Ideograph

“ Who can philosophically explain the transition from sensation to thought, from thought to word, from the word to its hieroglyphic presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to written language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of images, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in a sense, the hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing human ideas as embodied in the forms of animals that gave rise to the shapes of the first signs used in the East for writing down language? ”

“ Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored by the idea they represent? Then, to whose genius are they due? If it takes great intelligence to create a word, how old may human speech be? The combination of letters, their shapes, and the look they give to the word, are the exact reflection, in accordance with the character of each nation, of the unknown beings whose traces survive in us. ”

“ The terms of the plan by which we explain the facts, the classes, for instance, daylight and darkness, and their relation of alternation, or the words or symbols which stand for classes and relations are not themselves facts but abstractions. We cannot think in terms of actual facts: the intellectual activity by which we formulate general laws can only work among abstractions, and in order to explain a fact we are obliged to substitute for it either a class or word or other symbol. All description and explanation of facts consists in substitutions of this kind. ”

“ But this dependence on limited spheres of social life is concealed by the vague word "literature." Containing a generalization, and as such suggesting some abstract unity unconditioned by time and space, the word leads us to expect identity in the form and spirit of writing whenever and wherever it appears—an identity which does not strike us as false until repeated comparisons and contrasts have forced upon us the recognition of the falsity. ”

“ It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know. The relations of THINGS remain unchanged, by whatever system. By the word THINGS is to be understood any object of thought, that is any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an apprehension of distinction. ”

“ But the hieroglyphical manner of writing by living emblems, and perhaps in some instances by other pictures, was very abstruse, and inadequate to communicate that multiplicity and diversity of ideas which are requisite for the purpose of history, argumentation or general knowledge in any of the sciences or concerns of life; which mystical way of communicating ideas underwent a variety of alterations and improvements, though not so much as that of characters and grammar has done ”

“ Shall man, endowed with reason, do, say, or contrive any thing, without design, and without understanding? Hear the philosophers; who positively declare that nothing comes to pass without a cause. Hear Plato himself; who affirms that names and words subsist by nature, and contends that language is derived from nature, and not from art. ”

“ At length, these new or 'modern' philosophers abandoned the question of Realism, and the relation of thought to Reality, in favour of a system of pure logic or dialectics, dealing with the mere forms and expressions of thought, the formal analysis of ideas and words, the mutual relation of propositions and conclusions—in short, all that constitutes what we call formal logic, in its widest acceptation. At this point, the far-famed scholastic intellect, with its subtleties, its fine distinctions, its nice questions, its sophistical conclusions, reached its zenith. ”

“ Release the critic from the necessity of regarding nature as universal order and reason as the directive of this order, and, whatever the loss in philosophic concept, he is ready for a more specific and particular investigation that turns its attention to basic human behavior and the basic ways of the mind as the criterion by which to judge artistic representation. No need now for quaint parallels with the ancients to justify modern practice, nor for scholarly arguments to prove learning; all that is required is to prove adherence to common nature and common rationality. ”

“ What I have hitherto been endeavouring to do is to reveal clearly that the question whether or not there is any difference between the brute and the man in respect of abstraction, is nothing more than a question of terminology. The real question will arise only when we come to treat of the faculty of language: the question before us now is merely a question of psychological classification, or of the nomenclature of ideas. ”

“ What we learn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode, and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, and whatever else is involved in the experience of writing and reading.
The history of literature is connected to the diversification of language in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead us to believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can be better understood if we consider the practice of literature in relation to the many forms of human practice. ”

“ The actual treatise does not cover these twenty-six topics, but confines itself to the division of grammar commonly called Etymology.
Though the mental processes of an individual preserve a working harmony, some of them appear more rational than others. Such disparities may be glaring in men who enter upon the learning of a higher civilization without proper pilotage. How are they to discriminate between the valuable and the foolish? The common sense, which they apply to familiar matters, contrasts with their childlike lucubrations upon novel topics of education or philosophy. ”

“ Every form marks its own place in sequence by its relative complexity or affinity to other allied forms, in the same manner that every word in the science of language has a place assigned to it in the order of development or phonetic decay.
If there is such a thing as a science of language, and none can doubt it, who shall affirm that there is no such thing as a science of the arts? Language, it is true, embraces a wider sphere, and includes the arts; but, on the other hand, it is liable to sources of uncertainty for the purposes of science, from which the arts are free. ”

“ That this is the sense and arguing of the author will further appear by his answering the question he in another place puts: 'Since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms?' His answer is: 'Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas.' ("Essay on Human Understanding," Bk. III, chap. III, paragraph 6.) But it seems that a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. ”

