A manual treating of physics will best explain the reason of our false impression. When a ray of light is transmitted from one medium to another of different density, as from air to water, a change of direction is impressed on the ray, making the straight line appear broken; this change of direction is called refraction. Cardinal Newman made a very true observation on this subject. “If an idea is presented unexpectedly to us,” he said, “clothed in words to which we are unaccustomed, it is sufficient to cause us to speak of it as erroneous; this illusion is only a simple effect of the refraction of words; that is to say, that in the mind of the writer of this truth which startles us, the idea followed a straight line, but in our mind it became broken.”
The second kind of opposition is of a different nature. It is amusing to watch two individuals who are taking opposite sides in a heated discussion concerning some philosopher. “What I tell you is correct; A, who is a great scholar, says so.” “Yes, but I also know a great scholar, B, and he says just the contrary.”
There seems to be a charm in controversy which few persons can resist; they ignore what you say, and bluntly tell you that you are in the wrong.
Abstraction, Inattention
Not only is abstraction fatal to study, but it often plays us sorry tricks apart from our occupations. Sometimes a bright idea comes into our mind, but touching only the surface; if by inattention or idleness we do not fix it firmly in our memory by clothing it in suitable words, it is a hundred to one that it is not irrevocably lost to us. It is not more possible to arrest its flight than to fasten a placard to the wall without nails or gum.
It is difficult to note with exactness the amount of inattention which so frequently accompanies the act of opening a serious book even with the fixed intention of reading it.
I once surprised myself in a flagrant act of inattention. I was staying with a friend, and took up Pascal’s Pensées, which I had not read for some time. The edition was not the same as the one I had at home. Whilst turning over the leaves I said to myself occasionally, “How the style has changed—this is not clear—this observation is very shallow”; and so I went on, astonished at not being able to admire this celebrated work as I had formerly done. Suddenly I came upon this phrase, “Monsieur Pascal confond tout cela.” What was my humiliation to discover that in this edition “les Pensées de Pascal” were followed by “les Pensées de Nicole.” I had passed from the one to the other without noticing it. But what could have given rise to this impression of Nicole’s? I turned back a few pages, and read: “A book has just appeared which is perhaps the most useful that could be placed in the hands of princes; it is a selection of the ‘Pensées de Pascal.’ I do not say that all are equally good ... I find amongst them many well polished stones and fit to adorn a great building; but the remainder appeared to be mixed material, for which I can hardly suppose that M. Pascal could find a use.... There are even certain sentiments which hardly appear to be exact, and are like scattered thoughts thrown out at random, which are written only that they may afterwards be examined with more care and attention. Monsieur Pascal supposes that ennui comes from that which we see in ourselves—from what we think of ourselves. That assertion is perhaps more subtle than solid. Thousands of persons experience ennui without thinking of themselves at all; they feel weariness not from what they think, but because they do not think enough.... M. Pascal confond tout cela.” Upon my word, I felt consoled for my lapse into inattention; to this fault I owe my acquaintance with M. Nicole’s acute remark: “Men do not feel weariness from what they think, but because they do not think enough.”
Speech
When the members of the human family began to use the clamor concomitans which accompanied their occupations, as clamor significans, these simple materials formed the roots which indicated such and such acts, and produced verbal and nominatival bases composed of predicative and demonstrative elements. During the course of ages the first became conjugated and the second were declined. By means of adding the successive acts together, and retaining them united in the mind, or subtracting in several directions, our ancestors diversified the meaning of all the primitive roots; they formed collective and abstract nouns in their simplest form by combination. The process never varied; thus the thought progressed from the first root to the last concept. But the first word ever pronounced by a human creature was a true proposition, and our last literary chef-d’œuvre consists of a series of propositions.
Descartes’ brief phrase “Cogito, ergo sum” may be better rendered and still more briefly by one word. The Greek word Logos, meaning word and thought combined, had originally, as I have already remarked, the two meanings of assembling and combining. “Cogito” = I think, which is the short for co-agito = I assemble. The act of assembling presupposes that of separating, seeing that it is impossible to combine two or more things without at the same time separating them from other things. The child who is taught the first rules of arithmetic adds and subtracts, which can only be done by combining and separating. However little intelligence he may have, his task does not present great difficulties to him; and yet the most abstruse mathematical problem consists in adding and subtracting, and the most astounding calculations of Newton, and the most profound mathematical speculations of Kant, are but the results of addition and subtraction, of combining and separating.