Hamilton's Philosophy.' Sir William Hamilton held that the concept must always precede the name1, and he defends his opinion by very telling illustrations. 'Language,' he says 2, 'is the attribution of signs to our cognitions of things. But as a cognition must have been already there, before it could receive a sign, consequently, that knowledge which is denoted by the formation and application of a word must have preceded the symbol which denotes it.' 'A sign,' however, is necessary to give stability to our intellectual progess, to establish each step in our advance as a new starting-point for our advance to another beyond. A country may be overrun by an armed host, but it is only conquered by the establishment of fortresses. Words are the fortresses of thought. They enable us to realise our dominion. over what we have already overrun in thought; to make every intellectual conquest the basis of operations for others still beyond.' This is a most happy illustration, and the next is happier still. 'You have all heard of the process of tunnelling-of tunnelling through a sand-bank. In this operation it is impossible to succeed, unless every foot, nay almost every inch in our progress, be secured by an arch of masonry, before we attempt the excavation of another. Now, language is to the mind precisely 1 'Prétendre que dans l'esprit humain la notion de la chose signifiée ne précède pas celle du signe, que l'homme spontané crée le symbole avant de savoir bien précisément ce qu'il y met, c'eût été vraisemblablement parler une langue inintelligible en un temps où l'on était convaincu que l'esprit humain avait toujours procédé selon les règles tracées par l'abbé de Condillac.'-Renan, Étude d'histoire religieuse, p. 11. * Examination, p. 379. what the arch is to the tunnel. The power of thinking and the power of excavation are not dependent on the words in the one case, or the mason-work in the other; but without these subsidiaries, neither process could be carried on beyond its rudimentary commencement. Though, therefore, we allow that every movement forward in language must be determined by an antecedent movement forward in thought; still, unless thought be accompanied at each point of its evolution by a corresponding evolution of language, its further development is arrested.' Nothing could be a more accurate and a more telling simile of the progress of thought and language than the progress of excavation and arching in a tunnel through a sand-bank. It is extremely difficult to express the simultaneity of these two acts. The author of the Khandogya Upanishad, for instance, did his best. 'What a man thinks with his mind,' he says, 'that he speaks with his tongue, so says the Sruti (revelation).' He uses the present in both sentences, yet the commentator spoils all by interpreting: the employment of the tongue is preceded by the mind.' We might well be satisfied with this almost contemporaneous progress of thinking and naming, as here described by Sir W. Hamilton. But, curiously enough, Mill, in criticising Sir W. Hamilton, is not satisfied, but somewhat suddenly insists that concepts, or what are called general notions, cannot be formed without the aid of signs1; nay, he makes another step in advance by seeing that these signs need not be conventional or artificial, but are natural signs. He now concludes that we think by means of ideas of concrete phenomena, such as are presented in experience or represented in imagination, and by means of names, which being in a peculiar manner associated with certain elements of the concrete images, arrest our attention on those elements. And again: To say that we think by means of concepts, is only a circuitous and obscure way of saying that we think by means of general or class names 1,' We thus see that Mill, when once brought face to face with philosophers who hold that concepts come first and names afterwards, that we can think in concepts, though it is easier to think in names, goes far beyond his own original position, and is in fact in possession of the whole truth when he comes to perceive that names are natural, and not artificial signs. If he had seen that nomen, name, is the result of notio, which is the act, though often taken for the result of the act, like conceptio for conceptum, he would have understood in what sense the act and the result may be distinguished as well as identified. An understanding of the true relation between notio and nomen would likewise have supplied the best foundation for Sir W. Hamilton's somewhat obscure theory of the identity of Conceptualism and Nominalism which so often rouses Mill's anger, and yet is not very different from his own final view that we think by means of ideas and of names. Dr. Mansel, with whom I discussed these questions many years ago, though in other respects Mansel. a sworn follower of Sir W. Hamilton, goes beyond 1 P. 387. him in his conviction that language is simply and altogether inseparable from thought. Thus he writes1: 'That language (verbal or other) is inseparable from thought is rendered morally certain by the impossibility under which we labour of forming universal notions without the aid of voluntary symbols. The instant we advance beyond the perception of that which is present now and here, our knowledge can be only representative; as soon as we rise above the individual object, our representative sign must be arbitrary. The phantasms of imagination may have more or less resemblance to the objects of sense; but they bear that resemblance solely by virtue of being, like those objects themselves, individual. I may recall to mind, with more or less vividness, the features of an absent friend, as I may paint his portrait with more or less accuracy; but the likeness in neither case ceases to be the individual representation of an individual man. But my conception of a man in general can attain universality only by surrendering resemblance; it becomes the representative of all mankind only because it has no special likeness to any one man.' And in another place he says: 'As a matter of necessity men must think by symbols; as a matter of fact, they do think by language 2' But we have now to ask the question, which to my mind is most perplexing, How was it possible that not one of those philosophers, not even those who fully recognised the inseparableness of language and thought, should have seen that this discovery of the 1 Letters, Lectures, and Reviews, p. 8. What follows from the inseparablelanguage and ness of thought. true relation of language and thought, or what may truly be called this revelation of the oneness of thought and language, means a complete revolution in philosophy? How is it, that what may be called public opinion among philosophers has always shrunk from freely recognising this discovery, and that we still hear the same halting and hesitating judgments, the same weak and wavering objections which have been disposed of again and again by the students of the Science of Language, and yet rise to the surface again and again? Answers to objections to the insepara bleness of words and concepts. I thought that in my previous writings I had answered all objections that could possibly be raised against the fundamental tenet of the Science of Language, namely, the inseparableness of thought and speech. A few remonstrances, however, have lately been addressed to me again from quarters where I should least have expected them, and I feel obliged therefore, before proceeding further, to repeat once more a part at least of what I have so often said before. I have freely and fully admitted that thoughts may exist without words, because other Other signs signs may take the place of words. Five besides words. fingers or five lines are quite sufficient to convey the concept of five, between people speaking different languages, possibly between deaf and dumb people who speak no language at all. Thus the hand may become the sign for five, both hands for ten, hands and feet for twenty. Three fingers are as good as three strokes, three strokes are as good as three clicks of the tongue, three clicks of the tongue are as good as the sound three, or trois, |