LETTER VII.

LANGUAGE.

I HAVE already had to consider several important points in the philosophy of language, but it is too intimately connected with mental operations to be passed over, in these letters, without express investigation of several questions involved in it.

One of these relates to the specific intellectual function of words considered singly; and another is, how words are affected when combined in sentences; neither of which has been so accurately and exhaustively treated as to preclude further discussion or elucidation.

When a word has indicated or brought to mind the object or event for which it stands, it seems to me to have done all intellectually that it needs to do, or that it is desirable for it to do. It may cause an emotion of some kind as well as indicate an object or raise up a mental conception, and, by the thought or the feeling called up, may even awaken a multitude of associated thoughts

* I say indicated, to include cases in which the object designated by the word is actually present and consequently cannot be said to be brought to mind.

and feelings; but these are only incidental and variable effects; and irrespective of them, its direct intellectual function is perfectly accomplished when in certain cases it has indicated, and in others brought to mind, the object which it signifies.

The various ways in which words are connected with feelings constitute undoubtedly a subject of much interest and importance, and one also of much difficulty on account of the nicety required to distinguish the effects of the mere words from the effects of the ideas raised up by them.

A word while possessing the same intellectual significance in two successive ages, may cause a different emotion in each: and of two words in the same age meaning the same thing, one may excite pleasure, or shame, or loathing, and the other be heard with indifference. When, too, a word has raised up the precise idea of the object, that idea may suggest other ideas to an indefinite extent, but the latter, like the emotions just mentioned, do not enter into the meaning of the word. The influence of rhetoric, the beauties of poetry, the charm of personal conversation and epistolary intercourse, doubtless greatly depend not only on the precision with which words are used to raise up the ideas of the particular objects denoted by them, but on the tact (often instinctive) with which they are selected to awaken such emotions and associated ideas as will conduce to the purpose in view. Similar influences belong to the variable tones and

inflections of the voice, but we do not on that account consider the signification of the individual words uttered to vary with them, although the total effect of what is said, will so vary.

At present I pass by these influences; I am concerned with language only as an instrument for recording and communicating knowledge and lending aid to reasoning with its purely intellectual

function

It may be objected indeed that if I admit a word to be capable of awakening other ideas than that of the object denoted by it, the intellectual function includes the rousing of associated thoughts; an objection, however, which is at once removed by a consideration of the circumstance that it is not the word which calls up the associated ideas, but it is the idea raised up or the emotion awakened by the word: and while the word ought to bring into the minds of all who use or hear it, one precise idea or one of a precise class of ideas, the associations with which that idea is connected may vary indefinitely in every individual without at all affecting the signification.

With regard to the intellectual power of words in certain cases, I have already shown that common names and abstract terms can do no more than bring before the mind particular objects or combinations just as proper names do.

Men know only individual things, although it may be in groups or sequences: there is in truth

nothing else for them to know; they can think only of what they thus become acquainted with, and it would be strange if words had the power of enabling or compelling them to do otherwise to think of anything else.

It is no valid objection to this statement that we think of many merely imaginary objects,

"Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire,"

for a slight analysis suffices to show that every one of these fabulous monsters, is made up of parts familiar to us through the organs of sense. It cannot

indeed be otherwise.

In considering the efficiency of words, it is important to bear in mind that a name, whether articulated or written, is itself a real entity, a sound or visible object, and it is probably owing in part to this substantial existence that so many fictitious entities are created by or rather out of language.

The word itself being real, there is always something for the mind to dwell upon, so that even in the use of an abstract term, which has no corresponding abstract idea (to speak for a moment of a non-entity) but is suggestive only of shifting objects each as individual as if it had been called up by a proper name, the term presents itself to us as a fixed independent thing audible or visible or both.

Hence probably we are prone to conclude that

there is something equally distinct and independent in the consequent mental representation, to correspond with it.

For want of considering the precise intellectual office and power of words; that their special function is to bring before the mind objects and events already known (at least in their constituent parts) several singular doctrines have been maintained.

It is obvious that if the object named is brought before the mind clearly and fully by the name, it is of no importance in respect of the power of the word to perform its intellectual function, how it came to be associated with the object. Provided that the one directly suggests the other the utmost perfection of language, simply as an intellectual instrument, is attained. How extraordinary soever may have been the way in which the word came to be associated with the thing, that circumstance has not, nor can it beneficially have, any effect on the meaning when once the association has been perfectly established.

To trace the manner in which this took place is often interesting and instructive, and even amusing; but when the name has become so familiar as directly to suggest the object, and the object directly suggests the name, the end of language as an instrument of reasoning and of communicating knowledge, is attained, nor can any etymological researches, whatever historical or philosophical interest they may possess, improve it. With