Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic
The psychology of nominalism is undoubtedly right where it insists that every image is particular and every term, in its existential aspect, a flatum vocis; but nominalists should have recognised that images may have any degree of vagueness and generality when measured by a conceptual standard. A figure having obviously three sides and three corners may very well be present to the mind when it is impossible to say whether it is an equilateral or a rectangular triangle. Functional or logical universality lies in another sphere altogether, being a matter of intent and not of existence. When we say that “universals alone exist in the mind” we mean by “mind” something unknown to Berkeley; not a bundle of psychoses nor an angelic substance, but quick intelligence, the faculty of discourse. Predication is an act, understanding a spiritual and transitive operation: its existential basis may well be counted in psychologically and reduced to a stream of immediate presences; but its meaning can be caught only by another meaning, as life only can exemplify life. Vague or general images are as little universal as sounds are; but a sound better than a flickering abstraction can serve the intellect in its operation of comparison and synthesis. Words are therefore the body of discourse, of which the soul is understanding.
Literature moves between the extremes of music and denotation.
The categories of discourse are in part merely representative, in part merely grammatical, and in part attributable to both spheres. Euphony and phonetic laws are principles governing language without any reference to its meaning; here speech is still a sort of music. At the other extreme lies that ultimate form of prose which we see in mathematical reasoning or in a telegraphic style, where absolutely nothing is rhetorical and speech is denuded of every feature not indispensable to its symbolic rôle. Between these two extremes lies the broad field of poetry, or rather of imaginative or playful expression, where the verbal medium is a medium indeed, having a certain transparency, a certain reference to independent facts, but at the same time elaborates the fact in expressing it, and endows it with affinities alien to its proper nature. A pun is a grotesque example of such diremption, where ambiguities belonging only to speech are used to suggest impossible substitutions in ideas. Less frankly, language habitually wrests its subject-matter in some measure from its real context and transfers it to a represented and secondary world, the world of logic and reflection. Concretions in existence are subsumed, when named, under concretions in discourse. Grammar lays violent hands upon experience, and everything becomes a prey to wit and fancy, a material for fiction and eloquence. Man’s intellectual progress has a poetic phase, in which he imagines the world; and then a scientific phase, in which he sifts and tests what he has imagined.
Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have affinity.
In what measure do inflection and syntax represent anything in the subject-matter of discourse? In what measure are they an independent play of expression, a quasi-musical, quasi-mathematical veil interposed between reflection and existence? One who knows only languages of a single family can give but a biassed answer to this question. There are doubtless many approaches to correct symbolism in language, which grammar may have followed up at different times in strangely different ways. That the medium in every art has a character of its own, a character limiting its representative value, may perhaps be safely asserted, and this intrinsic character in the medium antedates and permeates all representation. Phonetic possibilities and phonetic habits belong, in language, to this indispensable vehicle; what the throat and lips can emit easily and distinguishably, and what sequences can appeal to the ear and be retained, depend alike on physiological conditions; and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle grows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium’s movement and that of the subject-matter.
Both language and ideas involve processes in the brain. The two processes may be wholly disparate if we regard their objects only and forget their seat, as Athena is in no way linked to an elephant’s tusk; yet in perception all processes are contiguous and exercise a single organism, in which they may find themselves in sympathetic or antipathetic vibration. On this circumstance hangs that subtle congruity between subject and vehicle which is otherwise such a mystery in expression. If to think of Athena and to look on ivory are congruous physiological processes, if they sustain or heighten each other, then to represent Athena in ivory will be a happy expedient, in which the very nature of the medium will already be helping us forward. Scent and form go better together, for instance, in the violet or the rose than in the hyacinth or the poppy: and being better compacted for human perception they seem more expressive and can be linked more unequivocally with other sources of feeling. So a given vocal sound may have more or less analogy to the thing it is used to signify; this analogy may be obvious, as in onomatopoeia, or subtle, as when short, sharp sounds go with decision, or involved rhythms and vague reverberations with a floating dream. What seems exquisite to one poet may accordingly seem vapid to another, when the texture of experience in the two minds differs, so that a given composition rustles through one man’s fancy as a wind might through a wood, but finds no sympathetic response in the other organism, nerved as it may be, perhaps, to precision in thought and action.
Syntax positively representative.
The structure of language, when it passes beyond the phonetic level, begins at once to lean upon existences and to imitate the structure of things. We distinguish the parts of speech, for instance, in subservience to distinctions which we make in ideas. The feeling or quality represented by an adjective, the relation indicated by a verb, the substance or concretion of qualities designated by a noun, are diversities growing up in experience, by no means attributable to the mere play of sound. The parts of speech are therefore representative. Their inflection is representative too, since tenses mark important practical differences in the distribution of the events described, and cases express the respective rôles played by objects in the operation. “I struck him and he will strike me,” renders in linguistic symbols a marked change in the situation; the variation in phrase is not rhetorical. Language here, though borrowed no doubt from ancestral poetry, has left all revery far behind, and has been submerged in the Life of Reason.
Yet it vitiates what it represents.