'
_Q._ 'Did Mr.---- approve of that gentleman's conduct and way of life?'--
_A._ 'I don't know that I ever heard him speak about it: but he seemed to
give it his implicit approbation by allowing both his sons to associate
with him when the complaints ran highest against him.'
These instances may serve to illustrate the original use of the word;
which use has been retained from the sixteenth century down to our own
days by an uninterrupted chain of writers. In the eighteenth century this
use was indeed nearly effaced but still in the first half of that century
it was retained by Saunderson the Cambridge professor of mathematics (see
his Algebra, &c.), with three or four others, and in the latter half by a
man to whom Saunderson had some resemblance in spring and elasticity of
understanding, viz. by Edmund Burke. Since his day I know of no writers
who have avoided the slang and unmeaning use of the word, excepting
Messrs. Coleridge and Wordsworth; both of whom (but especially the last)
have been remarkably attentive to the scholar-like [1] use of words, and
to the history of their own language.
Thus much for the primitive use of the word _implicit_. Now, with
regard to the history of its transition into its present use, it is
briefly this; and it will appear at once, that it has arisen through
ignorance. When it was objected to a papist that his church exacted an
assent to a great body of traditions and doctrines to which it was
impossible that the great majority could be qualified, either as respected
time--or knowledge--or culture of the understanding, to give any
reasonable assent,--the answer was: 'Yes; but that sort of assent is not
required of a poor uneducated man; all that he has to do--is to believe in
the church: he is to have faith in _her_ faith: by that act he adopts
for his own whatsoever the church believes, though he may never have hoard
of it even: his faith is implicit, _i.
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