CHAPTER XXII.

FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT.

Induction and Experience are names to which is often assigned the honour of being the source of all our knowledge. But what induction and experience consist in, is what we are supposed to be already aware of; and that is--it may be briefly said--the concentration of the felt and sense-given fragments into an intimate unity. The accidents and fortunes that have befallen us in lapses of time, the scenes that have been set before and around us in breadths of space, are condensed into a mood of mind, a habitual shading of judgment, or frame of thought. The details of fact re-arrange themselves into a general concept; their essence gets distilled into a concentrated form. Their meaning disengages itself from its embodiment, and floats as a self-sustaining form in an ideal world. Thus if we look at the larger process of history, we see every period trying to translate the sensuous fact of its life into a formula of thought, and to fix it in definite characters. The various parts of existence, and existence as a whole, are stripped of their sensible or factual nature, in which we originally feel and come into contact with them, and are reduced to their simple equivalents in terms of thought. From sense and immediate feeling there is, in the first place, generated an image or idea which at least represents and stands for reality; and from that, in the second place, comes a thought or notion proper, which holds the facts in unity.

The phenomenon may, perhaps, be illustrated by the case of numbers. To the adult European, numbers and numbering are an obvious and essential part of our scheme of things that seems to need no special explanation. But the experience of children suggests its artificiality, and the evidence from the history of language corroborates that surmise. If number be in a way describable as part of the sense-experience, or total impression, it certainly does not come upon us with the same passivity on our part as the perception of taste or colour, or even of shape. It postulates a higher grade of activity. As Plato says, it 'awakes the intelligence': it implies a question and looks forward to an answer: it is thus the first appearance of what in its later fullness will be called 'Dialectic,' To put it otherwise: Numbering can only proceed where there is a unit, and an identity: it implies a one, and it implies an infinite repetibility of that one[1] It thus postulates the double mental act, first of reducing the various to its basis of identity, and, secondly, of performing a synthesis of the identical units thus created. In the highly artificial world in which we live all this seems simple enough. The products of machinery, articles of furniture, dress, &c., &c., are already uniform items: and the strokes of a clock seem almost to invite summation. But in free nature this similarity is much less obviously stamped on things: and the products of primitive art--of literal _manu_-facture--display an individuality, an element of personal taste, even, which is necessarily lacking in things turned out by machinery. Thus it was necessary, before we could number, to reduce the qualitatively different to a quantitative equality or comparability. There are indeed some instances, in that nearest of things to us, the human body, which might help. There is the obvious similarity of organs and limbs which go in pairs, and which might easily suggest a dual, as, so to speak, a sensuous fact amongst other facts. Again, there is the hand and its five fingers, or the two hands and the ten fingers. The five or ten, as a whole naturally given, suggest a grouping of numbers in natural aggregates. The fingers, again, (and here we may keep at first to the fingers proper, minus the thumb,) may be without much ingenuity said to give us a set of four, naturally distinct, yet naturally alike, and needing, so to speak, the minimum of intelligence to create the numerical scale from one to four. It is by them, indeed, that Plato, it may be unconsciously, illustrates the genesis of number. Here in short you have the natural abacus of the nations, but one restricted, first, perhaps to the group 1-4, secondly to the group 1-10.

We have seen how the dual was, in certain instances, almost a natural perceptive fact. But when it is so envisaged, it is hardly recognised as number strictly so called. It is only a fresh and peculiar sensuous attribute of things: a thing which has the quality of duplication, not a thought which is the synthesis of two identical units. It is a sort of accident, not part of a regular system or series. So again with the plural, which may appear in several shapes before it is assigned to its proper place as a systematic function of the singular. If the Malay, in order to say 'the king of all apes' has to enumerate one after another the several sub-species of ape, or if to express 'houses' he has to reduplicate the singular, to insert a word meaning 'all' or 'many,' we can see that the conception of number is for him still in the bonds of sense. It is not a synthetic category, but only a material multitude. But in other cases the plural proper is almost confounded with the so-called 'collective.' It is not an unfamiliar fact in Greek and Latin that the plural has acquired a meaning of its own,--not the mere multiple of its singular; as also that the collective term is occasionally used as an abstract, occasionally as the more or less indeterminate collection of the individuals. Such plurals and such collectives represent a stage of language and conception when the aggregate of singulars form a uniquely-qualified case of the object. And the peculiarity of them is seen in the way the plurality is immersed in and restricted to the special class of objects: as e. g. when in English the plurality of a number of ships is verbally stereotyped as against the plurality of a number of sheep, or of partridges (fleet, flock, covey). In such instances the category of number is completely pervaded and modified by the quality of the objects it is applied to. So, in the Semitic languages, the so-called 'broken plural' is a quasi-collective, which grammatically counts as a feminine singular (like so many Latin and Greek collectives): and whereas the more regular plural is generally shown by separable affix, this quasi-collective plural enters the very body of the word by vowel-change, indicating as it were by this absorption the constitution of a specifically new view of things. On the other hand, it may be said, there is in this collective a trace of the emergence of the universal and identical element through the generalisation due to the conjunction of several similars all acting as one[2]

