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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
[Introduction]
248. The foregoing meditation upon the principles of ideas has provided us with a philosophy and history of the law of mankind. Now, to complete the other part of the jurisprudence of the natural law of the gentes, with the use of different principles, we must seek the science of a language common to this law throughout the whole world of human generation.
[Chapter] I New principles of mythology and etymology
249. The definition of Mθος [mythos] is ‘a true narration’, yet it survived with the meaning of the word ‘fable’, which everyone has hitherto taken to mean a false narration. The definition of τυμον [etymon] is ‘true speech’. In the vulgar it means the ‘origin’ or ‘history of words’, but the etymologies that have hitherto reached us are of very little help in understanding the true histories of the origins of the things signified by words. Whence, by meditating on these origins, new principles of mythology and etymology are discovered through which it is shown that fables and true speech were one and the same in meaning and that they constituted the vocabulary of the first nations.
250. For a poverty of words naturally makes men sublime in expression, weighty in conception, and acute in understanding much in brief expression, which are the three most beautiful virtues of language.
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