there is no beauty]
i close my eyes to it all
|
030617
|
|
... |
|
|
.
|
look down
|
030619
|
|
... |
|
|
Mahayana
|
you [she whispers]
|
030623
|
|
... |
|
|
silent storm
|
did i say that? i dont think i did. so either i dont remember saying it, or youre putting words in my mouth again. if its neither of those possibilities, then you must be talking about yourself because you most certainly did say it. and i have the email to prove it.
|
030623
|
|
... |
|
|
Mahayana
|
im not here to argue with you or to prove who is right or wrong- i dont care about that- i blather to vent cuz its the only way i can release what i feel- instead of trapping it inside, its the only thing that works.
[so please just leave me alone]
respond if you want to what i blathe cuz you will anyhow just know im not trying to have a [dialog] with you. im not trying to carry our conversations on here. im just looking for release.
|
030623
|
|
... |
|
|
silent storm
|
i know youre not trying to have a dialogue. and i will respond here b/c it seems to be the only way you actually listen to what i say.
want me to leave you alone?
fine.
|
030623
|
|
... |
|
|
shrapnel
|
overrated.
|
030630
|
|
... |
|
|
MeSsIaH
|
Fuck You For God Says Your a Fucker
|
030729
|
|
... |
|
|
andrew
|
something you never do to someone you love
|
030730
|
|
... |
|
|
icy
|
... so wonderful to say ...
|
030731
|
|
... |
|
|
Sj
|
How many fucking 'fuck's can you fucking fit into a fucking fucked up sentence?
Fuck this.
|
030731
|
|
... |
|
|
Marmaduke
|
Oh bugger, I was looking for some smut, seems I have got the wrong place. But now that I am here..
Greasy throbbing lovemonkey beavering about the burning bush, aching hot and sticky with desire. Come and suck upon the milky nipple of my love. Suckling.
There. Thats it
|
030731
|
|
... |
|
|
Marmaduke
|
Oh bugger, I was looking for some smut. But it seems I have got the wrong place. But now that I am here..
Greasy throbbing lovemonkey beavering about the burning bush, aching hot and sticky with desire. Come and suck upon the milky nipple of my love. Suckling.
There. Thats it
|
030731
|
|
... |
|
|
megan
|
d
r
o
p
p
i
n
g
the f bomb is quite prevelent
round here
|
030731
|
|
... |
|
|
pucker up
|
i wannnnnnna FUCK!
|
030816
|
|
... |
|
|
Bloody Trail
|
Sometimes a fuck is just a fuck. Sometimes it's love. Sometimes you make love to someone and find out they were just fucking with you.
|
030819
|
|
... |
|
|
Linzy
|
can be used as a noun(that was a good fuck) a verb(bob is fucking sally)or an ajective(You are fucking ugly) ..It can be used as an interjection(FUCK) or it can be use to hurt someones feelings(you fuckin nob)or to emphisize a point(this is fucking hard!)... it is almost the most versitile word in the human language
|
030903
|
|
... |
|
|
Linzy
|
Why fuck off when fucking on is much more productive?
|
030903
|
|
... |
|
|
some Fucking Radio DJ
|
Who says that Fuck is a "Bad" Word? Why can't I sa Fuck on the Radio? If I slip up and happen to say Fuck on the radio, I will either get yelled at, or maybe even fired. Why does it have to be like this? And what are the degrees of, ahem, fucking up? If I were to say, 'Holy fuck! Look at that car accident' while I'm lookin out the window at work, will I get more yelled at saying that or, 'I fucked this chick so hard last night.' Why so many degrees of fuck? Which is worse? Calling a chick a whore, or a FUCKING whore? 'Sandy? She's a FUCKING whore.' Which is worse, 'Oh fuck, I fucked up.' or 'that dude? He's gonna fuck you up.' Fuck can also be funny.. "Hey! Lets play a game! Lets play Hide-and-Go-Fuck-Yourself!" Thats funny!
But fuck can hurt: 'I fucked this girl so hard that I think I may have moved her womb.. She woke up and she said it was sore, and that it Fucking hurt..."
But right now, All I'm thinking is that I need to fuck.
|
030907
|
|
... |
|
|
shit
|
Part of my job
|
030915
|
|
... |
|
|
ThE mOsT bEaUtIfUl BeAuTiFuL
|
fuck me. fuck me with your beauty. stray clouds stray with a stray boy.
so stray he made me gay.so she fucks me repeatedly. two shes in every breathe. blood runs down me. when she goes down on me.and i bleed. what does that mean?dead babies.like dead leaves. falling.like im poison and she is the only treacle to eat. eating treacle is what fucking girls means.
|
030923
|
|
... |
|
|
Fuck shit bitch
|
fuck fuck fuck mother mother fuck... motha fuck motha fuck... motha fuck motha fuck motha motha fuck 1 2 1 2 3 4 noise noise noise smocken weed doin wiz din coke and drinken beers drinkin beers beers beers rollin cadies smokein blunts who smokes the blunts? we smoke the blunts!
Fuck that shit. fuck you, you, you, your cool... and fuck you I'm out!!
|
030930
|
|
... |
|
|
nomatter
|
I actually hate this word. I know I say it too often. I don't like it when people say it without meaning. It makes me cringe. I love it when it comes out spontaneously. That is delighful.
|
031003
|
|
... |
|
|
fuck off
|
stan says fuck your ugly cunt bitch
|
031009
|
|
... |
|
|
Louise
|
In the end
When it's me hunched up in the corner of the room,
somebody staring at me in confusion. I just tore my soul apart trying to make them understand.
But it never works.
It's always this point that I remember you cannot MAKE someone understand,
you cannot force that insight upon anybody.
They have to be willing.
But no, often they're just confused.
Oh, fuck.
|
031015
|
|
... |
|
|
Lemon_Soda
|
I used to think this word meant something. Something harsh.
but now its just another conversaton spicer.
Kinda like love and hate...
|
031015
|
|
... |
|
|
a girl with nothing to say
|
fuck you,fuck me,fuck the world,fuck that test its realy a universal saying
|
031017
|
|
... |
|
|
a girl with nothing to say
|
FUCK how many fucks can you fuckin fit into a fuckin fucked up sentence?
|
031017
|
|
... |
|
|
phil
|
A lot of fucking fucking fucked fucking fuck fucking fucks fucker.
|
031022
|
|
... |
|
|
icy
|
"
Imagine you're a deer. You're prancing around. You get thirsty. You spot a little brook. You put your little deer lips down to the clear water - BAM! A fuckin' bullet rips off part of your head! Your brains are lying on the ground in little bloody pieces. Now I axe you, do you give a FUCK what kind of pants the son-of-a-bitch who shot you was wearing?!
"
just a memorable quote that has fuck in it. (my cousin vinny)
i think it's right...
|
031031
|
|
... |
|
|
happy
|
forget it I do not
use that vulgur word normally,
certainly not within this post
keep resisting society
and its subversive influences
|
031110
|
|
... |
|
|
happy
|
forget it I do not
use that vulgur word, and I will
certainly not use it within this post
keep resisting society
and its subversive influences
|
031110
|
|
... |
|
|
happy
|
shit.
sorry for the double post I
hope you will ignore
it
this time
|
031110
|
|
... |
|
|
krag
|
I could use one.
Maybe I should just go fuck myself.
|
031114
|
|
... |
|
|
a girl with nothing to say
|
FUCK EVERYONE!
|
031122
|
|
... |
|
|
clockwork
|
Lets fuck.
...oh sorry "make love"
|
031126
|
|
... |
|
|
thespacebetween
|
I haven't fucked in one month today
oh ya i like that make love thing
i am so tired of people saying that. i maen what if a girl just wants to fuck. none of this sweet dinner and a movie crap. just hard fast sex. i mean whats so fucking wrong with that?
|
031129
|
|
... |
|
|
thespacebetween
|
i havent fucked in one month today.
anyone free later?
oh yeah and about that making love thing
what if a girl just wants to fuck?
none of that other crap
just hot wet sex
whats so wrong with that?
|
031129
|
|
... |
|
|
iforget
|
what IS making love? what's the difference between fucking and making love? do 2 people who love eachother "make love" and 2 people who just met fuck?
|
031201
|
|
... |
|
|
iforget
|
what IS making love? what's the difference between making love and fucking? speed and position? 2 people who love eachother "make love" and 2 people who just met fuck?
|
031201
|
|
... |
|
|
iforget
|
what IS making love? what's the difference between making love and fucking? speed and position? 2 people who love eachother "make love" and 2 people who just met fuck?
|
031201
|
|
... |
|
|
Satans little helper
|
I WISH THERE WAS A GOD SO I COULD FUCKING RAPE HIM IN THE ASSHOLE TILL HE BLED
|
031206
|
|
... |
|
|
jenny
|
i want someone to just fuck me for once. who says that it has to be something special. girls just like to fuck. i know i do. i want to fuck. i like to fuck. i LOVE to fuck. would someone cum fuck me?
please?
|
031212
|
|
... |
|
|
sh
|
fuck you, you ho, i don't want you back
|
031220
|
|
... |
|
|
GT3000
|
This page takes to fucking long to load. What the fuck? I can't believe you are at the bottom of this fucking page you fuck! How interesting can you be in this?
|
031229
|
|
... |
|
|
anon
|
Where is the smut??? I want some smut! I don't care about dirty words. I just want some smut!
|
031230
|
|
... |
|
|
cbenson666 (mark of the devil)
|
My psycho ex-girlfriend and her porn addicted new b/f. Fuck WORK. FUCK THE WORLD. For all I give a shit all of you motherfuckers can rot in hell and die. I hope to god that when you are in need of any kind of help that someone stabs you stupid ass in the back and cuts your no good two timing fucking throat!!
|
040104
|
|
... |
|
|
Mr Confused
|
What the...?
|
040108
|
|
... |
|
|
chocolatte
|
...is the word. not Grease.
|
040108
|
|
... |
|
|
blue
|
don’t you look at me, fuck!
i'll send you a loveletter straight from my heart, fucker
do you know how many times dennis hopper says the word “fuck” in blue velvet? sixty three.
you fucking fuck, fuck you
|
040111
|
|
... |
|
|
RoXXXie
|
profanity is used by people who have limited vocabularies, oh, fuck! that's me!
|
040111
|
|
... |
|
|
always wanting more
|
I'm a lady but I use this word in my head. Yes I want you hard and fast and now. I want you in the bed on the floor. Fuck me now. Rip off my clothes, push me down, take me, love me, fuck me.
