§ 1. Language as an Instrument of Conceptual Analysis and Synthesis. — In speaking of Language, we must remember that what primarily concerns the psychologist is not any special system of external signs such as gestures, articulate sounds, or written characters, but a certain psychical function, — a peculiar mode of mental activity. It is a unique and most important characteristic of this function or activity that many minds can cooperate in it as if they constituted a single mind. But the possibility of this cooperative thinking must be grounded in the nature of the mental process as it takes place in the individual mind„ I do not mean that the use of language in individual thinking was or could be prior to its use as a means of intercommunication. What I do mean is that the earliest communication could only take place between minds capable of a certain kind of mental process. Merely perceptual experience cannot be communicated except in presence of the perceived object. In order that A and B may interchange ideas, it is evident that they must start from a basis of common experience. It is impossible to discuss Greek particles with a person who does not know a word of Greek. But if communication is to be real and valuable, it must be possible for A not merely to convey to B what B already knows, but also what he does not know. A must be able to communicate to B something of which A has had experience and of which B has not had experience. How is this possible? Let us consider an analogous case. I wish to show some one how to pronounce a word which he has never heard. He is either deaf or at a distance, so that I cannot adopt the simple expedient of pronouncing it myself in his presence. My only resource is to write it down for him in phonetic spelling. I thus convey to him the new sound by exhibiting it as a combination of sounds with which he is already familiar. I reconstruct it and thus enable him to reconstruct it out of its phonetic elements. In like manner, A can communicate a new fact to B by reconstructing it out of elements which B has become acquainted with in the course of his previous experience. Intercommunication of ideas therefore implies analysis of the objects and processes presented to perception into certain constituents which recur in varying combinations in various particular cases. The use of language, then, involves the analysis of objects and processes into common factors and their free reconstruction out of these common factors.

It must not, however, be supposed that these common factors have each a rigid and unalterable nature which remains unchanged in the various combinations into which they enter. They are not like printers' types, which merely change their mode of external juxtaposition without inward modification. On the contrary, the elements of experience which are being continually combined in all kinds of varying ways in spoken or written discourse, mutually transform each other. The meaning of a word varies with its context. Paul emphasises this point in his valuable work, the Principles of the History of Language. "In sentences like, 'I never laid a hand upon him'; 'John never drew bridle,' the hand referred to is not a hand in general, but my hand, the bridle referred to is not a bridle in general, but that which was held by John. Compare such instances as 'a good point,' 'a point of honour,' 'the bar of an hotel,' 'the bar of justice,' ' the tongue of a woman,' 'the tongue of a balance.'"* The special meaning assumed by a word in a special context or special circumstances may be called its occasional meaning, It is only at a late stage of mental development that an express attempt is made to distinguish an identical and persistent element of meaning prevading the varying occasional significations of a word. When the attempt is made it constitutes an epoch in the history of thought. It is the beginning of definition and of the scientific concept. The fame of Socrates rests largely on his having been the first to insist on a systematic inquiry of this nature. In popular and prescientific thinking the occasional meaning is the only one which comes to clear consciousness.

* Ch. iv., p. 73. It will repay the student to read the whole chapter.

It follows from this account of language as a means of communication that words and their combinations express that process of analysis and synthesis which essentially constitutes a train of ideational thought. The use of language presupposes the breaking of the concrete content of actual perception into its partial aspects and constituents, and the recombination of these to form new ideal wholes. The variation of meaning with context is due to the nature of the constructive process. The word only calls up what is relevant to the controlling interest guiding the train of thought.

Ideational activity would seem from this account of the matter to be a prior condition of the existence of language. In logical strictness, this is so, but it is equally true that ideational thinking could only exist in a most rudimentary and inchoate form apart from the use of some kind of expressive signs. Language is not merely an accompaniment of ideational activity; it is an instrument essential to its development. It is an appropriate means of fixing attention upon ideally represented objects as distinguished from percepts. It becomes the more necessary the more abstract ideal representation is, — in other words, the less it contains of the concrete details of actual senseperception. The precise mode in which expressive signs serve to fix attention on ideas will be considered later on. Here we content ourselves with provisionally affirming that language in some form is an indispensable tool to think with. Within the mind of the individual thinker it serves to fix attention on the object of his own ideas; in communication with others, it serves to fix the attention of the hearer on the ideally represented objects present to the mind of the speaker.*

* It is unfortunate that there is no word corresponding to idea as percept corresponds to perception. In ordinary language idea is used both for the psychical state and for the object apprehended in it.

For illustration of conceptual analysis and synthesis, we may take any sentence or intelligible combination of words. Each word stands for some partial aspect of the concrete detail of actual perception, — in other words, it stands for what is called a universal or concept,— the object of the psychical process called a conception. The universals expressed by the several words combine in a unity, each helping to determine and particularise the rest, so as to form an ideal whole. Take such a sentence as "Nansen skates." "Nansen" is a proper name, and may therefore be supposed to stand for a particular, not for a universal. This is true from a certain point of view. The word "Nansen" designates a particular human being. But from another point of view it is a universal. The individual Nansen is a universal as the unity and connecting identity of his own manifold and varying states, relations, qualities, and activities. Nansen as perceived must be Nansen eating, or Nansen sleeping, or Nansen lecturing, or Nansen skating, or determined in some other specific way. But the word "Nansen" by itself does not stand for any of these particular determinations rather than others. It stands for Nansen in general. The word "skates" particularises the universal "Nansen." But it does so by means of another universal. Other people skate besides Nansen, in varying manners and in varying times and places. Thus the universal "skating" not only particularises the universal "Nansen," but receives particular determination from it. The skating is not any skating, but the skating of a Nansen. Now if instead of framing the proposition "Nansen skates," we actually saw him skating without any inward or outward translation of the experience into words or equivalent signs, there would be no conscious contradistinction between the agent in general and his particular act, or between the act in general and the particular agent. The psychical function, then, which is involved in the use of language, is conceptual analysis and synthesis. Discourse is the expression of discursive thinking.

We now pass to an old and wellworn problem,— that of the origin of language. Of course the question is not capable of what may be called a historical answer. There are no records or remains of remote prehistoric ages which would enable us to state on historical evidence the circumstances under which intercommunication of ideas by means of expressive signs first originated. But we are by no means at a loss on that account. Language actually grows and develops under our eyes, and we can apply the general laws of its growth and development to account for its origin. Besides this, we have in savage races examples of stages of mental development incomparably more rudimentary than our own; and by noting the points in which they differ from us we may obtain a clue to the nature of the differences between ourselves and primitive man.