One must keep one's eye on actual usage. One should
indeed allow for a certain amount of freakishness in this
usage. Beaumarchais, for example, makes classic synony-
mous with barbaric. ¹ One may disregard an occasional
aberration of this kind, but if one can find only confusion
and inconsistency in all the main uses of words like
classic and romantic, the only procedure for those who
speak or write in order to be understood is to banish the
words from their vocabulary.

Now to define in a Socratic way two things are neces-
sary: one must learn to see a common element in things
that are apparently different and also to discriminate
between things that are apparently similar. A Newton,
to take the familiar instance of the former process, saw
a common element in the fall of an apple and the motion
of a planet; and one may perhaps without being a liter-
ary Newton discover a common element in all the main
uses of the word romantic as well as in all the main
uses of the word classic; though some of the things to
which the word romantic in particular has been applied
seem, it must be admitted, at least as far apart as the fall
of an apple and the motion of a planet. The first step is
to perceive the something that connects two or more of
these things apparently so diverse, and then it may be
found necessary to refer this unifying trait itself back
to something still more general, and so on until we ar-
rive, not indeed at anything absolute -- the absolute
will always elude us -- but at what Goethe calls the
original or underlying phenomenon (Urphänomen).
A fruitful source of false definition is to take as primary
in a more or less closely allied group of facts what is

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