In a true plural, on the contrary, it is required that the sign of number be clearly eliminated from any peculiarities of its special object, and be distinctly separated from the collective. And similarly the true numeral has to be realised in its abstractness, as a category _per se._ And to do this requires some amount of abstraction. In Greek, for example, we meet the distinction between numbers in the abstract, pure numbers (such as four and six), and bodily or physical numbers (such as four men, six trees)[3]. The geometrical aspect under which numbers were regarded by the Greeks, e. g. as oblong or square numbers, bears in the same direction. But another phenomenon in language tells the tale more distinctly[4]. Abundantly in Sanscrit and Greek, more rarely in Zend and Teutonic, and here and there in the Semitic languages, we meet with what is known as the dual number, a special grammatical form intended to express a pair of objects. The witty remark of Du Ponceau[5] concerning the Greek dual, that it had apparently been invented only for lovers and married people, may illustrate its uses, but hardly suffices to explain its existence in language. But a comparison of barbarian dialects serves to show that the dual is, as it were, a prelude to the plural,--a first attempt to grasp the notion of plurality in a definite way, which served its turn in primitive society, but afterwards disappeared, when the plural had been developed, and the numerals had attained a form of their own. If this be so, the dual is what physiologists call a rudimentary organ, and tells the same story as these organs do of the processes of nature.

The language of the Melanesian island of Annatom, one of the New Hebrides, may be taken as an instance of a state of speech in which the dual is natural. That language possesses a fourfold distinction of number in its personal pronouns, a different form to mark the singular, dual, trial, and plural: and the pronoun of the first person plural distinguishes in addition whether the person addressed is or is not included in the 'we-two,' 'we-three,' or 'we-many' of the speaker[6]. The same language however possesses only the first three numerals, and in the translation of the Bible into this dialect it was necessary to introduce the English words, four, five, &c. The two facts must be taken together: the luxuriance of the personal pronouns and the scanty development of numerals in such languages are two phenomena of the same law. The numeral 'four' to these tribes is said to bear the meaning of 'many' or 'several,' Another fact points in the same direction. In many languages, such as those of China, Further India and Mexico, it is customary in numbering to use what W. von Humboldt has called class-words. Here it is felt that an artificial unity has to be created, a common denominator found, and all reduced to it, before any summation can be carried out. Scholars and officials, in Chinese, can only be classed under the rubric of 'jewel' or dignity: and animals or fish by 'tails,' as if thereby only could one get a handle to hold them and count them. (The idiom still lingers in western languages: as in English, heads of cabbage, or of cattle: or German, _sechs Mann Soldaten._) So in Malay, instead of 'five boys' the phrase used is 'boy five-man': in other words, the numerals are supposed to inhere as yet in objects of a special kind or common occurrence[7]. And among the South Sea Islanders the consciousness of number is decidedly personal: that is to say, the distinction between one and two is first conceived as a distinction between 'I' and 'we two.' Even this amount of simplification surpasses what is found amongst some Australian tribes. There we find four duals: one for brothers and sisters: one for parents and children: one for husbands and wives: and one between brothers-in-law[8]. Each pair has a different form. We thus seem to see to what early language is applied: not to designate the objects of nature, but the members of the primitive family and their interests. The consciousness of numbers was first awakened by the need of distinguishing and combining the things that belonged to and specially interested men and women in the narrow circle of barbarian life[9]. It is not altogether imaginative in principle, though it may be occasionally surmise in details, to connect the rise of grammatical forms with the temperament and character of the people, and therefore with its social organisation. If the Bantoo or Caffir languages of Southern Africa instead of a single third personal pronoun and third personal termination to the verb use the separate forms corresponding to the ten class-prefixes of the nouns, it must be in accordance with the general spirit and system of these tribes. The various plural forms, if they persist, will reflect contemporary modes of life.

