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In A Plea for Captain John Brown, Thoreau writes:

I have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane. It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secure.

The comma after organization makes me think that secure is used a noun here but I'm not sure of that as I have not read anywhere that secure is used as a noun. On the other hand, the lack of parallelism, in the form of than, makes me consider reading this sentence like so: It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary, secure organization.

Is the word used here as a noun? What does secure mean here?

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    Why should secure be a noun here? Why not an adjective? "...than an ordinary organisation which is secure"? I don't see how secure could ever be construed as a noun -- your question would be improved if you can show how it can be.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Commented Apr 15, 2023 at 10:31
  • @AndrewLeach I've just added to my question in response to your worthy comment.
    – John Smith
    Commented Apr 15, 2023 at 10:52
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    Secure seems to be used as a post-positional adjective and, given the context, carry the meaning of "trusted and accepted without question; unassailable."
    – Greybeard
    Commented Apr 15, 2023 at 11:12
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    There is, I think, a problem with the sentence, though it is possible to see what he means. "It" in sentence 2 presumably refers to "that conversation". In the second sentence it would have been better to write "sanity saner than..", and to avoid the awkward following of the singular "an ordinary discipline" with the plural "habits of life". But I cannot tell what you find odd or wrong about the 'asyndeton' (stylistic omission of a conjunction) or the use of the adjective "secure". But these are mainly editorial rather than grammatical thoughts.
    – Tuffy
    Commented Apr 15, 2023 at 13:06
  • This is a reasonable question—and it isn't obvious to me whether secure is being used as an adjective (as Andrew Leach, Greybeard, Tuffy, and DW256 surmise) or as a flat adverb (as Tinfoil Hat argues) or as a verb (as I suggest). Surely if there is that much disagreement among answerers and commenters, the question is not trivial. As far as I can see, the question poster attracted the wrath of downvoters by asking whether secure was being used as a noun, which we all agree it is not. But as for what "secure" means in the cited quotation—that, I think, is a legitimate question. +1.
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Apr 16, 2023 at 7:35

3 Answers 3

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Secure is a flat adverb (and a sentence adverb) here, meaning securely or assuredly. You can read the sentence as:

Assuredly, it has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization.

You can derive this by looking at both an adjective and adverb definition of secure and the adverb definition of securely:

secure, adj., adv., and n.1
A. adj. II. That is certain; fully assured; (objectively) safe.
B. adv. In a secure manner; securely, safely; easily.

securely, adv.
3. Without risk of error; with certainty.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary (login required)

By the way, secure as a noun means secure people considered as a class, like the rich and the poor.

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  • Secure like any adjective that can be used in a fused-head construction (the rich, the poor) is still best analyzed as an adjective: no plural forms (*the riches, *the poors, *the secures), can be graded (the richest, the poorest, the most secure), modified by adverbs (the insanely rich, the desperately poor, the reasonably secure). Besides, nearly all adjectives would have to be listed as nouns as well if 'secure' were, which is likely why most dictionaries don't.
    – DW256
    Commented Apr 16, 2023 at 4:52
  • @DW256 — The OED lists those as nouns based on their usage as such.
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Apr 16, 2023 at 14:40
  • Now if only the OED would enlighten us as to what they consider nouns to be, but alas we are left to receive their pronouncements without question. In fact, to accept these as nouns, one would have to invent a whole new order of nouns that take special modifiers (suspiciously like those adjectives would take), have special inflections (also suspiciously like those of adjectives), and allow only a very small subset of determiners (suspiciously unlike any other noun).
    – DW256
    Commented Apr 17, 2023 at 7:34
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The sanity referred to here is secure:

I have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane. It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secure.

=

It has the ring of a sanity

saner than an ordinary discipline and habits of life,

saner than an ordinary organization,

secure.

=

It has the ring of a secure sanity,

saner than an ordinary discipline and habits of life,

saner than an ordinary organization.

Left to the end for emphasis, and a contrast to the rather long comparative strings that come between it and sanity.

There is no reason to analyze it as a noun as it could not take any dependents typical of one such as determiners (no, a, my) or adjectives (good, sure, possible).

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I am surprised that no previous answerer or commenter has pointed out that the sentence in question makes perfect sense if you read secure as a verb. That is, the sentence as written by Thoreau:

It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secure.

could be read as meaning essentially the same thing as this sentence:

It has the ring of a saner sanity than one can secure for oneself through [dedication to] an ordinary discipline and [ordinary] habits of life, [and] than one might secure through an ordinary organization [of one's life].

The only difference in sense that I see between this second version of the sentence and Thoreau's original is that in the original wording, "discipline," "habits," and "organization" are the active agents that secure one's sanity (albeit a less sane sanity than John Brown possesses, according to Thoreau), whereas in my rewording, one [that is a person] is the active agent that secures one's garden-variety sanity—which one accomplishes by means of ordinary discipline, ordinary habits of life, and ordinary organization.

I can't claim that my rewording uses secure in the way that Thoreau intended—because I am not sure what Thoreau meant to say—but I can and do claim that such a reading makes sense. The fact that secure (if it is being used as a verb) appears in plural form merely signals that Thoreau is implicitly combining "than an ordinary discipline and habits of life [and] than an ordinary organization" to build a plural subject for the verb.

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