Near things are sharp and expressed
with remarkable vividness, ultimate objectives are blurred, which
is to say, they lack definition.
May the shades of Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Emerson, and all
great individualists protect us from bad definitions, and
especially from rigid or formal ones! Bad definitions destroy
themselves, for if they are thoroughly bad no one believes them,
and if they contain those pleasing half truths which a generation
loves to suckle upon, why then after their vogue they will wither
into nothingness. Such definitions are of the letter, and die by
it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill the spirit. To define a
great man by a rigid formula is to sink to the lowest practice of
the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply that it
cannot flow without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick
for which audiences should stone him. Solemn generalizations which
squat upon a book like an ostrich on a goose egg and hatch out
vast moral philosophies are to be dreaded like the devil, as are,
equally, the critics with pet theories, who, having defined them,
make everything from a squib to an epic fit their definition.
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