To accept words instead of things, to content oneself with words, to dispute about words: such is the history of all man’s intellectual aberrations. He is driven to this by two opposite tendencies: need of certainty, and indolence in inquiry.
The result of this is that he lumps together a whole order of phenomena, more or less connected, by a word more or less expressive and precise. He comprehends in this word, creatures of all kinds; and when he has once contracted the habit of repeating this word to himself or to others, he no longer observes the facts of the case: he only attaches his belief to the word.
As soon as the word is pronounced in his presence, some of his cerebral cells begin to act; and by reflex action he utters a series of incoherent but already-formed ideas upon the question which is before us.
Yves Guyot, Prostitution Under the Regulation System (Edgar Beckit Truman, M.D., F.C.S., trans., 1884), pp. 1–2.
Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the French artist André Gill (1840-1885).