Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/88

76 PSYCHOLOGY formed without it. The name of a thing or action becomes for one who knows the name as much an objective mark or attribute as any quality whatever can be. The form and colour of what we call an " orange " are perhaps even more intimately combined with the sound and utterance of this word than with the taste and fragrance which we regard as strictly essential to the thing. But, whereas its essential attributes often evade us, we can always com- mand its nominal attribute, in so far as this depends upon movements of articulation. By uttering the name (or hearing it uttered) we have secured to us, in a greater or less degree, that superior vividness* and definiteness that pertain to images reinstated by impressions : our idea approximates to the fixity and independence of a percept (comp. p. 57 above). With young children and uncultured minds who, by the way, commonly " think aloud " the gain in this respect is probably more striking than those not confined to their mother-tongue or those used to an analytical handling of language at all realize. 1 When things are thus made ours by receiving names from us and we can freely manipulate them in idea, it becomes easier mentally to bring together facts that logically belong together, and so to classify and generalize. For names set us free from the cumbersome tangibility and particu- larity of perception, which is confined to just what is pre- sented here and now. But as ideas increase in generality they diminish in definiteness and unity ; they not only become less pictorial and more schematic, but they become vague and unsteady as well, because formed from a num- ber of concrete images only related as regards one or two constituents, and not assimilated as the several images of the same thing may be. The mental picture answering to the word "horse" has, so to say, body enough to remain a steady object when under attention from time to time; but that answering to the word "animal" is perhaps scarcely twice alike. The relations of things could thus never be readily recalled or steadily controlled if the names of those relations, which as words always remain concrete, did not give us a definite hold upon them, make them comprehensible. Once these " airy nothings " have a name, we reap again the advantages a concrete constituent affords : by its means that which is relevant becomes more closely associated, and that which is irrele- vant abstracted from falls off. When what answers to the logical connotation or meaning of a concept is in this way linked with the name, it is no longer necessary that such " matter or content " should be distinctly present in consciousness. It takes time for an image to raise its associates above the threshold ; and, when all are there, there is more demand upon attention in proportion. There is thus a manifest economy in what Leibnitz happily styled " symbolic," in contrast to " intuitive " thinking. Our power of efficient attention is limited, and with words for counters we can, as Leibnitz remarks, readily perform operations involving very complex presentations, and wait till these operations are concluded before realizing and spreading out the net result in sterling coin. Thought But this simile must not mislead us. In actual thinking and idea- there never is any complete separation between the symbol and the ideas symbolized : the movements of the one are never entirely suspended till those of the other are com- plete. "Thus," says Hume, "if, instead of saying, that in war the weaker have always recourse to negotiation, we should say, that they have always recourse to conquest, the custom which we have acquired of attributing certain relations to ideas still follows the words and makes us 1 Raskin, in his Pars Clavigera, relates that the sight of the word " crocodile " used to frighten him as a child so much that he could not feel at ease again till he had turned over the page on which it occurred. tion. immediately perceive the absurdity of that proposition." 2 How intimately the two are connected is shown by the surprises that give what point there is to puns, and by the small confusion that results from the existence of homo- nymous terms. The question thus arises What are the properly ideational elements concerned in thought? Over this question psychologists long waged fight as either nominalists or conceptualists. The former maintain that what is imaged in connexion with a general concept, such as triangle, is some individual triangle " taken in a certain light," 3 while the latter maintain that an "abstract idea" is formed embodying such constituents of the several par- ticulars as the concept connotes, but dissociated from the specific or accidental variations that distinguish one par- ticular from another. As often happens in such contro- versies, each party saw the weak point in the other. The nominalists easily showed that there was no distinct abstract idea representable apart from particulars; and the conceptualists could as easily show that a particular presentation " considered in a certain light " is no longer merely a particular presentation nor yet a mere crowd of presentations. The very thing to ascertain is what this consideration in a certain light implies. Perhaps a speedier end might have been put to this controversy if either party had been driven to define more exactly what was to be understood by image or idea. Such ideas as are possible to us apart from abstraction are, as we have seen, revived percepts, not revived sensations, are complex total re-pre- sentations made up of partial re-presentations (comp. p. 57). Reproductive imagination is so far but a faint rehearsal of actual perceptions, and constructive imagina- tion but a faint anticipation of possible perceptions. In either case we are busied with elementary presentations complicated or synthesized to what are tantamount to intuitions, in so far as the forms of intuition remain in the idea, though the fact, as tested by movement, &c., is absent. The several partial re -presentations, however, which make up an idea might also be called ideas, not merely in the wide sense in which every mental object may be so called, but also in the narrower sense as second- ary presentations, i.e., as distinguished from primary pre- sentations or impressions. But such isolated images of an impression, even if possible, would no more be intuitions than the mere impression itself would be one : taken alone the one would be as free of space and time as is the other. Till it is settled, therefore, whether the ideational elements concerned in conception are intuitive complexes or some- thing answering to the ultimate elements of these, nothing further can be done. In the case of what are specially called " concrete " as distinct from " abstract " conceptions if this rough-and- ready, but unscientific, distinction maybe allowed the idea answering to the concept differs little from an intuition, and we have already remarked that the generic image (Gemeinhild of German psychologists) constitutes the con- necting link between imagination and conception. But even concerning these it is useless to ask what does one imagine in thinking, e.g., of triangle or man or colour. We never except for the sake of this very inquiry attempt to fix our minds in this manner upon some isolated conception ; in actual thinking ideas are not in conscious- ness alone and disjointedly but as part of a context. When the idea " man " is present, it is present in some proposition or question, as Man is the paragon of animals ; In man there is nothing great but mind ; and so on. It is quite clear that in understanding or mentally verifying such statements very different constituents out of the 2 Treatise of Human Nature, pt. i. vii. (Green and Grose's ed.) p. 331. 8 So Hume, op. cit., p. 456.