That this is not a fanciful case can be shown by noticing how often we speak of “transparent” honesty, or of “absolute” honesty:  this is notably one of the words for which we have a sliding scale of values, which vary considerably with the age and the community.  “Political honesty” has a very different meaning in the England of to-day from that which it had in the eighteenth century.  To get at the exact meaning of honesty, then, either for Mr. Sidgwick’s Brown, Jones, Robinson, and Smith, or for Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour as compared with Walpole or Pitt, we need a good deal more than a dictionary definition.  What has already been said (p. 65) on the use of the history of the case to get a preliminary understanding of the question which is to be argued, and the terms to be used in it, applies all through the reasoning involved in the argument.  Scrutinize all the terms you use yourself, as well as those used in arguments on the other side.  I have already pointed out the ambiguity there is in the emotional implications of words; but the danger from it is so subtle and so besetting that it will be worth while to dwell on it again.  There are many cases in which there is no doubt as to the denotation of the word,—­the cases which it is intended to name,—­but in which the two sides to a controversy use the word with a totally different effect on their own and other people’s feelings.  Before the Civil War pretty much the whole South had come to use the word “slavery” as implying one of the settled institutions of the country, more or less sanctified by divine ordinance; at the same time a large portion of the North had come to look on it as an abomination to the Lord.

Here there was no doubt as to the denotation of the word; but in a highly important respect it was ambiguous, because it implied a totally different reaction among the people who used it.  In a case where the contrast is so glaring there is little danger of confusion; but there are a good many cases where a word may have very different effects on the feelings of an audience without the fact coming very clearly to the surface.  “Liberal” is to most Americans a term implying praise, so far as it goes; to Cardinal Newman it implied what were to him the irreverent and dangerous heresies of free thought, and therefore in his mouth it was a word of condemnation.[50] “Aesthetic” to many good people has an implication of effeminacy and of trifling which is far from praiseworthy; to artists and critics it may sum up what is most admirable in civilization.  If in an argument on abolishing football as an intercollegiate sport you describe a certain game as played “with spirit and fierceness,” football players would think of it as a good game, but opponents of football would hold that such a description justified them in classing the game with prize fighting.  When one of the terms you use may thus stir one part of your audience in one way, and the other part in just the opposite way, you are dealing with an uncomfortable kind of ambiguity.