In public I cover up. I'm a lady presenting only the best. No one knows the truth, only you. I have a wild imagination and a wanting body. I need you. From the depths of my insides I need you hard, fast, and strong. I need to feel your hands all over my body. Not sweet kisses and soft caresses but deep hot wanting kisses and rough searching hands. I need to feel you.
|
040126
|
|
... |
|
|
orangine
|
is what we do
secretly aloud
biting downward onto bones
avoiding eyes until the last part
when we can't help it
|
040128
|
|
... |
|
|
Peter
|
I just don't give.
|
040206
|
|
... |
|
|
married
|
is a word representing all things promiscuous as a noun. if you want to use it as a verb, dont get married
|
040224
|
|
... |
|
|
married
|
is a word representing all things promiscuous as a noun. it means good fuckin sex if you use it as a verb. either way, dont get married.
|
040224
|
|
... |
|
|
gigio
|
wouldn't it be fun to fuck right now?
|
040225
|
|
... |
|
|
o
|
me
|
040303
|
|
... |
|
|
novathought
|
wow. so much fuck.if only it was real life.
|
040306
|
|
... |
|
|
TwistedSister
|
My brother & I fuck all the time...Fuck , isn't life grand. Fucking morons. Get a fucking clue. Fucking fart. Fuck me running. You fat, lazy fuck. Bend me over and fuck me in the ass. Stop and smell the fucking roses...bitch. Fuckin' lighten up. And why in the fuck do you fucking wanta know anyway fucking way. Yes I am a sick motherfucker. You woudln't fucking guess that in a million fuckin' years...if U knew who the fuckity- fuck I was. I am gonna go fuck my brother again...because it fucking feels better than anything. Have a nice fucking day.
|
040310
|
|
... |
|
|
TwistedSister
|
My brother & I fuck all the time...Fuck , isn't life grand. Fucking morons. Get a fucking clue. Fucking fart. Fuck me running. You fat, lazy fuck. Bend me over and fuck me in the ass. Stop and smell the fucking roses...bitch. Fuckin' lighten up. And why in the fuck do you fucking wanta know anyway fucking way. Yes I am a sick motherfucker. You woudln't fucking guess that in a million fuckin' years...if U knew who the fuckity- fuck I was. I am gonna go fuck my brother again...because it fucking feels better than anything. Have a nice fucking day.
|
040310
|
|
... |
|
|
the boss
|
what the fuck is all of this fucking nonsense. you're all a bunch of fucked up fuckheads!
|
040319
|
|
... |
|
|
the boss
|
what the fuck is all of this fucking nonsense. you're all a bunch of fucked up fuckheads!
|
040319
|
|
... |
|
|
dudeinanigloo
|
The people responsible for those mammoth posts should be fucking shot!
|
040406
|
|
... |
|
|
Borealis
|
have you ever fucked over a friend, fully knowing what you were doing, but not quite realizing the implications.
yes I know that sounds like a contradiction
FUCK!!!
...oh damnit...
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040411
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maatsby
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fuck me im tired
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040413
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d
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sex
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040415
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rage
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fuck ash 4 making me feel like shit, fuck me for letting him
fuck people that mess with my head
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040415
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... |
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rage
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fuck ash for making me feel like shit
fuck me for letting him
fuck people that mess with my head
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040415
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the fuckhead
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When Philip Larkin published High Windows in 1974, what everyone noticed, besides its general excellence, was its profusion of foul language. Larkin himself told John Betjeman that "whenever he looked at his book he found it was full of four-letter words." It is, too. Among the poems in High Windows that make use of dirty words are the book's title poem, "Vers de Société," and the well-known "This Be The Verse," a twelve-line poem beginning: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do." Robert Crawford described the impact that "Larkin's English" had on English poetry:
The word "fuck" is canonical now. The poem by Philip Larkin which most people find easiest to remember is the one that begins with a fine pun in it: "They fuck you up. . ."1
The pun-that your parents both generate and ruin you-is fine, and it plays on one of the many special properties that "fuck," and some other dirty words, have: Their common figurative meanings have very remote relations to their literal meanings. Heterogeneous ideas are yoked together through the pun, just as heterogeneous expectations are yoked together through the violence with which the title and the first line hijack the words and meter of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem."2
What else did "the fuck-poet" think he was doing? "I think [my use of four-letter words] can take different forms," Larkin wrote to John Sparrow:
It can be meant to be shocking (we live in an odd era, when shocking language can be used, yet still shocks-it won't last); it can be the only accurate word (the others being gentilisms, etc.); or it can be funny, in that silly traditional way such things are funny.3
By his own account, Larkin's language is "performative," does something to or for his audience: every poem "is an action of some sort," as Larkin also said.4 Moreover, Larkin sees his foul language as related to the language of the time, to the generational shifts in talk and behavior that were especially rapid, exciting and unavoidable in the late '60s and early '70s. The rapidfire "fuck" and "crap" with which Larkin begins some poems from this period-especially by contrast with the elevated diction and stately rhythms of the poems' endings-come across, as Crawford (quoting Blake Morrison) has said, as "Larkin's equivalents of dialect."5 But whose dialect?
Sometimes Larkin's four-letter words invoke all-male or working-class worlds. Sometimes, too, as in his "Vers de Société," dirty words can be a means of aggression or derogation, solitary grumbles against all of society. As often, however, the dirty words evoke the world of youth. "This Be The Verse" shows the poet negotiating with the feelings, illusions, and speech he attributes to the young. The gap in diction between the beginning and the end of "High Windows," (or of "This Be The Verse" or "Sad Steps") is a generation gap.6 As Alan Bennett has said, the "real Larkin" of the poems was someone "who feels shut out when he sees fifteen-year-olds necking at bus stops,"7 and one of the ways he reacts in that poem is to move into, and then out from under, their language. Larkin is cultivating, or pretending to have shared, or questioning whether he himself ever did share a solidarity of experience with the common adolescent.
Are kids (and men, and working-class people) more likely than others to use four-letter words (in the form of exclamations, vague approbatory adjectives, generalized derogatory verbs, and so on)? If so, why? What special effects can four-letter words have to make some people enjoy using them and force others to leave the room? Dirty words can obviously, as means of aggression or derogation, demean or devalue their targets. Also, they can be used in order to get attention; they break rules of discourse and establish the speaker's desire to épate whatever parent surrogates can be found. Dirty words are thus signs of affiliation with other speakers and listeners who have the same "enemies," who want to offend or drive off a given authority. This makes them signs of disaffiliation from, of not-being-like (because not talking like) that authority. By saying "fuck" in a room or on a record, an utterer invites his or her listeners to ask: Who does this speaker belong with? Who does this speaker emphatically not belong with?
The utterance of "fuck" (and in Britain, "bloody") can be powerful on the basis of these functions alone-aggression, attention, affiliation, disaffiliation: By using these words the utterer shows on whose side he or she wants to be. Princeton Review SAT-Course instructors are sometimes told to swear at least once per class; the dirty words not only get attention, but establish the instructors' difference from "regular" teachers and their status as co-conspirators against the Scantron tests. Two years ago, every college radio rock DJ in America was familiar with Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker," not only because it's a great song (and it is), but because you couldn't play it on the air before midnight. In making the record, Superchunk was doing-in a very safe, jocular and self-assured way-what the 1977 punks were doing much more threateningly and in earnest: joining, or conjuring into existence, a social context of youth and confrontation in which calling somebody a "slack motherfucker" was standard, even laudable. In this context, swearing became one of what British cultural critic and sociologist Dick Hebdige has called "signs of forbidden identity, sources of value."8 More recently, in 1984, Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a half-hour video of Tony Harrison's "V," a long poem rife with four-letter words. Tabloids and conservative MP's campaigned to block the program on grounds of indecency. After the broadcast, Harrison's publisher, Bloodaxe, issued a new version of the poem with 41 pages of news stories about the flap appended (with headlines like "Four-Letter TV Poem Fury"). This shows, among other things, that the words Larkin used in High Windows were still so shocking as to be valuable in Britain ten years after he used them.
So "High Windows" and "This Be The Verse"-like Princeton Review instructors, first-generation punks, and Tony Harrison-use dirty words as subcultural indicators, as powerful ways of calling into question who the poet sounds like, who he wants to sound like, and why. But in these poems, Larkin not only appropriates the way kids talk, but also talks about his not being like the kids whose speech he has appropriated. Both poems end in another register entirely, one that is more traditionally "poetic." The subcultural indicators, then, can only be part of the force. In "High Windows," the word "fucking" sounds aggressive, like a smear on the girl and maybe also on the boy in the poem. But this aggressive or derogatory effect is reversed when, further into the poem, the word gets reclassified as high praise: "I know this is paradise." What sounds early on like simple resentment or jealousy modulates into jealous admiration. And since the aggressive qualities of "fucking" set the reader up to expect more derogation, this admiration comes as a neat surprise. The same kind of elevating transition, this sudden shifting upward from the bottom of the poet's speech register, also occurs, I think, in the movement from the sexist language of "he's fucking her" to "paradise / Everyone old," since "Everyone" has to include both genders. It is this inward, self-critical turn away from his own prejudiced impulses and toward self-examination that marks the best of Larkin's poems from this period. It also distin-guishes the Larkin of these poems from the less attractive man who suffers and swears his way through Andrew Motion's 1993 biography A Writer's Life.
Yet four-letter words (as the pun in "They fuck you up" makes clear) are not only sites of aggression, affiliation and disaffiliation, but also of ambiguity. Sometimes we can't even be sure what a particular dirty word means, how figuratively to construe it, whether it's a compliment or a slap: "She thinks he's the shit." Does Fuck Yeah!-the former title of a fanzine-connote a sex-positive attitude, or only generic, joyful affirmation? What about Four- Letter Words, the current title of the same publication? "Swearing," as Craig Raine recently wrote, is (an) example of untranslatability, though a recent one because latterly swear words were expunged. . . Before swear words, however, there was the exclamation-often untranslatable in an identical way.9
The dominance of their performative function, their high level of ambiguity, and their large stock of overlapping figurative meanings all contribute to that untranslatability-the sense of thickness or opacity-which words like "fuck" often have, as opposed to words such as "coffee" or "incarnadine."
