ABSTRACT
Language is the oldest witness to the course of development of all human ideas. Before any other form of tradition grows up, language has given definite names to the dominant conceptions of the popular consciousness; and the word, with its many changes and refinements of meaning, is a mirror of the gradual development and mutation of ideas. The gradual severance of individual ethical ideas from the substrate of moral personality and conduct upon which they were originally based is a process that stands in the most intimate connection with the formation of general ethical concepts. It has been considered a significant ethical tendency in language that negative expressions should be chosen for the designation of the various forms of immorality, and that, while virtue may always be changed into vice by a negative prefix, the process cannot be reversed.