Numbers were at first immersed in the persons, and then, as things came to be considered also, in the things numbered. The mind seems to have proceeded slowly from the vague one to definite numbers. And the first decided step was taken towards an apprehension of numbers when two was distinguished from one, and the distinction was made part of the personal terminations. The plural was a further step in the same direction: the real value of which, however, did not become apparent until the numerals had been separately established in forms of their own. When that was accomplished, the special form of the dual became useless: it had outlived its purpose, and henceforth it ceased to have, any but that poetical beauty of old association which often adorns the once natural, but now obsolete growths of the past. When the numerals were thus emancipated from their material and sensuous environment, quantity was translated from outward being in its embodiments into a form of thought. At first, indeed, it was placed in an ethereal or imaginative space, the counterpart as it were of the sensuous space in which it had been previously immersed. It became a denizen of the mental region, as it had been before a habitant of the sense-world.

The mind was informed with quantity in the shape of number: but it does not follow from this, that the new product was comprehended, or the process of its production kept in view. Like all new inventions (and numeration may fairly be classed under that head), it was laid hold of, and all its consequences, results, and uses estimated and realised by the practical and defining intellect. In one direction, it became, like many new inventions in the early days of society, a magic charm, and was invested with mystery, sacredness, and marvellous powers. But the intelligent mind,--the understanding,--resolved to make better use of the new instrument: and that in two ways, in practical work and in theory. On the one hand it was applied practically in the dealings of life,--in commerce, contracts, legislation, and religion. On the other hand, the new conception of number, which common sense and the instinctive action of men had evolved, was carried out in all its theory: it was analysed in all directions, and its elements combined in all possible ways. The result was the science of arithmetic, and mathematics in general. Such consequences did the reflective understanding derive from the analysis of its datum,--the fact of quantity freed from its sensuous envelope.

The general action of understanding, and of practical thought, is of this kind. It accepts the representative images which have emerged from sensation, as they occur: and tries to appreciate them, to give them precision, to carry them into details, and to analyse them until their utmost limits of meaning are explored. Where they have come from, and where they lead to,--the process out of which they spring, and which fixes the extent of their validity,--are questions of no interest to the understanding[10]. It takes its objects, as given in popular conception, as fixed and ultimate entities to be expounded in detail.

We have taken number as one example of the transference of a sensible or sense-immersed fact into a form of thought: but a form which is still placed in a superior or mental space. One advantage of taking number as illustration, is that numbered things are distinguished from numbers in an emphatic and recognised way. Nobody will dispute that the abstraction, as it is called, has an existence of its own, and can be made a legitimate object of independent investigation. But if the process be more obvious in the case of the numerals, there must have been a similar course of development leading to the pronouns, the prepositions, and the auxiliary verbs--to what has been called the 'formal' or 'pronominal' or 'demonstrative' element, the connective and constructive tissue of language. Whether these pronominal 'roots' form a special and originally-distinct class of their own, or are derived from a transmutation of more material or substantial elements, is a question on which linguistic research casts as yet no very certain light. It is true that on the one hand etymology is mainly silent on the origin of pronouns, numerals, and the more fundamental prepositions (i. e. cannot refer them to roots significant of qualitative being): and one need not lay much stress on remarks, like that of Gabelenz[11], that in the Indo-Chinese languages the words for _I, five, fish_ have a like sound, as do those for _thou, two, ear_, or that _I am,_ originally means _I breathe_. In all languages--though with immense diversities of degree, this formal element has attained a certain independence. And in many instances we can more or less trace the process by which there grew up in language an independent world of thought: we can see the natural existence passing out of the range of the senses into spiritual relations. Before our eyes a world of reason is slowly constituting itself in the history of culture: and we, who live now, enter upon the inheritance which past ages have laid up for us.