Now the effects that I claim some dirty words set in motion (the creation of irresolvable ambiguities, the foregrounding of expression, and the confounding of denotation) ought to sound familiar. These effects have been claimed not only for the phrase "They fuck you up"-or even for its most basic occluded component, "fuck you"-but also for Art In General, or for poetry. "Poetry is what is lost in translation," said Frost, which is what Raine says of obscenity; the writerly element, the effect that exceeds its meaning and which Barthes wanted in his art, is effectively built into all four-letter words. Hebdige argues that the offensive postures of first-generation punks "gestured toward a 'nowhere' and actively sought to remain silent, illegible."10 Isn't gesturing toward a nowhere, into a silence beyond words, one of Philip Larkin's favorite ways of ending poems? Aren't the attention-getting swear-words with which Larkin liked to begin his late poems, in both their opacity and their distracting, disruptive quality, a lot like the gestures offstage and into the endless elsewheres, nothings and anywheres with which Larkin ends some of these same poems? So Larkin's foul language doesn't simply foreground his sad, distant, empathetic, and resentful relation to the kids whose speech he echoes. It also foreshadows and reflects the same self-isolating, sadly certain rejection of ordinary language and society that is realized, at the poem's end, in a negationist gesture out of and away from everything.
"High Windows" closes by looking up to wordless, endless, and radiant nothingness. Of course, the poem is about the end of religion (the windows seem to be those of a church) and the agnostic's fear of death. But, like other poems from this period, it is also about the relation of the poet and his language to the social and to the private, and about the relation of one generation and its pleasures to the next and theirs. Radiant high windows and high diction on the one hand, fucking and four-letter words on the other. And while these pleasures may at first seem rivalrous or opposed, they turn out to mean, and reveal, the same thing: disrupted and disrupting negativity, resistance to meaning and relation, and-most of all-the common unavailability, for the poet, of two contrasting kinds of consolation and joy. Other people, "High Windows" says, especially young ones, seem to me to have wonderful, satisfying, earthly, social, and sensual rewards, though of course it probably doesn't often seem that way to them (any more than it seemed to me, when I was young, a great relief to be rid of the fear of God), and those joys will never be available to me: and, second, the rewards that art can offer me, the rewards I am really built and suited for, are even at their best characterized by deferral, remoteness, vacancy. With Larkin, the rewards that art or "thought" can offer the reader or writer who is old or distant or lonely enough to need them always begin in privacy and end in privation. The invisible, endless, wordless "Elsewhere" in those windows is a final figure for two kinds of emptiness or regret-we might call them social and private, or young and old, or bodily and linguistic, or even life and art-for which the shaky ametricality and confrontational diction of the first stanzas, the fucked-up lines about fucking, comprise a first figure.
We say to ourselves "That'll be the life" far more than we say "This is the life." And what this indicates (a feeling of deferral, the hope that we might have the right experience later, the sense that someone else might be having it now but we haven't or can't) applies to our desires for artistic enlightenment as well as to those for sensual satisfaction. This common experience of the unattainability of whatever we want, or think we want, is one of Larkin's great subjects. It is also the subject of Andrew Swarbrick's Out of Reach, by far the best critical book solely about Larkin. Swarbrick argues that even "the most triumphant of Larkin's poems are about failure and. . . ultimately prefer silence to words."11 The "failures" and "silences" of "High Windows" are then twofold: one is sexual and social, the other is private and abstract. Larkin can't think about the one without the other. Some deep groove in his head connects an inability to reach or speak to the young with a sense of sexual unfulfillment, and associates both with an almost deconstructive despair at the failure of words (and of art) to mean or cohere. This complex of ideas, which animates "High Windows," runs back through his writing like an underground river, from "Love Again" to "Dockery and Son" to the jazz criticism, two sentences of which could almost serve as an epigraph for "High Windows":
In a humanist society, art. . . assumes great importance, and to lose touch with it is parallel to losing one's faith in a religious age. Or, in this particular case, since jazz is the music of the young, it was like losing one's potency.12
Larkin's confrontational "fucks," like his gestures to elsewhere and nothing, respond to this loss, to this sense of failure, which is both spiritual (and private) and social (and sexual).
"The peculiar triumph of Larkin's lyricism," as Swarbrick says (quoting Bakhtin), "is to incorporate 'other people's words.'"13 Talking about the kids in their language, ventriloquizing while showing his distance, the Larkin of these late poems is like the lonely boy John Kemp who spends about a third of Larkin's undergraduate novel, Jill, writing the fictional diary of its heroine. Historicizing his own feelings of outsiderhood in "High Windows," realizing that the same relations have applied whenever the old, resentful, lonely, and goatish (like Larkin) have looked at the young, Larkin turns to "arrogant eternity," solitude, Art, and realizes that their consolations, too, "never worked for me," as he put it in "Love Again." One kind of distance just replaces another. In the end, saying "fuck" and "bloody" turns out to be more like contemplating the depth of the ocean, the height of the air, or the uncomprehending sunlight than anyone but Larkin would have guessed.
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040417
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... |
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fuckhead
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When Philip Larkin published High Windows in 1974, what everyone noticed, besides its general excellence, was its profusion of foul language. Larkin himself told John Betjeman that "whenever he looked at his book he found it was full of four-letter words." It is, too. Among the poems in High Windows that make use of dirty words are the book's title poem, "Vers de Société," and the well-known "This Be The Verse," a twelve-line poem beginning: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do." Robert Crawford described the impact that "Larkin's English" had on English poetry:
The word "fuck" is canonical now. The poem by Philip Larkin which most people find easiest to remember is the one that begins with a fine pun in it: "They fuck you up. . ."1
The pun-that your parents both generate and ruin you-is fine, and it plays on one of the many special properties that "fuck," and some other dirty words, have: Their common figurative meanings have very remote relations to their literal meanings. Heterogeneous ideas are yoked together through the pun, just as heterogeneous expectations are yoked together through the violence with which the title and the first line hijack the words and meter of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem."2
What else did "the fuck-poet" think he was doing? "I think [my use of four-letter words] can take different forms," Larkin wrote to John Sparrow:
It can be meant to be shocking (we live in an odd era, when shocking language can be used, yet still shocks-it won't last); it can be the only accurate word (the others being gentilisms, etc.); or it can be funny, in that silly traditional way such things are funny.3
By his own account, Larkin's language is "performative," does something to or for his audience: every poem "is an action of some sort," as Larkin also said.4 Moreover, Larkin sees his foul language as related to the language of the time, to the generational shifts in talk and behavior that were especially rapid, exciting and unavoidable in the late '60s and early '70s. The rapidfire "fuck" and "crap" with which Larkin begins some poems from this period-especially by contrast with the elevated diction and stately rhythms of the poems' endings-come across, as Crawford (quoting Blake Morrison) has said, as "Larkin's equivalents of dialect."5 But whose dialect?
Sometimes Larkin's four-letter words invoke all-male or working-class worlds. Sometimes, too, as in his "Vers de Société," dirty words can be a means of aggression or derogation, solitary grumbles against all of society. As often, however, the dirty words evoke the world of youth. "This Be The Verse" shows the poet negotiating with the feelings, illusions, and speech he attributes to the young. The gap in diction between the beginning and the end of "High Windows," (or of "This Be The Verse" or "Sad Steps") is a generation gap.6 As Alan Bennett has said, the "real Larkin" of the poems was someone "who feels shut out when he sees fifteen-year-olds necking at bus stops,"7 and one of the ways he reacts in that poem is to move into, and then out from under, their language. Larkin is cultivating, or pretending to have shared, or questioning whether he himself ever did share a solidarity of experience with the common adolescent.
Are kids (and men, and working-class people) more likely than others to use four-letter words (in the form of exclamations, vague approbatory adjectives, generalized derogatory verbs, and so on)? If so, why? What special effects can four-letter words have to make some people enjoy using them and force others to leave the room? Dirty words can obviously, as means of aggression or derogation, demean or devalue their targets. Also, they can be used in order to get attention; they break rules of discourse and establish the speaker's desire to épate whatever parent surrogates can be found. Dirty words are thus signs of affiliation with other speakers and listeners who have the same "enemies," who want to offend or drive off a given authority. This makes them signs of disaffiliation from, of not-being-like (because not talking like) that authority. By saying "fuck" in a room or on a record, an utterer invites his or her listeners to ask: Who does this speaker belong with? Who does this speaker emphatically not belong with?
The utterance of "fuck" (and in Britain, "bloody") can be powerful on the basis of these functions alone-aggression, attention, affiliation, disaffiliation: By using these words the utterer shows on whose side he or she wants to be. Princeton Review SAT-Course instructors are sometimes told to swear at least once per class; the dirty words not only get attention, but establish the instructors' difference from "regular" teachers and their status as co-conspirators against the Scantron tests. Two years ago, every college radio rock DJ in America was familiar with Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker," not only because it's a great song (and it is), but because you couldn't play it on the air before midnight. In making the record, Superchunk was doing-in a very safe, jocular and self-assured way-what the 1977 punks were doing much more threateningly and in earnest: joining, or conjuring into existence, a social context of youth and confrontation in which calling somebody a "slack motherfucker" was standard, even laudable. In this context, swearing became one of what British cultural critic and sociologist Dick Hebdige has called "signs of forbidden identity, sources of value."8 More recently, in 1984, Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a half-hour video of Tony Harrison's "V," a long poem rife with four-letter words. Tabloids and conservative MP's campaigned to block the program on grounds of indecency. After the broadcast, Harrison's publisher, Bloodaxe, issued a new version of the poem with 41 pages of news stories about the flap appended (with headlines like "Four-Letter TV Poem Fury"). This shows, among other things, that the words Larkin used in High Windows were still so shocking as to be valuable in Britain ten years after he used them.
