238
PARTISAN REVIEW
As for the origin of ideas, ought we not remember thfit an
idea is a formulation of a response to a situation? Since the
~it
uations in which people find themselves are limited in number and
the possible·responses also limited, ideas certainly do have a ten–
dency to recur; and because people think habitually, ideas have
also a tendency to persist when the situation which engendered
them is no longer present. Then too, an idea, of another age may
be attractive just because it is historical. So that ideas do have a
certain sort of limited autonomy, though it is an autonomy of
appearance rather than of reality. But from that autonomy of
appearance there has grown up the idea of the perfect autonomy
of ideas; it is often suppostjd that ideas think themselves, create
themselves, have a life independent of the thinker and the situa–
tion. And from that we are often led to conclude that ideas, sys–
tematic ideas, are responsible for events.
A similar .feeling is prevalent among our intellectual classes
about words. It is being felt nowadays, under the influence of the
claims of semantics, that we have been betrayed by words, that
they are pushing us around. "The tyranny of words" became
recently a popular phrase, and the semanticists offer us an easier
world if only we assert our independence from words and arrange
them in an orderly way. But a long time ago Dickens said that he
was tired of hearing about "the tyranny of words" (he used that
phrase) ; he was, he said, less concerned with the way words abuse
us than with the way we abuse words. It is not words that make
the trouble but our own wills. Words cannot control us unless we
wish to be controlled. And the same thing is true of the control of
systematic ideas. We are beginning to believe more and more that
some ideas can betray us, others save us. The intellectual classes
are learning to blame ideas for our troubles rather than blaming,
what is a very different thing, our own bad thinking. This is the
great vice of any intellectual class, that it is concerned with ideas
rather than with thinking.
It is here, I
beli~ve,
that one of the problems of our profession
relates to practical matters. Consider for a moment these sentences
from a really admirable biography of Byron recently published,
and consider if the misconceptions of our profession are not in
some part responsible for the assumptions that are here being
used. Mr. Peter Quennell is making an estimate of the effect of
