There is, however, a difference between the way in which these results look to us now, and the way in which they originally organised themselves. The child who begins to learn a language in the lesson-books and the grammars finds the members of it all, as it were, upon one level: adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and verbs confront him with the same authority and rank. This appearance is deceptive: it may easily suggest that the words are not members in an organism, in and out of which they have developed. And this organism of thought has its individual types, expressed in the great families of human speech. Its generic form (as drawn out in a logical system) appears in different grades, with different degrees of fullness, in Altaic and Dravidian from what it does in Malay, or in Chinese, and these again have their own predominant categories as compared with those used in the American or African languages, or in Indo-Germanic and Semitic. If the Altaic languages e. g. are wanting in the verb proper, and manage with possessive suffixes and nouns; if the Semitic tenses display a poverty which contrasts with their wealth in Greek; and yet each group performs its function, we may infer that each speech has a complete organism, though it does not bring all its parts to adequate expression. All this distinction of 'parts of speech,' of forms, prefixes and suffixes, &c., is part of the life of language, embodying in more or less distinct organs the organisation of thought in the individual form it reached in that speech-type. Thus in Chinese there are strictly speaking no isolated words, nouns, or verbs: there are only abstract parts of a concrete sentence; and grammar in Chinese therefore has no accidence (no declensions, conjugations, &c.) but only syntax. Yet it is these abstract fragments which exist and seem to have independence and inherent meaning: whereas the unity in which they cohere to form a concrete context is the fleeting sentence of the moment. At the opposite extreme, again, the Mexican family of languages tend to incorporate relations to subject and object with the verb, in such a degree that the word almost becomes a sentence. Facts like these suggest that a science of the forms of language, in proportion as it generalises, tends to approach logic; and that logic will have a converse tendency to elevate to an unduly typical position the grammatical form of the languages with which the logician is best acquainted.
If these points were remembered, there would be less absurd employment of the grammatical categories of one group of languages to systematise another. Greek and Sanscrit grammar plays sad havoc with the organism of a Semitic tongue, and it is not less out of place as a schema for delineating e. g. South African dialect. Isolated words even in an Indo-Germanic language—even, we may say, in such a language as English—are still fractional, and do not get life and individuality except in their context. And it needs but a little experience to show how various that individuality may be. It needs perhaps still more meditation to realise that it is in this individuality that the real life of language lies: in the words said and written to express the thought of a personality. But, first, because language has its material and mechanical side, and secondly, because in civilised countries it further acquires a more stereotyped mechanism in written and printed language, its parts tend to gain a pseudo-independence. It is one aim of a philosophical dictionary to restore the organic interconnexion which in the mere sequence of vocables in juxtaposition is apt to be lost. What we call the meaning of a word is something which carries us beyond that mere word,—which restores the connexions which have been broken off and forgotten. In the form of a dictionary, of course, this can only be done piece-meal: but if each piece is done thoroughly, it can hardly fail to bring out certain comprehensive connexions. The mere word seems a simple thing; and one is at first disposed to get rid of its difficulty by substituting a so-called synonym. But a deeper study reveals the fact that an exact synonym is a thing one can no more find than two peas which are absolutely indistinguishable. A synonym is only a practical pis aller. But every word is really as it were a point in an infinitely complex organic life, with its essence or meaning determined by the currents to and fro which meet in it.
