Relation of Language to Thought.

45

well-made language, and Horne Tooke assures us that the business of the mind extends no further than to receive impressions, and that what are called its operations are merely the operations of language. The truth, we suspect, lies between the two. To identify the operations of thought and language is to confound the material refractions of the eye with the mental sensation of sight to expect to carry on a process of thought unaided by verbal or other symbols, is to put out our eyes that we may see the clearer. To perceive by organs, to think by symbols, may be imperfections in mankind as compared with a higher order of beings; but they are imperfections inseparable from our condition on earth, which we must bear with us while soul and body are united. Yet there have not been wanting speculators, who have sought, not to improve and strengthen their instruments, but to dispense with them altogether; as the gouty patient, in a moment of irritation, curses the good limb that has borne him through many a journey, and devoutly wishes, for the prevention of his torments, that man had been created a natural cul de jatte.

That language is not thought, is evident from the fact that the same conception may be represented by different words. That language (verbal or other) is inseparable from thought, is rendered morally certain by the impossibility under which we all labour of forming universal notions without the aid of voluntary symbols. The instant we advance beyond the perception of that which is present now and here, our knowledge can be only representative; as soon as we rise above the individual object, our representative sign must be arbitrary. The phantasms of imagination may have more or less resemblance to the objects of sense; but they bear that resemblance solely by virtue of being, like those objects themselves, individual. I may recall to mind, with more or less vividness, the features of an absent friend, as I may paint his portrait with more or less accuracy; but the likeness in neither case ceases to be the individual representation of an individual man. But my conception* of man in

Here we must take the liberty to dissent from Sir John Stoddart; not indeed from his principles, but from his phraseology. "Conception," he says, "which is derived from con and capio, expresses the action by which I take up together a portion of our sensations, as it were water, in some vessel adapted to contain a certain quantity." That the etymology of the word allows of its being thus applied to the perception of individual compounds, we do not deny ; but it has already been appropriated to express a still more important distinction—that of the act by which we comprehend by means of a general notion, as distinguished both from the perception of a present, and the imagination of an absent, individual. German philosophers have adopted a similar distinction between "Begriff" and "Anschauung;" the latter of which is applied both to the percepts of sense and to the phantasms of the imagination. The operation which Sir John Stoddart in the above passage calls conception, Kant, in the first edition of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, distinguishes by the name of apprehension, and regards it as the work of the imaginative faculty. In the subsequent editions he calls it conjunction, (Verbindung), and

general can attain universality only by surrendering resem blance; it becomes the representative of all mankind only because it has no special likeness to any one man.*

As a matter of necessity, men must think by symbols; as a matter of fact, they do think by language;—that is, they employ a corresponding system of symbols as the media of thought and of its communication. We might waste much fruitless speculation on the precise nature of the connection between these two,-between the articulations of speech without, and the εὐφήμου στόμα φροντίδος within. The word of thought we feel to be in some sort an echo of the word of speech, yet the one is an articulate sound, wholly material, and the other a modi fication of mind, wholly spiritual. But the truth is, that in this, as in every other case where mind and matter come in contact, we dogmatize at the point where ignorance begins, like the babbling hound, giving tongue when the scent is lost. Witness the vulgar idea of a ghost, as a visible vapour with human features, a substance every whit as material as Daniel Lambert or a Smithfield prize ox. Witness the representative theory of perception, with its whole apparatus of bodily effluxions and sensible species, and a host of other corporeo-spiritual go-betweens ;-as if these were stages of transition from matter to mind, as if body became soul by being rarefied, or soul became body by being informed. That mind does become cognizant of matter, is a truth which our every-day consciousness attests; how it does so we know not; the fact remains ultimate and inexplicable-a mystery. We can examine separately the phenomena of each, as we can investigate the structure of the earth, or the architecture of the heavens: we seek the boundaryline of their junction, as the child chases the horizon, only to discover that it flies as we pursue it.‡

attributes it to the understanding. The later view justifies Sir John's use of the term conception--at least in the eyes of those who admit (which we are by no means inclined to do) the whole of the Kantian theory of perception.

"On peut le dire dans un certain sens, il n'est point de véritable idée sans signe volontaire." Such are the words of Maine de Biran, an author who will scarcely be suspected of conceding too much to sensationalism or materialism.

†The nature of the mystery is well stated by Royer-Collard—“ Le mystère consiste en ce que la raison ne découvre aucune connexion nécessaire entre les impressions faites sur nos organes et la connaissance des objets extérieurs qui suit ces impressions, c'est à dire entre la matière et le mouvement d'une part, et la pensée de l'autre. Les philosophes ont voulu percer ce mystère, et ils ont cherché pour cela des analogies dans les lois du monde physique."

In no case is this more strongly exemplified than in some of the speculations on the first paradox of vision. Why do we see upright with an inverted image on the retina! To answer the question fully, we ought to know the exact relation be tween the material focus of refracted rays and the mental sensation of sight. The former can be produced by glass or crystal, but even a French ideologist would shrink from the absurdity of a lens that can see.

Methods of Grammatical Science-Horne Tooke.