There is, however, a difference between the way in which these results look to us now, and the way in which they originally organised themselves. The child who begins to learn a language in the lesson-books and the grammars finds the members of it all, as it were, upon one level: adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and verbs confront him with the same authority and rank. This appearance is deceptive: it may easily suggest that the words are not members in an organism, in and out of which they have developed. And this organism of thought has its individual types, expressed in the great families of human speech. Its generic form (as drawn out in a logical system) appears in different grades, with different degrees of fullness, in Altaic and Dravidian from what it does in Malay, or in Chinese, and these again have their own predominant categories as compared with those used in the American or African languages, or in Indo-Germanic and Semitic. If the Altaic languages e. g. are wanting in the verb proper, and manage with possessive suffixes and nouns; if the Semitic tenses display a poverty which contrasts with their wealth in Greek; and yet each group performs its function, we may infer that each speech has a complete organism, though it does not bring all its parts to adequate expression. All this distinction of 'parts of speech,' of forms, prefixes and suffixes, &c., is part of the life of language, embodying in more or less distinct organs the organisation of thought in the individual form it reached in that speech-type. Thus in Chinese there are strictly speaking no isolated words, nouns, or verbs: there are only abstract parts of a concrete sentence; and grammar in Chinese therefore has no accidence (no declensions, conjugations, &c.) but only syntax. Yet it is these abstract fragments which exist and seem to have independence and inherent meaning: whereas the unity in which they cohere to form a concrete context is the fleeting sentence of the moment. At the opposite extreme, again, the Mexican family of languages tend to incorporate relations to subject and object with the verb, in such a degree that the word almost becomes a sentence. Facts like these suggest that a science of the forms of language, in proportion as it generalises, tends to approach logic; and that logic will have a converse tendency to elevate to an unduly typical position the grammatical form of the languages with which the logician is best acquainted.

If these points were remembered, there would be less absurd employment of the grammatical categories of one group of languages to systematise another. Greek and Sanscrit grammar plays sad havoc with the organism of a Semitic tongue, and it is not less out of place as a schema for delineating e. g. South African dialect. Isolated words even in an Indo-Germanic language--even, we may say, in such a language as English--are still fractional, and do not get life and individuality except in their context. And it needs but a little experience to show how various that individuality may be. It needs perhaps still more meditation to realise that it is in this individuality that the real life of language lies: in the words said and written to express the thought of a personality. But, first, because language has its material and mechanical side, and secondly, because in civilised countries it further acquires a more stereotyped mechanism in written and printed language, its parts tend to gain a pseudo-independence. It is one aim of a philosophical dictionary to restore the organic interconnexion which in the mere sequence of vocables in juxtaposition is apt to be lost. What we call the meaning of a word is something which carries us beyond that mere word,--which restores the connexions which have been broken off and forgotten. In the form of a dictionary, of course, this can only be done piece-meal: but if each piece is done thoroughly, it can hardly fail to bring out certain comprehensive connexions. The mere word seems a simple thing; and one is at first disposed to get rid of its difficulty by substituting a so-called synonym. But a deeper study reveals the fact that an exact synonym is a thing one can no more find than two peas which are absolutely indistinguishable. A synonym is only a practical _pis aller_. But every word is really as it were a point in an infinitely complex organic life, with its essence or meaning determined by the currents to and fro which meet in it.

Words as we see them _prima facie_ in a printed page do look separate entities. They stand, one here and another there, in a quasi-extension, with marks of direction and connexion pointing from one to another, but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more solid points which are represented by nouns and verbs, or names of substances, actions, and attributes. Results, as they are, of that practical analysis which the need of writing down language has led to, they are treated as complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into certain temporary connexions. But this is an illusion which, because a thing changes its relationships, assumes that it can exist out of all relationships whatever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction, isolated from its context. But amid these contexts there are certain similarities: identical elements are detected: and these identical elements are the common names of language, the terms of general significance. In all cases, however, what an utterance of language describes or expresses is a definite individual event or scene, conceived as a concrete of several parts. Each separate vocable is a contribution to the total: a step towards the real redintegration of the whole out of its several parts. But the total itself--the content of fact in any single sentence--is only an abstraction,--a part of the universe which human interest and need have isolated from the comprehensive scope of things. Thus, in two degrees, we may say, the picture produced in the sentence falls short of the truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of the cutting is dependent on that abstraction, and relative to it. But--as in a given group of speech, the same sets of circumstances will naturally be selected, and tend to recur again and again,--the terms which describe them will acquire a certain association with the objects, and will come to be called the common names of these agents, acts, and qualities. They denote or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however in certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety and totality of nature.

