Persistence of Vision
In a “hermit crab essay,” one form of nonfiction is disguised inside another, its outer form at odds with creative prose: a shopping list, instruction manual, encyclopedia entry. The delicate flesh of the essay-crab is protected by a hard informational shell.1 More often than not, the soft tissue of the hermit crab is made of memoir or personal essay, but there is no principled reason why it couldn’t go another way. Why not a shopping list disguised as a sermon, a side-effects label in the form of a concert review?
My favourite hermit crab—and perhaps my favourite book—is Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus, a treatise in foundational metaphysics disguised as a reverse dictionary.2 Roget’s states his shell endeavour in the first edition of 1852:
The purpose of an ordinary dictionary is simply to explain the meaning of words; and the problem of which it professes to furnish the solution may be stated thus: — The word being given, to find its signification, or the idea it is intended to convey. The object aimed at in the present undertaking is exactly the converse of this; namely, — The idea being given, to find the word, or words, by which that idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed.
Roget’s was not the first book of synonyms in English. That honour goes to John Trusler’s 1766 translation of the Abbé Gabriel Girard’s La Justesse de la Langue Français, published nearly fifty years earlier, in 1718. Trusler’s work was trashed by the press: “We can by no means think this author equal to the task he undertakes,” wrote the Critical Review. “Few critics write nonsense with a better grace.” In 1794, when Roget was a teenager, Hester Thrale Piozzi—a well-known friend of Samuel Johnson—wrote her British Synonymy; or, an Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation. Again, it was not warmly received, the Critical Review complaining of its “uncouth language” and “total want of plan.”
In the decades that followed, the synonym industry blew up, exploded, increased rapidly, snowballed, mushroomed, and took off. A notable contribution was George Crabb’s 1816 English Synonymes Explained, in Alphabetical Order; With Copious Illustrations and Explanations Drawn from the Best Writers. It was followed by Carpenter 1842, Graham 1846, Jermyn 1848, and Rawson 1850, just in the decade before Roget.
Roget’s originality did not lie in compiling a synonymy, then. Nor was the 1852 Thesaurus Roget’s first attempt. Since childhood, he had kept notebooks of diagrams, mathematics—and words. He began with Latin-English pairings, organized by category. For instance, Beasts:
Elephas ______ an Elephant
Tigris ________ a Tiger
Porcus _______ a Hog
Sorex ________ a Rat
But Roget quickly shifted from words for particular kinds of things into abstraction. When he graduated from medical school in 1798, at age nineteen, Roget assembled a 51-page “Classification or Arrangement of Knowledge,” divided into (1) the material world, (2) the intellectual world, and (3) signs. Seven years later, working as a physician in Manchester, he drafted his Collection of English Synonyms Classified and Arranged. His primary innovation was to organize words in parallel columns, with synonyms of the target word opposite “correlative words”—the term “antonym” had not been coined—a structure echoed in Roget’s Thesaurus.
The organization of abstract ideas: this is almost Roget’s hermit crab. But the formulation suggests, mistakenly, that his topic was the mind, where ideas interpose between words and world. Roget would resist that reading. He took his epigraph from John Horne Tooke’s 1786 Epea Pteroenta, or “Winged Words”:
It is impossible we should ever thoroughly understand the nature of the signs, unless we first properly consider and arrange the things signified.
Roget’s Thesaurus is a work of crabbed metaphysics in a carapace of lexicography. It aims to carve reality, not language, at the joints, and it begins with categories a metaphysician would recognize as primordial:
1. EXISTENCE ____________ 2. INEXISTENCE
3. SUBSTANTIALITY ______ 4. UNSUBSTANTIALITY
5. INTRINSICALITY _______ 6. EXTRINSICALITY
These fall under the higher-order heading, EXISTENCE, followed by RELATION, QUANTITY, ORDER, NUMBER, TIME, CHANGE, and CAUSATION, all of which belong to CLASS I. EXISTENCE. (So EXISTENCE appears three times over, at three levels of being.) The other CLASSES are SPACE, MATTER, INTELLECT, VOLITION, and AFFECTIONS. The final section of CLASS VI. AFFECTIONS is the RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS, and its first entry, number 976, is DEITY. Thus God appears under the title of human feeling, near the end of the volume, not as the font of EXISTENCE at the beginning. Take that, Spinoza!
When later editions forgo this structure in favour of an alphabetical format, it’s an act of sacrilege, bequeathing us an empty shell. It’s even worse when they keep the format but revise the metaphysics, as in the facile anthropomorphism of the International Thesaurus, which begins with passable gravity:
1. BIRTH
2. THE BODY
before descending into bathos:
3. HAIR
4. CLOTHING MATERIALS
5. CLOTHING
There may be a case to make for the ontological centrality of the human person. But the idea that hair comes third in the order of being, followed by fabric, is an intellectual embarrassment.
Why did Roget write a book like this?
