Signs, Processes and Associations
cept, and of the impossibility of treating separately the different factors of a phenomenon without regard to its unity,—all which add to the difficulties in trying to solve the mysteries of words.
Signs only can be effective and constant through the law of standards. An idea is represented by a sound: the sound must have a distinct value in order to condense the image from the shapeless cloud of thought or feeling of which the idea is a part. When the sign-standards are relaxed, the word-values diminish and ideas of a similar order are confused—the bête noir of careless speech.
This necessary conformity of signs to standards is the basis of the nomenclatorial conception of language. But the conception fails to recognize the “plastic stress” and the positional values of words, neither of which lessens the force of the law of standards, since speech, phonetic and graphic, is vastly more than the words that enter its composition. The relations of the words to each
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