Moreover, even if the faculty of intelligence were disembodied and could exist in a vacuum, it would still be a vain possession if no data were given for it to operate upon and if no particular natural structure, animal, social, or artistic, were at hand for intelligence to ally itself to and defend. Reason would in that case die of inanition; it would have no subject-matter and no sanction, as well as no seat. Intelligence is not a substance; it is a principle of order and of art; it requires a given situation and some particular natural interest to bring it into play. In fact, it is nothing but a name for the empire which conscious, but at bottom irrational, interests attain over the field in which they operate; it is the fruition of life, the token of successful operation.
Every theme or motive in the Life of Reason expresses some instinct rooted in the body and incidental to natural organisation. The intent by which memory refers to past or absent experience, or the intent by which perception becomes recognition, is a transcript of relations in which events actually stand to one another. Such intent represents modifications of structure and action important to life, modifications that have responded to forces on which life is dependent. Both desire and meaning translate into cognitive or ideal energy, into intent, mechanical relations subsisting in nature. These mechanical relations give practical force to the thought that expresses them, and the thought in turn gives significance and value to the forces that subserve it. Fulfilment is mutual, in one direction bringing material potentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and in the other direction embodying intent in the actual forms of things and manifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desire to disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material world which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her even more, for a theme.
In private and silent discourse, when words and grammar are swathed in reverie, the material basis and reference of thought may be forgotten. Desire and intent may then seem to disport themselves in a purely ideal realm; moral or logical tensions alone may seem to determine the whole process. Meditative persons are even inclined to regard the disembodied life which they think they enjoy at such times as the true and native form of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thought they deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma to reach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mystical logicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisite suicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight are annihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloon consumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found without an organ; none is conceivable without an expression which is that organ’s visible emanation; and none would be significant without a subject-matter lying in the world of which that organ is a part.
The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.
The natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, and its existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind the analogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. This hypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions which imply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smile or a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have been at work in the body while thought occupied the mind—even if, as more often happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce the feeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is said to cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that such involuntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out of feeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion which determines their material character, so that laughter, for instance, becomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just as well have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself is concerned.
In the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage and superficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the point of view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplaying impulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay the budding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies the perfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniably continues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity have known physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hidden complexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; they become recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received by the ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature; through it thought, being expressed in that its material basis is extended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; for its expression enters into the chain of its future conditions and becomes an omen of that thought’s continuance, repetition, and improvement. Thought’s rational function consists, as we then perceive, in expressing a natural situation and improving that situation by expressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequate state of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions. Expression makes thought a power in the very world from which thought drew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining and self-assured.
A thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute moral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to a fellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, the desire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself in the mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue of its cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy, which even an inarticulate yearning would not have lacked, becomes in language an overt phenomenon, linked observably with all other objects and processes.
Language is accordingly an overflow of the physical basis of thought. It is an audible gesture, more refined than the visible, but in the same sense an automatic extension of nervous and muscular processes. Words underlie the thought they are said to express—in truth it is the thought that is the flower and expression of the language—much as the body underlies the mind.
Intent starts from a datum.
Language contains, side by side two distinct elements. One is the meaning or sense of the words—a logical projection given to sensuous terms. The other is the sensuous vehicle of that meaning—the sound, sign, or gesture. This sensuous term is a fulcrum for the lever of signification, a point d’appui which may be indefinitely attenuated in rapid discourse, but not altogether discarded. Intent though it vaults high must have something to spring from, or it would lend meaning to nothing. The minimal sensuous term that subsists serves as a clue to a whole system of possible assertions radiating from it. It becomes the sign for an essence or idea, a logical hypostasis corresponding in discourse to that material hypostasis of perceptions which is called an external thing.