It was never contended or conceived by a sound, orthodox utilitarian, that the lover should kiss his mistress with an eye to the common wealth.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than the metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. But then, that acumen has been concentrated primarily upon the practical business of life. If a distinction works well for practical purposes in ordinary life (no mean feat, for even ordinary life is full of hard cases), then there is sure to be something in it, it will not mark nothing: yet this is likely enough to be not the best way of arranging things if our interests are more extensive or intellectual than ordinary. And again, that experience has been derived only from the sources available to ordinary men throughout civilized history: it has not been fed from the resources of the microscope and error and fantasy of all kinds do become incorporated in ordinary language and even sometimes stand up to the survival test (only, when they do, why should we not detect it?) Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.

We take some very simple action, like shoving a stone, usually as done by and viewed by oneself, and use this, with the features distinguishable in it, as our model in terms of which to talk about other actions: and we continue to do so, scarcely realizing it even when these other actions are pretty remote and perhaps much more interesting in their own right than the acts originally used in constructing the model ever were, and even when the model is really distorting the facts rather than helping us observe them.