“ But the point on which I desire to fasten attention at present is the enormous leverage which is furnished to the faculty of ideation by thus using words as the mental equivalents of ideas. For by the help of these symbols we climb into higher and higher regions of abstraction: by thinking in verbal signs we think, as it were, with the semblance of ideas: we dispense altogether with the necessity of actual images, whether of precepts or of recepts: we quit the sphere of sense, and rise to that of thought. ”

“ Pronounce the formula to him, change the blind impulse into a clear idea, and you give him a new suggestion, which will, perhaps, cause him to fall on the side to which he is inclining. On the other hand, there are formulas and generous suggestions that need only to be pronounced to carry entire masses. It sometimes falls to the man of genius to translate the aspirations of his epoch into ideas; he pronounces the word and a whole people follow. Great moral, religious, and social revolutions occur when feelings, long restrained or hardly recognized, come to be formulated into ideas or words. ”

“ In science, Reason is the dialectical or analytic faculty, by which the discoveries of Imagination and the perceptions of the Understanding receive a definite form—the faculty of analysis, arrangement, and combination. Reason in itself is not inventive—it makes no discoveries—it is rather a negative than a positive faculty—but it is the indispensable arbitress, to whose decision Understanding and Imagination must submit their various productions.
Imagination, on the other hand, is the inventive faculty in art, poetry and even science. ”

“ The many specialized languages of literary criticism and interpretation- such as comparative studies, phenomenological analysis, structuralism, semiotic interpretation, deconstructionism-as difficult and opaque to the average literate reader as scientific and philosophic languages, are duplicated in the specialized language of creative post-modern writing. ”

“ They create, namely, an ascending progress from the individual to the more general notions, by a methodical process of filiation; they operate upon living beings, or objects of the same nature, having consequently a common standard. The history, even in brief, of these classifications is instructive: it shows the progressive passage of concrete-abstract ideas to more and more abstract concepts, from a statement of gross resemblances to the quest after subtle similarities, from the period of assimilation to that in which dissociation predominates. ”

“ In the routine of our school education logic might, perhaps, be made a highly profitable study if only it were combined with and made to bear upon the history of the gradual development of human thought, and especially the theory of language. And then, since thought and speech are so intimately allied to and dependent on each other, it would be advisable to go a step farther, and extend our logical studies to the theory of imagination, symbolical language and its fundamental rules. ”

“ The danger of basing a name on a theory of literature is that the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be inadequate, and then the name, having become immutable by the force of custom, is left standing, a monument of ancient error. The terminology of the sciences, which pretends to be exact and colourless, is always being reduced to emptiness by the progress of knowledge. ”

“ From the perspective of literacy, this time span comprised the liberation of the human being from the pictorially concrete and the establishment of the realm of conventions, of purposeful encoding. Abstract thinking is not possible without the cognitive support of abstract representations and the sharing of conventions (some implicit) they embody. The wedge-shaped letters of Sumerian cuneiform, the sacred engraved notations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese ideograms, the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman alphabets-all have in common the need to overcome concreteness. ”

“ But the successive points of this differentiation, which creates grammatical forms, and parts of discourse, are under an objective form the history of the development of intelligence, inasmuch as it abstracts, generalises, analyses, and tends towards an ever-growing precision. The completely developed languages—and we are speaking only of such—bear throughout the print of the unconscious labor that has fashioned them for centuries: they are a petrified psychology. ”

“ Ideologists have written whole volumes on the operations of our understanding, and the simple rustic performs these operations without thinking that he performs them. How much has been written on abstraction, generalization, and universals! Yet this is all well regulated in the mind of every man, ignorant as he may be of a science which examines it. ”

“ Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms. ”

“ In language, an alphabet represents the mechanism of materialism, while the words expressive of the meaning of a thousand thoughts, grand ideas, and noble ideals—of love and hate, of cowardice and courage—represent the performances of mind within the scope defined by both material and spiritual law, directed by the assertion of the will of personality, and limited by the inherent situational endowment. ”

“ Metaphysics, theology, ethics, logic, æsthetics, dialectic developments as they are of "norms" or "realities" which themselves can have no meaning without the "apparent," changing world they measure and belie, assume consequently a detachment and self-sufficiency they do not actually possess. Their historians have treated them as if they had no context, as if the elaboration of the ideal tendencies of the successive systems explained their origin, character, and significance. ”

“ Learning, in the proper sense, is not learning things, but the meanings of things, and this process involves the use of signs, or language in its generic sense. In like fashion, the warfare of some educational reformers against symbols, if pushed to extremes, involves the destruction of the intellectual life, since this lives, moves, and has its being in those processes of definition, abstraction, generalization, and classification that are made possible by symbols alone. ”