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There are two methods by which grammar may be treated as a science; methods corresponding to the two extremes between which all philosophy oscillates, sensationalism and idealism, the relation of object to subject viewed from the one or the other side. The one takes its departure from the external phenomena of existing languages, the other from the internal testimony of our own consciousness. The one employs the researches of comparative philology to ascertain the history of languages in their origin and progress from the parent stem; the other, reasoning from the facts and laws of the human mind, inquires how language must have arisen, as the instrument of thought and its communication. And here, as in all other branches of philosophy, the merits of each method must ultimately be tested by the comparison of their results; the errors arising from the exclusive pursuit of either will be eliminated, and the truths common to both confirmed, by their combination. But for this we are not yet ripe. Comparative grammar is but of yesterday, and psychology, though of elder birth and maturer growth, has not yet been fully investigated or applied to the solution of the problems of language. Both must be suffered to advance to completeness, and even to run into extravagance, before the merits or the faults of either can be brought to the test of a discriminating eclecticism. For the present we need only observe that the tendency of the former school is to give too much weight to chronological antecedence, that of the latter to attend too exclusively to logical priority. A notion or judgment is logically prior to another, when its existence or truth is necessarily implied as a condition of that of the latter; but in the order of time, the dependent and consequent fact may be the earlier known by us."

Tooke's Diversions of Purley may in one point of view be regarded as a premature attempt to reconcile the two methods. by the application of a hasty and partial philology to a crude and one-sided theory of mind. Viewed with reference to psychology alone, the author undoubtedly belongs, where he is usually placed, to the ultra-sensational school. Viewed with reference to grammar, he is not without a sprinkling of abortive eclecticism. And by a strange perversity of fortune, while he confounded the form of speech with the matter, and endeavoured to merge the philosophy of language in its history, he has been more successful on the formal than on the material side of grammar, in his philosophical principle than in his ety

*The distinction is as old as Aristotle. Some valuable remarks on its importance may be found in M. Cousin's critique of Locke; Cours de Philosophie, Leçon xvii.

mological details. His main position, that the noun and the verb are the only necessary parts of speech, if not absolutely true, requires but slight modification to become so. But that historically there ever was a time when the language of mankind consisted of these parts only, is a theory which, however plausibly supported by his Anglo-Saxon and Gothic etymologies, has been any thing but confirmed by a more extensive examination of the Indo-Teutonic languages. But on this question it would as yet be premature to pronounce judgment. We must leave the philologer and the metaphysician to pursue their separate paths, confident that the time will come when the conclusions of each, with redundancies lopped and deficiencies supplied, may be combined into one harmonious whole. Meanwhile the writer on universal grammar will best fulfil his task by taking for his guide the precept of Leibnitz, "Il est vrai que celui qui écriroit une Grammaire Universelle feroit bien de passer de l'essence des langues à leur existence, et de comparer les grammaires de plusieurs langues. Cependant, dans la science même, séparé de son histoire ou existence, il n'importe point si les peuples se sont conformés ou non à ce que la raison ordonne."

The above remarks will also in a great measure be applicable to another metaphysico-grammatical theory. That there ever was a period in the history of man, as Reid conjectures,† when every single word represented a sentence, when the noun and the verb themselves held the same place which their several syllables hold now, as fractional and imperfect in speech as they still are in thought; this is an hypothesis which we may reasonably hesitate to admit. But logically the position is true. The sentence, we may go farther, the enunciative sentence, is the unit of speech, as the judgment is of thought; and it behoves us to remember, that the verbal analysis of the thoughts we utter, like the chemical decomposition of the air we breathe, exhibits only the forced and unnatural dissolution of parts whose vital force and efficacy exists only in combination.

The treatise of Sir John Stoddart is a valuable contribution to the science of grammar from the psychological point of view. The author commences with the recognition of two most important but often neglected principles; (1.) That the philosophy, as distinct from the history, of language must be based on a knowledge of the faculties of the mind; and (2.) That the distinction between the several parts of speech is intelligible only in their relation to the sentence as a whole. With the greater part of the contents of the work we cordially agree; and with

* Nouv. Essais, l. 3, c. 5, § 8.

+ Correspondence with James Gregory, Letter XI.

Judgment the Unit of Consciousness.

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this opinion of its general value, and indeed in consequence of it, we venture, for the sake of further accuracy, to point out, in no invidious spirit, a few points on which we are compelled to differ from the learned author.

Of the threefold division of the facts of consciousness, which Sir John Stoddart agrees with us in adopting, we have spoken already. We have now to speak of the subordinate classification of the operations of reason alone, with respect to which he gives the ordinary logical division into simple apprehension, judgment, and discourse. Here we must notice, if not an error, at least an omission of some consequence. Sir John, while he partially adopts in practice, has neglected to state in theory, what we believe to be the cardinal point of grammar and of logic. It should be remarked, (1.) that judgment is not confined to the province of thought strictly so called; (2.) that, whether within or without that province, it is logically as well as chronologically prior to the corresponding apprehension, using the latter term also in its widest extent. Logically, apprehension cannot exist without judgment. Every perception, nay, every imagination and conception, is accompanied by a conviction of the existence of its object, either within or without the mind; and the possibility of consciousness itself depends upon the mutual relation of subject and object. And in the order of time, the complete analysis of the development of mind assures us that its earliest operations, whether relating to itself or to the world without, appear in the form of singular judgments, combining an attribute with a subject.* It is not till reflection comes in and decomposes the complex whole into its constituent elements, that we learn to estimate the value of the fractional parts of the unit of consciousness. For this purpose, language is our instrument. It is of course difficult to speculate on the possible results of a supposition which never has been, and never will be realised; but we believe that if man had been denied the gift of speech, judgment would have been the sole operation of his mind. It is true that he would not have known it as judgment, being conscious of no other operation from which to distinguish it. The complex nature of each perception and volition would have remained undetected, from want of the instrument by which it is analysed; as the combination of rays in the. light of the sun is not suspected by those who have never wit

nessed its refraction.

The service performed by language in the analysis of our intuitions, and its consequent necessity for the formation, and not

For a farther explanation of most of what is here advanced, the reader is referred to M. Cousin's Cours de Philosophie, especially to the four concluding

lectures.

VOL. XIV. NO. XXVII.

D