This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things.

Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric.

In the same way the scientific materialists have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist" as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt.

So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives" in London always calls himself a "progressive" in South Africa.
A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society.

It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free.