Words as we see them prima facie in a printed page do look separate entities. They stand, one here and another there, in a quasi-extension, with marks of direction and connexion pointing from one to another, but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more solid points which are represented by nouns and verbs, or names of substances, actions, and attributes. Results, as they are, of that practical analysis which the need of writing down language has led to, they are treated as complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into certain temporary connexions. But this is an illusion which, because a thing changes its relationships, assumes that it can exist out of all relationships whatever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction, isolated from its context. But amid these contexts there are certain similarities: identical elements are detected: and these identical elements are the common names of language, the terms of general significance. In all cases, however, what an utterance of language describes or expresses is a definite individual event or scene, conceived as a concrete of several parts. Each separate vocable is a contribution to the total: a step towards the real redintegration of the whole out of its several parts. But the total itself—the content of fact in any single sentence—is only an abstraction,—a part of the universe which human interest and need have isolated from the comprehensive scope of things. Thus, in two degrees, we may say, the picture produced in the sentence falls short of the truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of the cutting is dependent on that abstraction, and relative to it. But—as in a given group of speech, the same sets of circumstances will naturally be selected, and tend to recur again and again,—the terms which describe them will acquire a certain association with the objects, and will come to be called the common names of these agents, acts, and qualities. They denote or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however in certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety and totality of nature.
In this product of intellectual movement above the limits of sensation we have the 'representation'[12] as Hegel calls it, on which the Understanding turns its forces. We have one product of the organic whole of thought taken by itself as if it were independent, set forth as a settled nucleus for further acquaintance: and this one point discussed fully and with precision, elaborated in all detail and consequence, to the neglect of its context, and the necessary limitations involved in the notion. The process of name-giving may illustrate this tendency in human thought to touch its objects only in one point. The names given to objects do not embrace the whole nature of these objects, but give expression only to one striking feature in them. Thus the name of the horse points it out as 'the strong' or 'the swift': the moon is 'the measurer' or 'the shining one'; and so in all cases. The object as expressed in these names is viewed from one aspect, or in one point: and the name, which originally at least corresponds to the conception, meets the object, properly speaking, on that side only, or in that relation. The object is not studied in its own nature, and in its total world, but as it specially enters the range of human interest, and serves human utilities. One can at least guess why it should be so: why a name should, in logical language, express an 'accidens' and not the 'essentia' of the object. For the investigation of primitive language seems to show that words, as we know them in separate existence, are a secondary formation: and that the first significant speech was an utterance intended to describe a scene, an action, a phenomenon, or complex of event. In point of time, the primary fact of language is an agglomeration or aggregate,—we may call it either word or clause (λόγος in short)—which describes in one breath a highly individualised action or phenomenon. The spirit or unifying principle in this group might be the accent. Such a word-group denotes a highly specialised form of being: and if we call it a word, we may say that the earliest words, and the words of barbarous tribes, are ingeniously special.[13] But it would be more correct to say, that in such a group the elements of the scene enter only from a single aspect or in a single relation. Accordingly when disintegration begins, the result is as follows. The elements of the group, having now become independent words held together by the syntax of the sentence, are adopted to denote the several objects which entered into the total phenomenon. But these words, or fragments of the word-group, 'represent' the objects in question from a certain point of view, and not in their integrity. The names of things therefore touch them only in one point, and express only one aspect. And thus, although different names will arise for the same thing, as it enters into different groups, in each case the name will connote only a general attribute and not the nature of the thing. These names are in the Hegelian sense of the term 'abstract.' In popular phraseology, they are only 'signs' of things: i. e. not 'symbols' (though they may have been in some cases symbolic in origin), for in a symbol there is a natural correspondence or sensible analogy to the thing symbolised, but something 'instituted,' due to an 'understanding' or convention.
[1] See vol. ii. p. 190, (Logic, § 102).
[2] See Max Müller in Mind, vol. i. 345.
[3] Pure number is ἀριθμὸς μοναδικός: applied number is αριθμὸς φυσικὸς or σωματικός. Aristotle, Metaph. N. 5, speaks of αριθμὸς πύρινος ἤ γήϊνος. But this is only Greek idiom: as we say 'Greek history' instead of 'History of Greece:' or vice versa, when we translate Populus Romanus by 'people of Rome.' Aristotle is speaking of 'proportions' or 'amounts' of fire or earth in the compounds of these elements.
[4] See L. Geiger, Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft (vol. i. p. 380). And Gabelenz 'Die melanesischen Sprachen' in the Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (VIII), 1861, pp. 89-91.