So "High Windows" and "This Be The Verse"-like Princeton Review instructors, first-generation punks, and Tony Harrison-use dirty words as subcultural indicators, as powerful ways of calling into question who the poet sounds like, who he wants to sound like, and why. But in these poems, Larkin not only appropriates the way kids talk, but also talks about his not being like the kids whose speech he has appropriated. Both poems end in another register entirely, one that is more traditionally "poetic." The subcultural indicators, then, can only be part of the force. In "High Windows," the word "fucking" sounds aggressive, like a smear on the girl and maybe also on the boy in the poem. But this aggressive or derogatory effect is reversed when, further into the poem, the word gets reclassified as high praise: "I know this is paradise." What sounds early on like simple resentment or jealousy modulates into jealous admiration. And since the aggressive qualities of "fucking" set the reader up to expect more derogation, this admiration comes as a neat surprise. The same kind of elevating transition, this sudden shifting upward from the bottom of the poet's speech register, also occurs, I think, in the movement from the sexist language of "he's fucking her" to "paradise / Everyone old," since "Everyone" has to include both genders. It is this inward, self-critical turn away from his own prejudiced impulses and toward self-examination that marks the best of Larkin's poems from this period. It also distin-guishes the Larkin of these poems from the less attractive man who suffers and swears his way through Andrew Motion's 1993 biography A Writer's Life.
Yet four-letter words (as the pun in "They fuck you up" makes clear) are not only sites of aggression, affiliation and disaffiliation, but also of ambiguity. Sometimes we can't even be sure what a particular dirty word means, how figuratively to construe it, whether it's a compliment or a slap: "She thinks he's the shit." Does Fuck Yeah!-the former title of a fanzine-connote a sex-positive attitude, or only generic, joyful affirmation? What about Four- Letter Words, the current title of the same publication? "Swearing," as Craig Raine recently wrote, is (an) example of untranslatability, though a recent one because latterly swear words were expunged. . . Before swear words, however, there was the exclamation-often untranslatable in an identical way.9
The dominance of their performative function, their high level of ambiguity, and their large stock of overlapping figurative meanings all contribute to that untranslatability-the sense of thickness or opacity-which words like "fuck" often have, as opposed to words such as "coffee" or "incarnadine."
Now the effects that I claim some dirty words set in motion (the creation of irresolvable ambiguities, the foregrounding of expression, and the confounding of denotation) ought to sound familiar. These effects have been claimed not only for the phrase "They fuck you up"-or even for its most basic occluded component, "fuck you"-but also for Art In General, or for poetry. "Poetry is what is lost in translation," said Frost, which is what Raine says of obscenity; the writerly element, the effect that exceeds its meaning and which Barthes wanted in his art, is effectively built into all four-letter words. Hebdige argues that the offensive postures of first-generation punks "gestured toward a 'nowhere' and actively sought to remain silent, illegible."10 Isn't gesturing toward a nowhere, into a silence beyond words, one of Philip Larkin's favorite ways of ending poems? Aren't the attention-getting swear-words with which Larkin liked to begin his late poems, in both their opacity and their distracting, disruptive quality, a lot like the gestures offstage and into the endless elsewheres, nothings and anywheres with which Larkin ends some of these same poems? So Larkin's foul language doesn't simply foreground his sad, distant, empathetic, and resentful relation to the kids whose speech he echoes. It also foreshadows and reflects the same self-isolating, sadly certain rejection of ordinary language and society that is realized, at the poem's end, in a negationist gesture out of and away from everything.
"High Windows" closes by looking up to wordless, endless, and radiant nothingness. Of course, the poem is about the end of religion (the windows seem to be those of a church) and the agnostic's fear of death. But, like other poems from this period, it is also about the relation of the poet and his language to the social and to the private, and about the relation of one generation and its pleasures to the next and theirs. Radiant high windows and high diction on the one hand, fucking and four-letter words on the other. And while these pleasures may at first seem rivalrous or opposed, they turn out to mean, and reveal, the same thing: disrupted and disrupting negativity, resistance to meaning and relation, and-most of all-the common unavailability, for the poet, of two contrasting kinds of consolation and joy. Other people, "High Windows" says, especially young ones, seem to me to have wonderful, satisfying, earthly, social, and sensual rewards, though of course it probably doesn't often seem that way to them (any more than it seemed to me, when I was young, a great relief to be rid of the fear of God), and those joys will never be available to me: and, second, the rewards that art can offer me, the rewards I am really built and suited for, are even at their best characterized by deferral, remoteness, vacancy. With Larkin, the rewards that art or "thought" can offer the reader or writer who is old or distant or lonely enough to need them always begin in privacy and end in privation. The invisible, endless, wordless "Elsewhere" in those windows is a final figure for two kinds of emptiness or regret-we might call them social and private, or young and old, or bodily and linguistic, or even life and art-for which the shaky ametricality and confrontational diction of the first stanzas, the fucked-up lines about fucking, comprise a first figure.
We say to ourselves "That'll be the life" far more than we say "This is the life." And what this indicates (a feeling of deferral, the hope that we might have the right experience later, the sense that someone else might be having it now but we haven't or can't) applies to our desires for artistic enlightenment as well as to those for sensual satisfaction. This common experience of the unattainability of whatever we want, or think we want, is one of Larkin's great subjects. It is also the subject of Andrew Swarbrick's Out of Reach, by far the best critical book solely about Larkin. Swarbrick argues that even "the most triumphant of Larkin's poems are about failure and. . . ultimately prefer silence to words."11 The "failures" and "silences" of "High Windows" are then twofold: one is sexual and social, the other is private and abstract. Larkin can't think about the one without the other. Some deep groove in his head connects an inability to reach or speak to the young with a sense of sexual unfulfillment, and associates both with an almost deconstructive despair at the failure of words (and of art) to mean or cohere. This complex of ideas, which animates "High Windows," runs back through his writing like an underground river, from "Love Again" to "Dockery and Son" to the jazz criticism, two sentences of which could almost serve as an epigraph for "High Windows":
In a humanist society, art. . . assumes great importance, and to lose touch with it is parallel to losing one's faith in a religious age. Or, in this particular case, since jazz is the music of the young, it was like losing one's potency.12
Larkin's confrontational "fucks," like his gestures to elsewhere and nothing, respond to this loss, to this sense of failure, which is both spiritual (and private) and social (and sexual).
"The peculiar triumph of Larkin's lyricism," as Swarbrick says (quoting Bakhtin), "is to incorporate 'other people's words.'"13 Talking about the kids in their language, ventriloquizing while showing his distance, the Larkin of these late poems is like the lonely boy John Kemp who spends about a third of Larkin's undergraduate novel, Jill, writing the fictional diary of its heroine. Historicizing his own feelings of outsiderhood in "High Windows," realizing that the same relations have applied whenever the old, resentful, lonely, and goatish (like Larkin) have looked at the young, Larkin turns to "arrogant eternity," solitude, Art, and realizes that their consolations, too, "never worked for me," as he put it in "Love Again." One kind of distance just replaces another. In the end, saying "fuck" and "bloody" turns out to be more like contemplating the depth of the ocean, the height of the air, or the uncomprehending sunlight than anyone but Larkin would have guessed.
|
040417
|
|
... |
|
|
fuckhead
|
When Philip Larkin published High Windows in 1974, what everyone noticed, besides its general excellence, was its profusion of foul language. Larkin himself told John Betjeman that "whenever he looked at his book he found it was full of four-letter words." It is, too. Among the poems in High Windows that make use of dirty words are the book's title poem, "Vers de Société," and the well-known "This Be The Verse," a twelve-line poem beginning: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do." Robert Crawford described the impact that "Larkin's English" had on English poetry:
The word "fuck" is canonical now. The poem by Philip Larkin which most people find easiest to remember is the one that begins with a fine pun in it: "They fuck you up. . ."1
The pun-that your parents both generate and ruin you-is fine, and it plays on one of the many special properties that "fuck," and some other dirty words, have: Their common figurative meanings have very remote relations to their literal meanings. Heterogeneous ideas are yoked together through the pun, just as heterogeneous expectations are yoked together through the violence with which the title and the first line hijack the words and meter of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem."2
What else did "the fuck-poet" think he was doing? "I think [my use of four-letter words] can take different forms," Larkin wrote to John Sparrow:
It can be meant to be shocking (we live in an odd era, when shocking language can be used, yet still shocks-it won't last); it can be the only accurate word (the others being gentilisms, etc.); or it can be funny, in that silly traditional way such things are funny.3
By his own account, Larkin's language is "performative," does something to or for his audience: every poem "is an action of some sort," as Larkin also said.4 Moreover, Larkin sees his foul language as related to the language of the time, to the generational shifts in talk and behavior that were especially rapid, exciting and unavoidable in the late '60s and early '70s. The rapidfire "fuck" and "crap" with which Larkin begins some poems from this period-especially by contrast with the elevated diction and stately rhythms of the poems' endings-come across, as Crawford (quoting Blake Morrison) has said, as "Larkin's equivalents of dialect."5 But whose dialect?
Sometimes Larkin's four-letter words invoke all-male or working-class worlds. Sometimes, too, as in his "Vers de Société," dirty words can be a means of aggression or derogation, solitary grumbles against all of society. As often, however, the dirty words evoke the world of youth. "This Be The Verse" shows the poet negotiating with the feelings, illusions, and speech he attributes to the young. The gap in diction between the beginning and the end of "High Windows," (or of "This Be The Verse" or "Sad Steps") is a generation gap.6 As Alan Bennett has said, the "real Larkin" of the poems was someone "who feels shut out when he sees fifteen-year-olds necking at bus stops,"7 and one of the ways he reacts in that poem is to move into, and then out from under, their language. Larkin is cultivating, or pretending to have shared, or questioning whether he himself ever did share a solidarity of experience with the common adolescent.
Are kids (and men, and working-class people) more likely than others to use four-letter words (in the form of exclamations, vague approbatory adjectives, generalized derogatory verbs, and so on)? If so, why? What special effects can four-letter words have to make some people enjoy using them and force others to leave the room? Dirty words can obviously, as means of aggression or derogation, demean or devalue their targets. Also, they can be used in order to get attention; they break rules of discourse and establish the speaker's desire to épate whatever parent surrogates can be found. Dirty words are thus signs of affiliation with other speakers and listeners who have the same "enemies," who want to offend or drive off a given authority. This makes them signs of disaffiliation from, of not-being-like (because not talking like) that authority. By saying "fuck" in a room or on a record, an utterer invites his or her listeners to ask: Who does this speaker belong with? Who does this speaker emphatically not belong with?
