We are face to face with the problem which the pure Nominalists attacked, when they took this nil in its proper sense. Were there indeed any who really pretended that we could have in mind words, and words only—nothing besides? This is a historical problem into which it is useless for us to enter. It is possible that some may have pushed their reaction against the extravagances of realism even to this point, but the thesis is totally insupportable; for at that rate there would be no difference between a general term, and a word of any unknown language: the latter is the pure flatus vocis, a sound that evokes nothing. If, on the other hand, by word we mean sign, everything changes, since the sign implies and envelops something. Such appears to me to be the true interpretation.[85]
So that for the cases which alone concern us for the moment, i. e., those in which the reply was “Nothing,” there are two elements, the one existing in consciousness (word heard or auditory image), the other subconscious, but not therefore invalid and inaccurate. Hence we must penetrate into the obscure region of the unconscious, in order to apprehend the something which gives to the word its signification, its life, its power of substitution.
Leibnitz wrote: “Most frequently, e. g., in any prolonged analysis, we have no simultaneous intuition of all the characteristics or attributes of a thing: in their place we use signs. In actually thinking, we are accustomed to omit the explanation of these signs by reference to what they signify—knowing or believing that we have this explanation in our power: but we do not judge the application, or explanation, of the words to be positively necessary.... I have termed this method of thinking, blind or symbolic. We employ it in algebra, in arithmetic, and in fact universally:” which is equivalent to saying that potential knowledge is stored up beneath the general or abstract terms; nor should we be surprised at finding this doctrine in the man who first introduced the idea of the unconscious into philosophy.
To determine the rôle of this inevitably active, albeit silent, factor is a difficult enterprise, and one that is necessarily inaccurate,—since it amounts to the translation of obscure and enveloped states into the clear and analytical language of consciousness. The simplest procedure is to examine how we arrive at the comprehension of general terms.[86] Set a page of a philosophical work before the eyes of a novice or of a man wholly ignorant of the subject. He understands nothing. The only method that will render it intelligible is to take the general or abstract terms one after the other, and translate them into concrete events, into facts of current experience. This labor demands an hour or two. In proportion to the progress of the novice, the translation is effected more quickly; it becomes superfluous for certain terms; and finally but a few minutes are required for the comprehension of a page. Untrained minds are often surprised, on reading a sentence consisting of abstract terms, at understanding each word, and yet not knowing what the whole means. This signifies that they have not beneath each word potential knowledge sufficient to establish a connexion or relation between all the terms, and giving meaning to them. Apart from those who are familiar with abstraction by natural gift or by habit, it is incontestable that to the vast majority the reading of an abstract page is a slow and painful and very fatiguing process. This is because each word exacts an act of attention, an effort, which corresponds to labor in the unconscious or subconscious regions. When this labor becomes useless, and we think, or appear to think, by signs alone all goes rapidly and easily.
In short, we learn to understand a concept as we learn to walk, dance, fence, or play a musical instrument: it is a habit, i. e., an organised memory. General terms cover an organised, latent knowledge which is the hidden capital without which we should be in a state of bankruptcy, manipulating false money or paper of no value. General ideas are habits in the intellectual order. Suppression of effort corresponds with perfected habit; as again with perfect comprehension.
What occurs each time we have in consciousness merely the general term, is only a particular case of a very common psychological fact: as follows:—The useful work is carried on below consciousness, and above its surface only results, indications, or signs appear. The facts enumerated above are all taken from motor activity. Their equivalents abound in the domain of feeling. The “causeless” states of joy or sorrow, which are frequent in the sound man, and still more in the invalid, are only the translation into consciousness of ignored organic dispositions operating in obscurity. What gives intensity and duration to our passions is not the consciousness we have of them, but the depth of the roots by which they plunge into our being, and are organised in our viscera, and subsequently in our brain. They are no more than the expression of our constitution, permanent, or momentary. We might run over the whole province of psychology, with variations on the same theme. I do not propose to do so here, but would simply recall that every state of consciousness whatsoever (percept, image, idea, feeling, passion, volition) has its substrate; that the concept reduced to the bare word is but another case of the same kind, and in no wise peculiar: that to believe that there is nothing more than the word, because it alone exists in consciousness, is to seize only the superficial and visible part of the event,—perhaps, all things considered, the least part. This unconscious substratum, this organised and potential knowledge, gives not merely value, but an actual denotation to the word,—like harmonics superadded to the fundamental note.
To conclude: we think not with words in the strict sense (flatus vocis) but with signs. Symbolic thought, which is a purely verbal operation, is sustained, co-ordinated, vivified, by potential knowledge and unconscious travail. To this it must be added that potential knowledge is a genus, of which the concept is only a species. All memory can be reduced to latent knowledge, organised, susceptible of revival, but all memory is not material for concepts. The man who knows many languages even when not speaking them, the naturalist capable of identifying millions of specimens while not classifying them, have a very extended potential knowledge, but it is all concrete. The potential knowledge which underlies concepts consists in a sum of characters, qualities, extracts, which are the less numerous in proportion as the concept approximates to pure symbolism: in other terms what underlies the concept is an abstract memory, a memory for abstracts.
In my opinion, a large measure of the obscurities and dissensions which prevail as to the nature of concepts, arises from the fact that the rôle of unconscious activity has for centuries been misunderstood or forgotten,—psychology having confined itself exclusively to consciousness: and while its action is universally admitted to-day for all other manifestations of mental life—instincts, percepts, feelings, volition, etc.—it is still excluded from the domain of concepts. The whole of the foregoing discussion is an essay towards its reintegration.
Need we add that the opinion adopted as to the nature of the unconscious matters little in the present connexion? On this point there are, we know, two principal hypotheses. According to the one it is a purely physiological event, and can be reduced to unconscious cerebration. According to the other, the unconscious is still a psychical fact; whether it be an affective rather than a representative state, or a complex of little, scattered consciousnesses, isolated, evanescent, with no linkage to the self, or, again, an organisation or sequence of states, which forms another current coexistent with that of clear consciousness. These theories, and others which I omit, have nothing to do with our purpose. It is sufficient to recognise unconscious activity as a fact, without any explanation, and this position would seem to be incontestable.