John Wesley Powell

“ Here we have especially to note that acception becomes not the sole but the chief agency for the development of the concepts of mind.
And now on symbol wings as magical words, the soul flies to all the realms of the universe, learning not only of the worlds of space and time, but penetrating into the arcana of other souls.
By the invention of speech man has acquired an inexhaustible resource from which to draw ideas, but by this artificial method dangers are involved. Imagination often outruns the ideas expressed in words, producing illusions, but usually harmless illusions. ”

“ To understand the word itself it is necessary that there shall be a consciousness and an inference leading to a judgment that the word is such or such, as a sound or a written symbol, and the whole process by sensation and perception must be repeated with every word in order to distinguish it as a word. Then perception, apprehension, and reflection are all employed in confirming a judgment about the meaning of the word, and no word has any meaning until it is interpreted into concepts of number, space, motion, time, or judgment, one or all. ”

“ The landsman may learn from the mariner, the dweller in the valley from the mountaineer, the denizen of the forest from the denizen of the prairie, and he who dwells where tropical hurricanes wash the coral reefs with the waves of the sea, may learn from him who dwells among the cliffs of ice and sees the bergs of crystal plunged from their glacial homes into the depths of the sea. This process of forming judgments we call acception. ”

“ The mind cannot rest content with an incongruity. It is the ultimate spur to all intellectual activity, for we may forego the pleasures of the mind when we know that others may be enjoyed, but oftentimes we cannot neglect the dangers of false judgments. We must make a practical solution of every incongruous judgment at the time, but every intelligent man yearns for an ultimate solution, thus the world is on the qui vive for knowledge as for the breath of life. Those who teach the doctrine of the unknowable offer stones for bread and vipers for fish.
All our concepts must be congruous ”

“ Here we have a crucial test for the legitimate use of a word; if it does not express a number, a space, a motion, a time, or a judgment, or their reciprocals as kind, form, force, causation, or concept of a body or a relation of one body to another, it expresses a pseudo-idea. A word used to express an idea of an unknown thing may become legitimate by the unknown becoming known, but a word used to express an unknowable thing is blank voice. ”

“ Vision is the primordial sense of ideation. We see the motions in others, which I have heretofore called self-activity, and interpret them as symbols of soul. By soul I mean all intellectual and emotional judgments made by the animate being. The individual is conscious of the judgments made by himself, but he infers the judgment made by others. The judgments that others make are inferred from the signs which others make. ”

“ Thus the spoken word is a sound impression upon the organ of hearing; the written word a light impression upon the organ of vision, and the impression becomes a symbol for sensation, or a symbol for perception, or a symbol for apprehension, or a symbol for reflection, or a symbol for ideation. So all words are symbols for ideation, but the symbols are conventional—invented by mankind for the purpose as an addition to the natural symbols. ”

“ The lower animal makes judgments of ideation in this manner, and uses these judgments in guiding its own conduct. With mankind in higher culture this faculty is greatly developed. All words are signs of concepts, and all combined words that express thought are judgments, and the symbols of ideas, both spoken and written, constitute the pabulum of higher culture. Thus we not only cognize the intellections of others, but at the same time we accept their judgments as judgments of our own. ”

“ IDEATION
We have seen that consciousness is one of the essentials of an animate particle; that sensation is the first mental property or faculty of an animate body; that perception is the second mental property or faculty of an animate body; that apprehension is the third mental property or faculty of an animate body; and that reflection is the fourth mental property or faculty of an animate body. Now, we have to consider the fifth mental property or faculty of an animate body. We form judgments about consciousness and choice, and about judgments and concepts; that is, we cognize mind. ”

“ Ideation, therefore, as the term is here used, is the act of making judgments about judgments which, when verified, are cognitions.
We are conscious of our own judgments, but we infer the judgments of others. We may find the judgments of others to be like those we have already formed, or we may find that they are new to us. These new judgments we may accept or reject. When speech is developed and education is instituted, acception comes to play a very important role in mental acquisition. ”

“ All scientific research is a process of reinvestigating our concepts and of adjusting them to the light which has been shed upon them by some broader generalization than we have been wont to make. We gain a concept by induction and immediately we apply it in a multitude of ways by deduction, and in making these applications we discover our fallacious judgments and go on forever to readjust our concepts. ”

“ Words themselves are of great assistance to ideation in that they symbolize with one word great groups of judgments which we call concepts. Thus it is that the ego is diverted from the material world to the ideal world, and caused to dwell abstractly upon judgments and their compounds. Perhaps abstraction is more nearly complete in the consideration of judgments and their compounds than in the consideration of times and their compounds, motions and their compounds, spaces and their compounds, and numbers and their compounds. ”

“ The nature of this motility we have elsewhere explained and we have called it self-activity, which must not be confounded with self-motion, for self-motion is inherent in every particle, while self-activity is self-directed motion in a body.
Only animate bodies have this self-activity. But according to our hypothesis the ultimate particles of inanimate bodies have self-activity in so far as they manifest choice or affinity, while plant bodies seem to have self-activity in their cells. Neglecting this hypothesis, animate bodies certainly have consciousness and choice in their cells. ”