The utterance of "fuck" (and in Britain, "bloody") can be powerful on the basis of these functions alone-aggression, attention, affiliation, disaffiliation: By using these words the utterer shows on whose side he or she wants to be. Princeton Review SAT-Course instructors are sometimes told to swear at least once per class; the dirty words not only get attention, but establish the instructors' difference from "regular" teachers and their status as co-conspirators against the Scantron tests. Two years ago, every college radio rock DJ in America was familiar with Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker," not only because it's a great song (and it is), but because you couldn't play it on the air before midnight. In making the record, Superchunk was doing-in a very safe, jocular and self-assured way-what the 1977 punks were doing much more threateningly and in earnest: joining, or conjuring into existence, a social context of youth and confrontation in which calling somebody a "slack motherfucker" was standard, even laudable. In this context, swearing became one of what British cultural critic and sociologist Dick Hebdige has called "signs of forbidden identity, sources of value."8 More recently, in 1984, Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a half-hour video of Tony Harrison's "V," a long poem rife with four-letter words. Tabloids and conservative MP's campaigned to block the program on grounds of indecency. After the broadcast, Harrison's publisher, Bloodaxe, issued a new version of the poem with 41 pages of news stories about the flap appended (with headlines like "Four-Letter TV Poem Fury"). This shows, among other things, that the words Larkin used in High Windows were still so shocking as to be valuable in Britain ten years after he used them.
So "High Windows" and "This Be The Verse"-like Princeton Review instructors, first-generation punks, and Tony Harrison-use dirty words as subcultural indicators, as powerful ways of calling into question who the poet sounds like, who he wants to sound like, and why. But in these poems, Larkin not only appropriates the way kids talk, but also talks about his not being like the kids whose speech he has appropriated. Both poems end in another register entirely, one that is more traditionally "poetic." The subcultural indicators, then, can only be part of the force. In "High Windows," the word "fucking" sounds aggressive, like a smear on the girl and maybe also on the boy in the poem. But this aggressive or derogatory effect is reversed when, further into the poem, the word gets reclassified as high praise: "I know this is paradise." What sounds early on like simple resentment or jealousy modulates into jealous admiration. And since the aggressive qualities of "fucking" set the reader up to expect more derogation, this admiration comes as a neat surprise. The same kind of elevating transition, this sudden shifting upward from the bottom of the poet's speech register, also occurs, I think, in the movement from the sexist language of "he's fucking her" to "paradise / Everyone old," since "Everyone" has to include both genders. It is this inward, self-critical turn away from his own prejudiced impulses and toward self-examination that marks the best of Larkin's poems from this period. It also distin-guishes the Larkin of these poems from the less attractive man who suffers and swears his way through Andrew Motion's 1993 biography A Writer's Life.
Yet four-letter words (as the pun in "They fuck you up" makes clear) are not only sites of aggression, affiliation and disaffiliation, but also of ambiguity. Sometimes we can't even be sure what a particular dirty word means, how figuratively to construe it, whether it's a compliment or a slap: "She thinks he's the shit." Does Fuck Yeah!-the former title of a fanzine-connote a sex-positive attitude, or only generic, joyful affirmation? What about Four- Letter Words, the current title of the same publication? "Swearing," as Craig Raine recently wrote, is (an) example of untranslatability, though a recent one because latterly swear words were expunged. . . Before swear words, however, there was the exclamation-often untranslatable in an identical way.9
The dominance of their performative function, their high level of ambiguity, and their large stock of overlapping figurative meanings all contribute to that untranslatability-the sense of thickness or opacity-which words like "fuck" often have, as opposed to words such as "coffee" or "incarnadine."
Now the effects that I claim some dirty words set in motion (the creation of irresolvable ambiguities, the foregrounding of expression, and the confounding of denotation) ought to sound familiar. These effects have been claimed not only for the phrase "They fuck you up"-or even for its most basic occluded component, "fuck you"-but also for Art In General, or for poetry. "Poetry is what is lost in translation," said Frost, which is what Raine says of obscenity; the writerly element, the effect that exceeds its meaning and which Barthes wanted in his art, is effectively built into all four-letter words. Hebdige argues that the offensive postures of first-generation punks "gestured toward a 'nowhere' and actively sought to remain silent, illegible."10 Isn't gesturing toward a nowhere, into a silence beyond words, one of Philip Larkin's favorite ways of ending poems? Aren't the attention-getting swear-words with which Larkin liked to begin his late poems, in both their opacity and their distracting, disruptive quality, a lot like the gestures offstage and into the endless elsewheres, nothings and anywheres with which Larkin ends some of these same poems? So Larkin's foul language doesn't simply foreground his sad, distant, empathetic, and resentful relation to the kids whose speech he echoes. It also foreshadows and reflects the same self-isolating, sadly certain rejection of ordinary language and society that is realized, at the poem's end, in a negationist gesture out of and away from everything.
"High Windows" closes by looking up to wordless, endless, and radiant nothingness. Of course, the poem is about the end of religion (the windows seem to be those of a church) and the agnostic's fear of death. But, like other poems from this period, it is also about the relation of the poet and his language to the social and to the private, and about the relation of one generation and its pleasures to the next and theirs. Radiant high windows and high diction on the one hand, fucking and four-letter words on the other. And while these pleasures may at first seem rivalrous or opposed, they turn out to mean, and reveal, the same thing: disrupted and disrupting negativity, resistance to meaning and relation, and-most of all-the common unavailability, for the poet, of two contrasting kinds of consolation and joy. Other people, "High Windows" says, especially young ones, seem to me to have wonderful, satisfying, earthly, social, and sensual rewards, though of course it probably doesn't often seem that way to them (any more than it seemed to me, when I was young, a great relief to be rid of the fear of God), and those joys will never be available to me: and, second, the rewards that art can offer me, the rewards I am really built and suited for, are even at their best characterized by deferral, remoteness, vacancy. With Larkin, the rewards that art or "thought" can offer the reader or writer who is old or distant or lonely enough to need them always begin in privacy and end in privation. The invisible, endless, wordless "Elsewhere" in those windows is a final figure for two kinds of emptiness or regret-we might call them social and private, or young and old, or bodily and linguistic, or even life and art-for which the shaky ametricality and confrontational diction of the first stanzas, the fucked-up lines about fucking, comprise a first figure.
We say to ourselves "That'll be the life" far more than we say "This is the life." And what this indicates (a feeling of deferral, the hope that we might have the right experience later, the sense that someone else might be having it now but we haven't or can't) applies to our desires for artistic enlightenment as well as to those for sensual satisfaction. This common experience of the unattainability of whatever we want, or think we want, is one of Larkin's great subjects. It is also the subject of Andrew Swarbrick's Out of Reach, by far the best critical book solely about Larkin. Swarbrick argues that even "the most triumphant of Larkin's poems are about failure and. . . ultimately prefer silence to words."11 The "failures" and "silences" of "High Windows" are then twofold: one is sexual and social, the other is private and abstract. Larkin can't think about the one without the other. Some deep groove in his head connects an inability to reach or speak to the young with a sense of sexual unfulfillment, and associates both with an almost deconstructive despair at the failure of words (and of art) to mean or cohere. This complex of ideas, which animates "High Windows," runs back through his writing like an underground river, from "Love Again" to "Dockery and Son" to the jazz criticism, two sentences of which could almost serve as an epigraph for "High Windows":
In a humanist society, art. . . assumes great importance, and to lose touch with it is parallel to losing one's faith in a religious age. Or, in this particular case, since jazz is the music of the young, it was like losing one's potency.12
Larkin's confrontational "fucks," like his gestures to elsewhere and nothing, respond to this loss, to this sense of failure, which is both spiritual (and private) and social (and sexual).
"The peculiar triumph of Larkin's lyricism," as Swarbrick says (quoting Bakhtin), "is to incorporate 'other people's words.'"13 Talking about the kids in their language, ventriloquizing while showing his distance, the Larkin of these late poems is like the lonely boy John Kemp who spends about a third of Larkin's undergraduate novel, Jill, writing the fictional diary of its heroine. Historicizing his own feelings of outsiderhood in "High Windows," realizing that the same relations have applied whenever the old, resentful, lonely, and goatish (like Larkin) have looked at the young, Larkin turns to "arrogant eternity," solitude, Art, and realizes that their consolations, too, "never worked for me," as he put it in "Love Again." One kind of distance just replaces another. In the end, saying "fuck" and "bloody" turns out to be more like contemplating the depth of the ocean, the height of the air, or the uncomprehending sunlight than anyone but Larkin would have guessed.
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040417
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dudeinanigloo
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You know, you didn't need to post an 8-paragraph-long post three times FUCKHEAD!
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040426
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dudeinanigloo
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My mistake - 17 FUCKING paragraphs!!
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040426
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paperthin
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nothing like making love
even less than sex
sex without respect
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040426
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Cablex
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all i need, all i want to do, but what does it get me, where does it take me
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040426
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oldephebe
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"the word f*** is canonical now.."
please explain. Are you saying the f word is esteemed so by readers of that gentlemens so called seminal work? Has that reverance seeped out beyond the ivy entombed towers and cubicles to propogate a shift in the common culture? Are 12 to 24 year olds now peppering their already genrationally informed/epistemologically and experientially inused verbiage with the new elevated connotation of the f word?
That was a really provocative claim. Tell me you weren't being tongue in cheek.
...
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040427
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ofsuch
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i need you to fuck me. come over please and fuck me.
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040429
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anniemo23@hotmail.com
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He held my hand to his neck
to make me feel him swallow me
as he was going down on me.
And then
Tie me up to the bed post
And lick me
Almost reaching climax and then
let up and wait
And then start again
Torturous bliss
Build me up
To tear me down
Bend me over
Grab the hips
Slide in and out
Slowly
So that way
I can feel all of you,
Feel your head dip in and out
slowly
And then rush in
Fast, all the way
Surge of good pain
Pumping
Pulling
Pulsating
Go ahead, pull my hair
Bite my ass
Enjoy me.
Flip me over
Put my legs over your
Shoulders
And go wild, animalistic
You can hurt me, if you wanna
I’ll all yours
I can be your pet.
Tell me “good girl”
As we sit at a restaurant
Just to turn me on; sub-spacing.
I don't mind if the cabbie watches
Open me up and deliver.
I can wear those suspensors
With only your boxers on
We can do that.
I’d do that for you,
Cuz I know you're worth it
Sedate me
Trance me
Fuck me
Like you mean it.
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040430
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dudeinanigloo
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HISTORY OF THE "F" WORD
Perhaps one of the more interesting words in the English language today is the word "fuck". Out of all the other words that begin with the letter F, fuck is the only word that is referred to as the "f" word. Like most words in the English language, fuck is derived from German - the word "friechen", which means "to strike". Fuck falls into many dramatical categories. As a transitive verb, for instance:
"John fucked Shirley".