One way to answer is biographical. We can trace the origins of the Thesaurus in Roget’s personality and intellectual formation. He was influenced by his friend and Edinburgh Professor, Dugald Stewart—now largely forgotten, then regarded as the most important European philosopher outside of Königsburg. Stewart was a pragmatic, commonsensical thinker. He emphasized the role of language in abstract reasoning and the power of philosophy to make sense of our chaotic world: the philosopher “can trace an established order where a mere observer of facts would perceive nothing but irregularity.”
Roget’s search for order found expression in a treasury of scientific research. He experimented with nitrous oxide, but did not enjoy it;, he engaged in a failed attempt to design and build a working fridge at the behest of Jeremy Bentham; he invented the log-log scale for determining powers and roots, the premise of the modern slide rule; he discovered the phenomenon we now call “the persistence of vision,” in which the brain treats sequential stills as moving pictures; he devised a method for moving the knight over a chessboard, hitting every square exactly once, starting anywhere and ending anywhere; and he published the so-called “Bridgewater Treatise” (after its sponsor, the 8th Earl of Bridgewater), Animal and Vegetable Physiology, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, in 1834. The Treatise divined God’s order in the biological world—as, for instance, the marvelous behaviour of the hermit crab. (Its American edition was praised by Emerson as “the only good one … in the series” and by Poe: “The talents of Dr. Roget … are a sufficient guarantee that he has furnished no ordinary work.”)
But while biography might explain why Roget had an interest in philosophy, science, and the order of the universe, it does not explain why he would hide his metaphysics in a book of words. A speculative answer points to the suspicion of metaphysics that divides Enlightenment Britain from the rest of Europe. We have no Leibniz or Spinoza, no Kant or Hegel. Instead, we have John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. Bracketing the fact that empiricism is itself a theoretical commitment, Iris Murdoch had a point when she wrote, in 1958:
The British were never ones for theory in any case. We have always been empiricist, anti-metaphysical in philosophy, mistrustful of theoretical systems.
Roget hid his pithy metaphysics in a shell of stiff synonymies—hid it, maybe, even from himself. Like a hermit crab, his thinking grew within a home that came to be too small for it. Unlike a hermit crab, it never left. Roget’s philosophy was cramped by confinement, the philosophical power of his taxonomy at best implicit, untested and unexplored. Roget’s Thesaurus may be a work of stealth metaphysics—but I don’t say it succeeds.
This reading explains why Simon Winchester’s 2001 critique of Roget is unfair. An early sign of Winchester’s misprision is his careless accounting of the contents of the book. “Once he had established his conceptual framework,” Winchester writes, “[Roget] concluded that all words could be placed in one of six classes.” But he did no such thing, deliberately omitting words for particular kinds of being. There was a division of labour between natural history in the Bridgewater Treatise and the abstract metaphysics of the Thesaurus.
Winchester complains that Roget overestimates his readers, assuming they will know the meanings of his synonyms with their fine distinctions, and that they’ll have the tact to pick the best. If they don’t, their use of Roget will misfire. Winchester mocks a freshman who “attempted to improve the phrase ‘his earthly fingers’ by changing it to ‘his chthonic digits.’” He ruthlessly concludes:
Each time such a wrong is perpetrated by way of Peter Mark Roget, the language, as spoken, written, or read, becomes a little worse, a little more mediocre, and a measure more decayed, disarranged, and unlovely. And that, I suggest, is why all Rogets should be shunned.
But (a) the phrase “his earthly fingers” is pretty peculiar to begin with, (b) “his chthonic digits” is terrific, and (c) while Roget’s Thesaurus is best used in concert with a dictionary, maybe Winchester should teach his students that, empowering them to explore the language, not confining them to words that they already know. It’s good to have high expectations.
Winchester finds the ontological structure of Roget’s Thesaurus equally off-putting:
For how on earth could an average user understand something that few trained lexicographers—and, indeed, few philosophers of language—can properly comprehend (let alone agree on) today?
But you don’t need to appreciate the metaphysics of Roget’s Thesaurus, still less agree with it, in order to use the book effectively, dictionary by your side. You may not even notice how it’s organized, the crab curled shyly in its shell. The Thesaurus is an exercise in steganography, a cipher hidden in plain sight—or an instance of “cross-writing,” in which a single text is addressed to multiple audiences who can read it without being distracted or disturbed by meanings not aimed at them.
In this, it differs from other hermit crabs, where the reader is meant to grasp the interaction of genres: this is part of how the essay works on us. Roget’s Thesaurus is a hermit crab of a hermit crab, like a memoir disguised as a shopping list so useful that you may not recognize its allegory of childhood trauma. Instead, you hasten to the store, impatient to assemble the ingredients for its recipe, full of flavor, taste, tang, relish, and spice.
The term was coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in 2003; some highlights of the genre are collected here.
In addition to the text of Roget’s Thesaurus, this post draws on Joshua Kendall’s The Man Who Made Lists (2009), and Simon Winchester’s “Word Imperfect” (2001).