“(1) Concepts may be formed, and yet not put before the consciousness of the conceiver, so that he ‘realizes’ what he is doing.”
Does that mean that the conceiver conceives concepts without conceiving them? Then, I ask, whom do these concepts belong to, where are they, and under what conditions were they realized? Is to conceive an active or a passive verb? May I once more quote Kant without incurring the suspicion of wishing to strangle free inquiry by authority? “Concepts,” says the old veteran, “are founded on the spontaneity of thought, sensuous intuitions on the receptivity of impressions.”
“(2) Complex thoughts are doubtless impossible without symbols, just as are the higher mathematics?”
Are lower mathematics possible without numerical symbols, and where is the line which separates complex from simple thought? Everything would seem to depend on that line which is so often spoken of by our critics. There ought to be something in that line which would at once remove the blunders committed by Humboldt and others. It would define the limit between inarticulate and articulate thought; it might possibly be the very frontier between the animal and the human mind, and yet that magic line is simply conceived, spoken of freely, but never realized, i.e., never traced with logical precision. Till that is done, that line, though it may exist, is to me as if it did not exist.
“(3) We know that dogs doubt and hesitate, and finally determine to act without any external determining circumstance.”
How this argument fits in here, is not quite clear to me; but, whatever its drift may be, a perusal of Professor Huxley’s excellent paper, “The Hypothesis that Animals are Automata,” will supply a full answer.
“(4) Professor Whitney very happily illustrates the independence of thought from language, by calling up our state of mind when casting about, often in the most open manner, for new designations, for new forms of knowledge, or when drawing distinctions, and pointing conclusions, which words are then stretched or narrowed to cover.”
Language with us has become so completely traditional, that we frequently learn words first and their meaning afterwards. The problem of the original relation between concepts and words, however, refers to periods when these words did not yet exist, but had to be framed for the first time. We are speaking of totally different things; he, of the geology, I, if I may say so, of the chemistry of speech. But even if we accepted the test from modern languages, does not the very form of the question supply the answer? If we want new designations, new forms of knowledge, do we not confess that we have old designations, though imperfect ones; old forms of knowledge which no longer answer our purpose? Our old words, then, become gradually stretched or narrowed, exactly as our knowledge becomes stretched or narrowed, or we at last throw away the old word, and borrow another from our own, or even from a foreign language.
“It is a proof,” Mr. Darwin says, “that we realized and conceived the idea of the texture and nature of a musical sound before we had a word for it, that we had to borrow the expressive word “timbre” from the French.”
But how did we realize and conceive the idea before we had a word for it? Surely, by old words. We called it quality, texture, nature—we knew it as the result of the presence and absence of various harmonics. In German, we stretched an old word, and called it Farbe; in English, timbre was borrowed from the French, just as we may call a pound vingt-cinq francs; but the French themselves got their word by the ordinary process—viz., by stretching the old word, tympanum.