As an intransitive verb:
"Shirley fucks."
Its meaning is not always sexual - it can be used as an adjective. As in these examples:
"John's doing all the fucking work."
As an adverb enhancing an adjective:
"Shirley is fucking beautiful."
Fuck can also be used to represent situations, such as:
Fraud
"I got fucked at the used-car lot."
Difficulty
"I don't understand this fucking question."
Dismissal
"Why don't you go outside and play hide-and-go-fuck yourself?"
Incompetence
"He's a fuck-off!"
............etc.
I don't remember the whole thing, but if you want to see it yourself, go to www.funnyjunk.com. It is #3 on the list of top funny pages.
peace :)
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040507
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Halona
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Fuck me. Fuck you. Fuck we. Fuck she. Fuck he.
Fuck is a very used word. It is used harshly and lovingly. Liste to the tone of the voice from the lips from the mind that the word comes from.
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040508
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lou_la_belle
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AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
just god damn it all to god damn fucking hell! geezus fucking christ i god damn fucking hate this!! bloody fucking hell! FUCK! just fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck!
whew. i feel better now.
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040607
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elegance
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In a first flit
of filth
(and this my dear is always pleasant)
softly kisses broken veins with blue eyes
and sharp teeth sharper than mine and my wit and words.
save the world my sweetthing
my heart
burns to see you my body aches to be held in
your hands to feel
small and fuckgirl lewd
and to scream as loudly
as I want with my hair
pinned to mapdirty sheets
pupil to pupil moans emanate
from girlyhole- source of our boths pleasure
pinned back face against the smutty
shower wall its fast its dirty
it makes me cry with desire.
I be your post orgasmic kill.
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040614
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puredream
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FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!
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040614
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witchesrequiem
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It's odd.
When you speak with an Irish accent the word.... is some where between a fuck and a folk..but it all means the same.
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040615
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witchesrequiem
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It's odd.
When you speak with an Irish accent the word.... is some where between a fuck and a folk..but it all means the same.
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040615
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self effacing bastard
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softly she whispers
and a dress falls with a hush
my moonlit angel fades into essence
and all i know is her smell and
her touch...
she laughed like children
she made love like a queen
but now her memory disappears into dream.
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040624
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witchesrequiem
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Damn... yall are fucking killing me!
It could take 6 hours to read this whole fucking blath.
Drunk..maybe days.
I say fuck my new job, this city I refuse to leave, casting directers, my old HS president for not having a 5 yr reunion (I read she did make the deans list ..wowho..),fuck bordom, human nature and stores that over price candles.
That all for today..thank u
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040624
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witchesrequiem
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Damn... yall are fucking killing me!
It could take 6 hours to read this whole fucking blather.
Drunk..maybe days.
I say fuck my new job, this city I refuse to leave, casting directers, my old HS president for not having a 5 yr reunion (I read she did make the deans list ..wowho..),fuck bordom, human nature and stores that over price candles.
That all for today..thank u
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040624
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witchesrequiem
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Damn... yall are fucking killing me!
It could take 6 hours to read this whole fucking blather.
Drunk..maybe days.
I say fuck my new job, this city I refuse to leave, casting directers, my old HS president for not having a 5 yr reunion (I read she did make the deans list ..wowho..),fuck bordom, human nature and stores that over price candles.
That all for today..thank u
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040624
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witchesrequiem
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Damn... yall are fucking killing me!
It could take 6 hours to read this whole fucking blather.
Drunk..maybe days.
I say fuck my new job, this city I refuse to leave, casting directers, my old HS president for not having a 5 yr reunion (I read she did make the deans list ..wowho..),fuck bordom, human nature and stores that over price candles.
That all for today..thank u
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040624
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me_again_song_for_the _dead_witches
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fuck this ..server telling me it's down...reload shit that causes shit to appear over and over and over and fucking over,,,,
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040624
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1 of NOAHS sons
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one of my most hated words, so vulgar and diluted it shrivels my skin in disgust with its cheap tackyness. ironic to see the effect it has on the people on this page
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040630
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jimothy
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abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz wahoo now they r all in order
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040630
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jimothy
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abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz wahoo now they r all in order
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040630
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jimothy
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abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz wahoo now they r all in order
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040630
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jimothy
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abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz wahoo now they r all in order
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040630
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*Colleen*
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It's recently become my addiction...
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040801
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*Colleen*
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It's recently become my addiction...
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040801
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... |
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*Colleen*
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It's recently become my addiction...
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040801
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... |
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*Colleen*
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It's recently become my addiction...
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040801
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*Colleen*
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It's recently become my addiction...
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040801
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the one who knew
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The Word That Comes Up Out Of You as The Thrusting Of The Penis Is To Painful To Bare. The Word You Say As You Fall Apart On Your Partner and Lose Your Grip On The Sheets.
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040803
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pop_guru
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Is fucking the same as making love?
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040806
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hell
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no
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040808
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werere
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FUCKASS!
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040901
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werere
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FUCKASS!
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040901
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werere
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FUCKASS!
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040901
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anonymous coward
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used this word for the first time today
still never said it
recoil in disgust
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040907
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Xeneth Sparda
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I like to.
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040912
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me
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oh so much fun
but at the same time, fuck that fucktard
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040924
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some freak
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its a word that i like to use a lot donno why
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040929
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some freak
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its a word that i like to use a lot donno why
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040929
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der
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FUCK? oh thats easy it means gettin a root! der.....
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040929
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der
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FUCK? oh thats easy it means gettin a root! der.....
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040929
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dan
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fuck is when she breaks my heart beacause she says she needs time to figure herself out. fuck that shit in the fucking ass. i fucking cant believe she told me she wanted to marry me and be with me forever. fuck her for that bull shit. i am fucking pissed. girls can IM me at dnutt32
fuck it. when i asked her to fuck me i didnt mean to ruin my life
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041006
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when?
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holy fuck
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041011
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ugh
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fiznuck is not a word, but it loads a lot faster than fuck
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041026
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ugh
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fiznuck is not a word, but it loads a lot faster than fuck
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041026
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insane_child
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expressive
helpful in a time of need.
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041105
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insane_child
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expressive.
helpful in a time of need.
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041105
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LadyDeath900
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Fuck
My favorite word, it can mean alot of different things. . . Things that bring pleasure, problems, annoyance, and grief!
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041211
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dave
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what the fuck, fuck you, fuck them, fuck the fucking mailman for not delivering the fucking mail today. fucking asshole, fuck the fake motherfuckers I'm watching on fucking mtv right now, mtv what the fuck.
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050129
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(tuesday)
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hobbes? what the fuck? why the fuck? what the fuck where you thinking? you fuck.
fuck hobbes.
while we're at it, fuck locke, fuck hume, fuck kant, fuck leibniz, and, oh yes, fuck descartes.
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050226
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Kaji
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Man, fuck took a fucking long time to load. People must like saying fuck.
Fucking Modems...
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050228
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fucker
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Fuck the fucking fuckers
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050309
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Organic Freak
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Fuck the quizes
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050318
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poet@12:57
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fuck, what a word.
fuck who
fuck what
fuck that
fuck him
not that
fuck that
fuck this
fuck her
not that
fuck time
fuck light
fuck him
not that
fuck sight
fuck smell
fuck her
not that
fuck this
fuck that
not this or that
Fuck what a word!
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050319
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Amber Lee
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Get a "Fucking" Grip people, what you
want to bitch about who does or doesn't
Love or Respect you? Well boo fucken hoo. Have a little love and respect for yourself and "Fuck" everyone who tries to take that from you. People will try to make you feel like shit by
making you feel less than them, SO TELL
THEM TO FUCK OFF!!!! AND TO KISS YOU "FUCKEN" ASS!!! You need to love you, cause if you don't who will? Stick to your guns and demand what you want from a relationship! Don't let anybody run you down or treat you like
crap, because they will do it if you let them. Love is out there keep looking. Love You, alee
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050320
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steph
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fuck me i need a fuck. fucking hell it's been so fucking long since i had a good fucking. i'm not fucking happy i need a great fucking fuck. so FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME FUCK ME!!!!!!!
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050408
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carina
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ya like yesterday night my boyfriend fucked me in the ass than my mouth
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050423
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me
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fuck fuck fuck, i can't find a fucking thing, stupid fucking shit! what the fuck
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050428
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fuck
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fuck
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050429
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not i
|
frequently
uncalled
cock
killers
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050512
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tov
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you
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050513
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snarl
|
FUCKKK THAT SHIT.
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050608
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snarl
|
FUCKKK THAT SHIT.
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050608
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snarl
|
FUCKKK THAT SHIT.
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050608
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dschip
|
What makes a word a bad word? For fuck sakes its just a word. Also what ever happened to making love? These questions need to be answered. Not in a punctillious way any answere will do as long its plausible
|
050612
|
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... |
|
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dschip
|
What makes a word a bad word? For fuck sakes its just a word. Also what ever happened to making love? These questions need to be answered. Not in a punctillious way any answere will do as long its plausible
|
050612
|
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... |
|
|
dschip
|
What makes a word a bad word? For fuck sakes its just a word. Also what ever happened to making love? These questions need to be answered. Not in a punctillious way any answere will do as long its plausible
|
050612
|
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... |
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the duckling
|
thats the way i like it girllllll dont u kno i like i like the way u look at me
FUCKFUCKFUCK
|
050728
|
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... |
|
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the duckling
|
thats the way i like it girllllll dont u kno i like i like the way u look at me
FUCKFUCKFUCK
|
050728
|
|
... |
|
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the duckling
|
thats the way i like it girllllll dont u kno i like i like the way u look at me
FUCKFUCKFUCK
|
050728
|
|
... |
|
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the duckling
|
thats the way i like it girllllll dont u kno i like i like the way u look at me
FUCKFUCKFUCK
|
050728
|
|
... |
|
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the duckling
|
thats the way i like it girllllll dont u kno i like i like the way u look at me
FUCKFUCKFUCK
|
050728
|
|
... |
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Maddox
|
why the fuck are you ppl so god damn sad what the fuck is wrong with you ppl so damn depressing even the word fuck, im like ready to go cut myself or something, or maybe ill go and fuck.