“ Words often have many meanings; learn these many meanings of many concepts, put them together as one compound idea and you have an absurdity; but such is often the method of metaphysical reasoning. Akin to this is to use the word as a metaphor and then to forget the metaphor. See how Hegel uses the word mediation. A mediator is one who comes between others; the ether mediates the light between the sun and the earth; the air mediates the sound between the voice and the ear ”

“ Through the agency of language we discover the fifth property of bodies. When we are interested in them and interest grows apace we may wish to know what those bodies say instead of what they are; it is then that language becomes speech, but culture continues to advance and speech becomes designed or purposeful instruction. ”

“ Now, as one inanimate body has inherent motion in its several particles, which are organized in a hierarchy of bodies, the inanimate body cannot be deflected except by collision with another body, but the animate body can deflect its own motion as a body by metabolism, and by deflecting its own motion as a body it can deflect the motion of others. ”

“ So many judgments have been found fallacious by every individual in the race of men, and fallacious judgments have led to such dire disasters, and have been repeated so often in matters of profound moment, as well as in matters of superficial consequence, that there has grown up a habit of mind by which incongruity of judgments is taken as a signal that danger lurks in the way. ”

“ Ideation, as the term is here used, is a cognition of intellections in that manifestations of intellections are cognized by forming concepts of them. In sensation manifestations are conceived as expressions of kind. In perception they are conceived as expressions of form; in apprehension they are conceived as expressions of force; in reflection they are conceived as expressions of cause and effect; in ideation they are conceived as expressions of mind. ”

“ Gesture language may become gesture speech, oral language oral speech, and picture writing written speech. It is with this higher condition of language as speech that we are chiefly interested in ideation. Everything in nature has manifestations which may be interpreted, but only animate beings purposely convey concepts to one another.
Ideation is reënforced by other demotic agencies than those of speech. The pleasures, the industries, the institutions, and the opinions of mankind, are all expressed as human activities, and manifest the concepts by which they are produced ”

“ There are other signs, however, which I observe in animate beings, and especially in human activities, which I do interpret as marks of soul. These signs are those which are produced only by those bodies which, being animate, have motility. ”

“ The habit of learning words without learning the ideas for which they stand is worse than an inanity—it is a vice, for the mind is irresistibly led into the practice of informing such words with vague and misleading meanings. ”

“ It is this power in the animate body of deflecting its own motion at will and of deflecting the motions of others by colliding against them at will, which is the sign or mark of mind in those bodies to which we attribute mind, and which exhibit more and more the purpose and ability to convey concepts to others, until among the higher animals a conventional sign language is produced, which becomes oral in the higher animals, but oral and written speech in man. ”

“ Select any word in common usage to express the leading ideas in the metaphysical discussion of the nature of the universe, and follow it where it occurs many times, and you can invariably discover that it is used with many meanings wholly incompatible with one another, and the foundation of these meanings will be discovered to be something unknowable—a nothing, an abstract attribute reified as having concrete existence. ”

“ There is a constant tendency to learn words without meanings, or words with vague meanings, and to use them with a semblance of expressing ideas. No word is properly understood when it does not stand for an idea about one or more of the concomitants of body or about the relations of these concomitants. ”

“ Words are signs of ideas to be interpreted by the imagination of the hearer, and a true or a false interpretation may be given them, depending upon the knowledge already existing in the mind of the hearer. ”

“ This final faculty in verification resorts to the multitudinous concepts of which the mind is possessed and when one is incongruous with others it demands a reinvestigation of that one. Sometimes the one is right and the many are wrong, and the multitude must be made to establish congruity with one, but meanwhile the one multiplies until it becomes the many and the fallacious judgments the few. ”

“ A crude speech is developed by all animal life—a general sign language by which every animal holds converse with the members of its own species. This general sign language is inherited by man and gradually developed by him; but oral speech soon leads the way in the development of a still higher language. ”

“ As we enter the cove, instead of finding a narrow glen, with towering walls and overhanging rocks, I see a stretch of pasturage land inclosed by rocks that are broken back in hills, and up the valley beyond the pasturage lands there is a deserted cabin. Near the cabin a great spring gushes from the foot of the rock, and about it trees grow. ”

“ The sensations, perceptions, apprehensions, reflections, and ideations of the individual are not exhausted by an enumeration of these derived by the individual in his converse with nature. From his ancestors he inherits the powers of thought, with his organism, which is expectant and apt in judgment and conception. ”

“ Now the eye, by its peculiar construction with apparatus for accommodation to distance and direction, is especially adapted to the reception of sense impressions that imply self-activity, hence it is the primary sense organ for the faculty of ideation. ”

“ Then all the appliances of instruction are developed until one of the principal occupations of mankind is the giving and receiving of instruction and the acquiring of concepts from one another, in which process the instructor is more instructed than the pupil, for the speaker in the organization of that which is spoken learns more than the hearer. ”

“ With the power and skill thus developed it is able to deal with and rationally idealize an immeasurable body of facts which it cannot discover for itself—facts gathered in other lands by other minds and conveyed to it by the agency of language. ”

“ A man may accept a verbal explanation of the facts of science and believe that he has a world of congruous concepts, but experience will find incongruity, which he may conceal for himself in a jugglery of words, but others will detect it when they are announced. ”

“ With this idea was associated another, namely, that animals do not reason, but have instinct, there being no realization of the fact that certain practical judgments are repeated so often that they become intuitive as acts become habitual. ”