[235] George Campbell: Philosophy of Rhetoric, book ii, chap. vii.
[236] Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, by 'Jean Story' (1879).
[237] M. G. Tarde, quoting (in Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1885), p. 226) some nonsense-verses from a dream, says they show "how prosodic forms may subsist in a mind from which logical rules are effaced.... I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of finding two words which rhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first presented itself with other words which, added, gave the right number of syllables, and yet I was ignorant of the sense of the words.... Thus we have the extraordinary fact that the words called each other up, without calling up their sense.... Even when awake, it is more difficult to ascend to the meaning of a word than to pass from one word to another; or to put it otherwise, it is harder to be a thinker than to be a rhetorician, and on the whole nothing is commoner than trains of words not understood."
[238] We think it odd that young children should listen with such rapt attention to the reading of stories expressed in words half of which they do not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. But their thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both of us make flying leaps over large portions of the sentences uttered and we give attention only to substantive starting points, turning points, and conclusions here and there. All the rest, 'substantive' and separately intelligible as it may potentially be, actually serves only as so much transitive material. It is internodal consciousness, giving us the sense of continuity, but having no significance apart from its mere gap-filling function. The children probably feel no gap when through a lot of unintelligible words they are swiftly carried to a familiar and intelligible terminus.
[239] Not literally heard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceive shocks and jars that can be felt, even when so slight as to be unnoticed by those who can hear.
[240] Quoted by Samuel Porter: 'Is Thought possible without Language?' in Princeton Review, 57th year, pp. 108-12 (Jan. 1881?). Cf. also W. W. Ireland: The Blot upon the Brain (1886), Paper x, part ii; G. J. Romanes: Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 81-83, and references therein made. Prof. Max Müller gives a very complete history of this controversy in pp. 30-64 of his 'Science of Thought' (1887). His own view is that Thought and Speech are inseparable; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of symbolism or even mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the wordless summary glimpses which we have of systems of relation and direction.
[241] Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem iv, chapter 5. Compare also Victor Egger: La Parole Intérieure (Paris, 1881), chap. vi.
[242] If but one person sees an apparition we consider it his private hallucination. If more than one, we begin to think it may be a real external presence.
[243] Revue Philosophique, vol. xxi, p. 671.
[244] Quoted from the Therapeutic Gazette, by the N. Y. Semi-weekly Evening Post for Nov. 2, 1886.