In this product of intellectual movement above the limits of sensation we have the 'representation'[12] as Hegel calls it, on which the Understanding turns its forces. We have one product of the organic whole of thought taken by itself as if it were independent, set forth as a settled nucleus for further acquaintance: and this one point discussed fully and with precision, elaborated in all detail and consequence, to the neglect of its context, and the necessary limitations involved in the notion. The process of name-giving may illustrate this tendency in human thought to touch its objects only in one point. The names given to objects do not embrace the whole nature of these objects, but give expression only to one striking feature in them. Thus the name of the horse points it out as 'the strong' or 'the swift': the moon is 'the measurer' or 'the shining one'; and so in all cases. The object as expressed in these names is viewed from one aspect, or in one point: and the name, which originally at least corresponds to the conception, meets the object, properly speaking, on that side only, or in that relation. The object is not studied in its own nature, and in its total world, but as it specially enters the range of human interest, and serves human utilities. One can at least guess why it should be so: why a name should, in logical language, express an 'accidens' and not the 'essentia' of the object. For the investigation of primitive language seems to show that words, as we know them in separate existence, are a secondary formation: and that the first significant speech was an utterance intended to describe a scene, an action, a phenomenon, or complex of event. In point of time, the primary fact of language is an agglomeration or aggregate,--we may call it either word or clause (λόγος in short)--which describes in one breath a highly individualised action or phenomenon. The spirit or unifying principle in this group might be the accent. Such a word-group denotes a highly specialised form of being: and if we call it a word, we may say that the earliest words, and the words of barbarous tribes, are ingeniously special.[13] But it would be more correct to say, that in such a group the elements of the scene enter only from a single aspect or in a single relation. Accordingly when disintegration begins, the result is as follows. The elements of the group, having now become independent words held together by the syntax of the sentence, are adopted to denote the several objects which entered into the total phenomenon. But these words, or fragments of the word-group, 'represent' the objects in question from a certain point of view, and not in their integrity. The names of things therefore touch them only in one point, and express only one aspect. And thus, although different names will arise for the same thing, as it enters into different groups, in each case the name will connote only a general attribute and not the nature of the thing. These names are in the Hegelian sense of the term 'abstract.' In popular phraseology, they are only 'signs' of things: i. e. not 'symbols' (though they may have been in some cases symbolic in origin), for in a symbol there is a _natural_ correspondence or sensible analogy to the thing symbolised, but something 'instituted,' due to an 'understanding' or convention.

[Footnote 1: See vol. ii. p. 190, (Logic, § 102).]

[Footnote 2: See Max Müller in Mind, vol. i. 345.]

[Footnote 3: Pure number is ἀριθμὸς μοναδικός: applied number is ἀριθμὸς φυσικὸς or σωματικός. Aristotle, _Metaph_. N. 5, speaks of αριθμὸς πύρινος ἤ γήϊνος. But this is only Greek idiom: as we say 'Greek history' instead of 'History of Greece:' or vice versa, when we translate _Populus Romanus_ by 'people of Rome.' Aristotle is speaking of 'proportions' or 'amounts' of fire or earth in the compounds of these elements.]

[Footnote 4: See L. Geiger, _Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft_ (vol. i. p. 380). And Gabelenz 'Die melanesischen Sprachen' in the _Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften_ (VIII), 1861, pp. 89-91.]

[Footnote 5: _Mémoire sur le Systeme grammatical_, &c. p. 155.]

[Footnote 6: Cf. _nous_ and _nous autres_. The same distinction is found in some American languages. There is a dual in the language of the Greenlanders; but it is not, however, used when a natural duality seems to call for it, but in cases when, though there might have been several things, only two are actually found.]

[Footnote 7: W. von Humboldt, _Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues_, p. 423 (ed. 1841); Misteli, _Typen des Sprachbaues_ (1893).]

[Footnote 8: Capt. Grey, _Vocabulary of the dialects of S. W. Australia_, pp. xxi and 104 (1840).]

[Footnote 9: The sharp distinction between the first and second personal pronouns and the third: the want of any apparent connexion in the Indo-Germanic languages between the first and second persons singular and the plural form seems to point in the same direction.]

[Footnote 10: Cf. vol. ii. _Notes and Illustrations_, p. 400.]

[Footnote 11: _Die Sprachwissenschaft_, p. 168.]

[Footnote 12: 'Vorstellung,' as distinguished from 'Begriff.']

[Footnote 13: Thus in Malay, there are about twenty words for strike, according as it is done with thick or thin wood, downwards, horizontally, or upwards, with the hand, with the fist, with the flat hand, with a club, with the sharp edge, with a hammer, &c. (See Misteli, _Typen des Sprachbaues_, p. 265.)]