|
050731
|
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... |
|
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r3n3g8
|
absofuckinglutely!!!
|
050807
|
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... |
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ROdent
|
RRRRRRRRRRR....m fuck thats good meg n meth 4 eva k ttfn
|
050904
|
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... |
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CRACKtakis
|
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS IT WITH THESE PEOPLE...THEY FUCK YOU ON MONDAY(FUCK MONDAY) TUESDAY, WEDNSDAY (FUCK SPELLING)FUCK ALL YOU PIECES("")OF FUCKING SHIT WHY DONT YOU JUST TAKE MY MONEY....I DONT NEED IT OR ANYTHIG....FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCKING FUCK
|
050920
|
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... |
|
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fuck me
|
oh ilove you fuck me harder i love you ohh im coming
|
051013
|
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... |
|
|
fuck me
|
oh ilove you fuck me harder i love you ohh im coming
|
051013
|
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... |
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adrian
|
wanna fuck 63655338. for manly love
|
051108
|
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... |
|
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adrian
|
wanna fuck 63655338. for manly love
|
051108
|
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... |
|
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robert
|
I'm gay and i like big cocks
call me on 63688517 and ask for robert you fucknig little slut
|
051108
|
|
... |
|
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robert
|
I'm gay and i like big cocks.
call me on 63688517 and ask for robert you fucknig little slut
|
051108
|
|
... |
|
|
robert
|
I'm gay and i like big cocks.
call me on 63688517 and ask for robert you fucknig little slut
|
051108
|
|
... |
|
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robert
|
I'm gay and i like big cocks.
call me on 63688517 and ask for robert you fucknig little slut
|
051108
|
|
... |
|
|
robert
|
I'm gay and i like big cocks.
call me on 63688517 and ask for robert you fucknig little slut
|
051108
|
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... |
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adrian
|
Im a tight gay bitch and i want men to fuck me but we can have phone sex
63655338
|
051108
|
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... |
|
|
pssylvr
|
Want to know why men dream of abusing women during sex; because there are too many dam games played. If women will just quite with the games. You know you want to get fucked, and you females love it when the big dick is in your fuckin pussy. Mine as well get down and dirty in front of everyone and be filmed on tape. I love pussy and I dream of fucking every chic I see. Females are thought of as bithes, hoes, whores, and sluts. Everyone pussy deserves to get the fucking shit fucked out of it.
|
051213
|
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... |
|
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pssylvr
|
Want to know why men dream of abusing women during sex; because there are too many dam games played. If women will just quite with the games. You know you want to get fucked, and you females love it when the big dick is in your fuckin pussy. Mine as well get down and dirty in front of everyone and be filmed on tape. I love pussy and I dream of fucking every chic I see. Females are thought of as bithes, hoes, whores, and sluts. Everyone pussy deserves to get the fucking shit fucked out of it.
|
051213
|
|
... |
|
|
pssylvr
|
Want to know why men dream of abusing women during sex; because there are too many dam games played. If women will just quite with the games. You know you want to get fucked, and you females love it when the big dick is in your fuckin pussy. Mine as well get down and dirty in front of everyone and be filmed on tape. I love pussy and I dream of fucking every chic I see. Females are thought of as bithes, hoes, whores, and sluts. Everyone pussy deserves to get the fucking shit fucked out of it.
|
051213
|
|
... |
|
|
me
|
I fuck my girlfriend in har pantyhose all the time
|
060102
|
|
... |
|
|
me
|
I fuck my girlfriend in har pantyhose all the time
|
060102
|
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... |
|
|
Shiverz
|
fucking kill that fucking fuck who fucked my girl and in turn fucked me so i'll fuck him but is he really fucking him or just a fucked up thought in my head from being fucked.
|
060129
|
|
... |
|
|
kariann
|
it's a beautiful thing.
|
060216
|
|
... |
|
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-
|
pssylvr maybe u should hav a lie down or sit on the toilet or do thia chi or something coz u sound like a pretty reved up horny son of a bitch and I Didnt need to hear that.
|
060219
|
|
... |
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Maple Tree
|
fuck, such a harsh word. but i want him to do me anyway.
|
060219
|
|
... |
|
|
Maple Tree
|
fuck, such a harsh word. but i want him to do me anyway.
|
060219
|
|
... |
|
|
Maple Tree
|
fuck, such a harsh word. but i want him to do me anyway.
|
060219
|
|
... |
|
|
who ever
|
fuck you all in all your small mindedness
|
060310
|
|
... |
|
|
fucker
|
fucked up and freaked out. I fuck with the world and the world fucks me back. I am fucking useless and use fucking to become less. I am the lesser for fucking up. I am fucked up the greater for fucking with my uselessness. Fuck me and say you hate me. Fuck up the arse on your death bed and laugh. fuck cry. cry out during fucking at how fucking fucked up you fucking well are you fucker. Fuck me like god fucked mary when she concieved jesus. I love you when you fuck me up like we in the west love so much to be.
|
060311
|
|
... |
|
|
fucker
|
fucked up and freaked out. I fuck with the world and the world fucks me back. I am fucking useless and use fucking to become less. I am the lesser for fucking up. I am fucked up the greater for fucking with my uselessness. Fuck me and say you hate me. Fuck up the arse on your death bed and laugh. fuck cry. cry out during fucking at how fucking fucked up you fucking well are you fucker. Fuck me like god fucked mary when she concieved jesus. I love you when you fuck me up like we in the west love so much to be.
|
060311
|
|
... |
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|
oren
|
On Fridays, at work, we use the_word "fuck" as often as possible. We call them "Fuck_You Fridays."
|
060311
|
|
... |
|
|
Eddie
|
Fuck? Kcuf?
Indeed.
I Love Your Rehtom!
3
|
060317
|
|
... |
|
|
uglytruth
|
even the most self-respecting, femminist, level-headed woman likes to get fucked.
fucking doesn't negate respect, or love.
i like fucking.
(except that i am also fatalistically fucked....)
|
060411
|
|
... |
|
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Lafiel
|
fuck means screw in swahilie...
|
060418
|
|
... |
|
|
jordie
|
When I think about my high school, the first thing that comes to mind is the cafeteria. Bright, hard and uncomfortable. The stench of cardboard milk cartons and synthetic meat heavy in the stark atmosphere. The strong feelings of nausea and exposure whenever I enter the place. I hate the stinging fluorescent lighting and the cinderblock walls like a prison. I hate the bells and the rules and the bland hallways like a bizarre dream. I hate the male teachers who look down my shirt and touch my shoulder and look at my ass. I hate the grades, the math, the homework.
I never liked school.
Then it reminds me of the geinocologist. Because I went this morning and I hate that place too.
She stuck a fucking metal probe in me while she told me about how I should lessen up the number of partners I fuck.
Yeah, well fuck you.
|
060517
|
|
... |
|
|
Stu
|
possibly the most useful word ever
|
060519
|
|
... |
|
|
australian highrise
|
good word. secretly, my favorite. behind a veil of piousness and smiles and blogs.
|
060612
|
|
... |
|
|
australian highrise
|
good word. secretly, my favorite. behind a veil of piousness and smiles and blogs.
|
060612
|
|
... |
|
|
.
|
I am that teacher, jordie. Nice pair you're packin down there........ and great ass, too.
|
060613
|
|
... |
|
|
.
|
I am that teacher, jordie. Nice pair you're packin down there........ and great ass, too.
|
060613
|
|
... |
|
|
Erin Lee
|
my friends recite:
"Fuck fuck fuck a duck,
screw a kangaroo.
finger bang an orangutang
at the local zoo."
|
060625
|
|
... |
|
|
mystic spiral
|
me proper, and don't call me in the morning, getting fucked is half the fun of getting fucked
|
060629
|
|
... |
|
|
mystic spiral
|
me proper, and don't call me in the morning, getting fucked is half the fun of getting fucked
|
060629
|
|
... |
|
|
mystic spiral
|
me proper, and don't call me in the morning, getting fucked is half the fun of getting fucked
|
060629
|
|
... |
|
|
Briar~Rose
|
History of the Word Fuck
Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today, is the word fuck.
Of all the English words beginning with f, fuck is the single one referred to as the "f-word". It's the one magical word. Just by it's sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. Fuck, as most of the other words in English, has arrived from Germany. Fuck from German's "fliechen" which mean to strike. In English, fuck folds into many grammatical categories. As a transital verb for instance, "John fucked Shirley". As an intransitive verb; "Shirley fucks". It's meaning is not always sexual, it can be used as an adjective such as; John's doing all the fucking work. As part of an adverb; "Shirley talks too fucking much", as an adverb enhancing an adjective; Shirley is fucking beautiful. As a noun; "I don't give a fuck". As part of a word: "abso-fucking-lutely" or "in-fucking-credible". Or as almost every word in a sentence: "fuck the fucking fuckers!". As you must realize, there aren't many words with the versitility such as the word fuck,as in these examples used as the following words;
- fraud: "I got fucked"
- trouble: "I guess I'm really fucked now"
- dismay: "Oh, fuck it!"
- aggresion: "don't fuck with me, buddy!"
- difficulty: "I don't understand this fucking question"
- inquery: "who the fuck was that?"
- dissatisfaction: "I don't like what the fuck is going on here"
- incompetence: "he's a fuck-off!"
- dismissal: "why don't you go outside and fuck yourself?"
I'm sure you can think of many more examples.
With all these multipurpoused applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word?
Use this unique, flexibel word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly:
FUCK YOU!
|
060707
|
|
... |
|
|
life is pointless
|
my life is fucked up. Why? One little mistake. Well i fucking hit a stupid insulting bitch in his ugly fucked up face , so he desided to fuck up my fucking life. Fuck stops my from killin myself and other. Fuck is the most useful word i know
|
060715
|
|
... |
|
|
Rikae Arson
|
Fuck the fucking fuckers.
|
060721
|
|
... |
|
|
BAAL PHEGOR
|
FUCK PEOPLE FUCK SOCIETY FUCK LIFE FUCK YOU FUCK ME FUCK HIM FUCK HER FUCK THEM FUCK US FUCKY RELIGION FUCK OPINIONS FUCK THE GOVERMENTS FUCK WORLD LEADERS FUCK WORLD PEACE FUCK WAR FUCK THE EARTH FUCK HUNGER FUCK RICHNESS AND SUCCESS FUCK THE UNIVERSE FUCK THE CREATOR FUCK ALL MATTER FUCK ALL FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS FUCK HEAVY SHIT FUCK MY IDEA FUCK THIS TEXT FUCK THIS MONITOR FUCK YOUR PC FUCK THE INTERNET FUCK COMMUNICATION
|
060906
|
|
... |
|
|
BAAL PHEGOR
|
FUCK PEOPLE FUCK SOCIETY FUCK LIFE FUCK YOU FUCK ME FUCK HIM FUCK HER FUCK THEM FUCK US FUCK RELIGION FUCK OPINIONS FUCK THE GOVERMENTS FUCK WORLD LEADERS FUCK WORLD PEACE FUCK WAR FUCK THE EARTH FUCK HUNGER FUCK RICHNESS AND SUCCESS FUCK THE UNIVERSE FUCK THE CREATOR FUCK ALL MATTER FUCK ALL FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS FUCK HEAVY SHIT FUCK MY IDEA FUCK THIS TEXT FUCK THIS MONITOR FUCK YOUR PC FUCK THE INTERNET FUCK COMMUNICATION
|
060906
|
|
... |
|
|
BAAL PHEGOR
|
FUCK PEOPLE FUCK SOCIETY FUCK LIFE FUCK YOU FUCK ME FUCK HIM FUCK HER FUCK THEM FUCK US FUCK RELIGION FUCK OPINIONS FUCK THE GOVERMENTS FUCK WORLD LEADERS FUCK WORLD PEACE FUCK WAR FUCK THE EARTH FUCK HUNGER FUCK RICHNESS AND SUCCESS FUCK THE UNIVERSE FUCK THE CREATOR FUCK ALL MATTER FUCK ALL FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS FUCK HEAVY SHIT FUCK MY IDEA FUCK THIS TEXT FUCK THIS MONITOR FUCK YOUR PC FUCK THE INTERNET FUCK COMMUNICATION
|
060906
|
|
... |
|
|
BAAL PHEGOR
|
FUCK PEOPLE FUCK SOCIETY FUCK LIFE FUCK YOU FUCK ME FUCK HIM FUCK HER FUCK THEM FUCK US FUCK RELIGION FUCK OPINIONS FUCK THE GOVERMENTS FUCK WORLD LEADERS FUCK WORLD PEACE FUCK WAR FUCK THE EARTH FUCK HUNGER FUCK RICHNESS AND SUCCESS FUCK THE UNIVERSE FUCK THE CREATOR FUCK ALL MATTER FUCK ALL FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS FUCK HEAVY SHIT FUCK MY IDEA FUCK THIS TEXT FUCK THIS MONITOR FUCK YOUR PC FUCK THE INTERNET FUCK COMMUNICATION
|
060906
|
|
... |
|
|
frazer
|
what the fuck
|
060924
|
|
... |
|
|
.wav
|
i have what the Briar~Rose says as a .wav file and it's narrated in a very upbeat post WWII era style.
i considered posting it myself and i'm pleased to see it is already here.
|
061007
|
|
... |
|
|
Emptyness Alive
|
fuck a word that can be used in many situations. such as a exclamation, aprofanity, an word of pleasure such as fuck thats good or fuck yeah. it is commonly used as a swearword or a used for the a a different option from the word sex or making love.
&hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts
|
061121
|
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... |
|
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&hearts
|
&hearts
|
061121
|
|
... |
|
|
.
|
fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuckity fuckity fuck fuck
|
061121
|
|
... |
|
|
.
|
fuck fuck fuckity fuck
fuckity fuckity fuck fuck
|
061121
|
|
... |
|
|
.
|
fuck fuck fuckity fuck
fuckity fuckity fuck fuck
|
061121
|
|
... |
|
|
phil
|
I thought you guys were joking. I must be some other species.
|
061122
|
|
... |
|
|
Nick
|
Oh fuck! It's breasticles!
|
070127
|
|
... |
|
|
f
|
uck
|
070128
|
|
... |
|
|
F
|
fucity FUCK-ITY FUCK
FFFFUCKITY FUCKITY FUCKITY FUCK.
OH FUCK
FUUUUCCCCCKK
oh crap
FUCK
its ok...
FUCK.
|
070228
|
|
... |
|
|
F
|
fucity FUCK-ITY FUCK
FFFFUCKITY FUCKITY FUCKITY FUCK.
OH FUCK
FUUUUCCCCCKK
oh crap
FUCK
its ok...
FUCK.
|
070228
|
|
... |
|
|
F
|
fucity FUCK-ITY FUCK
FFFFUCKITY FUCKITY FUCKITY FUCK.
OH FUCK
FUUUUCCCCCKK
oh crap
FUCK
its ok...
FUCK.
|
070228
|
|
... |
|
|
F
|
fucity FUCK-ITY FUCK
FFFFUCKITY FUCKITY FUCKITY FUCK.
OH FUCK
FUUUUCCCCCKK
oh crap
FUCK
its ok...
FUCK.
|
070228
|
|
... |
|
|
the ignored
|
Fuck my life!!!
I have been bad luck for almost an entire year. I used to think it was just a strike, but nothing good is happening. Holy shit! Fick! My life is so fucking miserable. Fuck my life and people around me. Fuck! No matter how much I work I will never succeed! No matter how much I try, I will never have a friend! Fick Dich! Fuck you!
|
070326
|
|
... |
|
|
poet
|
not with that attitude
|
070502
|
|
... |
|
|
pash
|
fuck with passion.
|
070503
|
|
... |
|
|
L.
|
FUCK YOU, I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
|
070518
|
|
... |
|
|
kele-de
|
That's what I say
|
070530
|
|
... |
|
|
kele-de
|
That's what I say
|
070530
|
|
... |
|
|
kele-de
|
That's what I say
|
070530
|
|
... |
|
|
whiskey
|
I've heard it said that everyone is allowed to fuck up every once in a while. Well then why do you have to fix it? Why does society make you live with all of your fuck ups? Can't we all just say "oops, there goes fuck-up #117... How many do I have left?"
|
071103
|
|
... |
|
|
fuck
|
I say fuck a lot when I'm drunk. Whatthefuckisgoingon. Yeah thats right. I feel; the world is against me. What is going on. i;m lost in a cool cruel world. where no one is around. only bthe lost desolate words i hear in my mind. i'm lonley. where am i? it;s dark....
|
080216
|
|
... |
|
|
niecespieces
|
Fuck is like playdough... it can become what you need it to be.
Fuck is a thing, an idea, an action, and a consequence... it is what we live for, and hide from, fear, and abuse.
Describe your life.
fuck.
describe the best things in your life
fuck.
describe your heart
fucked.
|
080306
|
|
... |
|
|
In_Bloom
|
"I don't make love. I Fuck."
... and you're a liar
|
080823
|
|
... |
|
|
misscherrythief
|
when a pretty girl says the word fuck it makes her look ugly.
|
080917
|
|
... |
|
|
hsg
|
eye_of_the_beholder
|
080917
|
|
... |
|
|
arg
|
as in
fuck_my_life !!!!
|
080923
|
|
... |
|
|
niecespieces
|
"do you want me to fuck you?"
"yes"
"how bad?"
"so bad"
They wisper, entwined with vodka on their speech, and with careless eyes...
|
080928
|
|
... |
|
|
In_Bloom
|
Half a world away
Half
Worth so much more than just a fuck
No one believes it but you do
And I do
And we keep on loving
With just half
Half a world away
Let the rest of them have *fuck*
|
080929
|
|
... |
|
|
fuck
|
fuck
|
081215
|
|
... |
|
|
thes
|
Whatthefuckisgoingon
Yousir are correct. I always find myself yelling this, only to notice, too late, that I don't want to know. thankyouverymuch.
|
081231
|
|
... |
|
|
Nikki
|
fuck the world lets all get high
|
090401
|
|
... |
|
|
unhinged
|
would be nice right about now
even nicer
if i cared about the person
|
090401
|
|
... |
|
|
.
|
.
|
090403
|
|
... |
|
|
hsg
|
there's a certain raw quality to fucking that i appreciate.
what bothers me is when people don't have the courage to make "fucking" love.
|
090403
|
|
... |
|
|
In_Bloom
|
.
|
090403
|
|
... |
|
|
unhinged
|
or just make out til you're black and blue; i don't think the gin helped the black and blue part.
|
090404
|
|
... |
|
|
theo
|
sex with out cause
|
090416
|
|
... |
|
|
me
|
fuck me. fuck you. fuck it. fuck this. fuck. FUCK. fuck sakes.
|
100209
|
|
... |
|
|
Annie Capote
|
and what the fuck does it even mean to want to fuck someone you think you have a spiritual connection with, like why would i want to do that? why can't i transcend? why can't we all transcend?
|
100302
|
|
... |
|
|
fzvfdzsdrtgh
|
fzvfdzsdrtgh
|
101116
|
|
... |
|
|
foyoy
|
foyoy
|
110930
|
|
... |
|
|
foyoy
|
foyoy
|
110930
|
|
... |
|
|
m
|
fuck fuck everything.
fuck relationships that you're in because you think you need to be.
fuck jobs that make you hate yourself.
fuck your own self loathing.
fuck television.
fuck technology.
fuck anyone who hates other cultures.
fuck balls that squeek.
fuck stress..
fuck cancer.
fuck hiding behind a veil.
|
141014
|
|
... |
|
|
balls that squeek
|
fuck you
|
141015
|
|
... |
|
|
Karen
|
Not all guys just you
you with your video games
and weed
FUCK you and your word it's worthless
You're a fucking loser with a loser job and a loser personality
you pretend like youre so fucking nice to please everyone
but you're a weasel
She was right about you
she saw right through your sweet eyes
to the depths of your weasel soul
she was right and you are HALF the man she is.
I hate you with every fucking fibre of my being and you just sit there smiling like I have no right to be upset.
GET OFF YOUR FUCKING ASS AND DO SOMETHING.
This is why I said no to you for so long. I should have followed my gut.
but after that long I ran out of reasons not to...
what a romantic reason to get involved with someone - no reason not to.
You were the romantic type
what with your empty promises and ability to stare blankly at a tv screen for several hours....let me swooooooooon
you hairy midget freak.
|
150216
|
|
... |
|
|
fuck
|
fuck
|
160908
|
|
|
what's it to you?
who
go
|
blather
from
|
|
