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LANGUAGE STUDY AND LANGUAGE PSYCHOLOGY 379 



as a whole. It is as much an entity as an icicle, the perception of which 

 need not involve the thought of water, much less of hydrogen and 

 oxygen. Qua analyst, I may divide amabo in one way for its syllables, 

 and in another way for its root and stem, its tense and person signs. 

 Qua hearer or reader, the unit is amabo, which I think I can mentally 

 realize in rather less time than I realize " I shall love." My eye may see 

 ama- sooner than it does -bo, but my consciousness appropriates them 

 simultaneously. It is more probable that my eye sees amabo all at 

 once, just as it is immediately aware of a flag, which it may then analyze 

 as a tricolor, and last as three colored stripes. It requires no special 

 act of enumeration to be conscious that a group is composed of five or 

 six individuals, but the group is probably first to rouse my attention and 

 my perception of it is a synthetic perception. 



It was only the little lad learning to read from a hornbook at his 

 grannam's knee that ever passed through Spencer's struggles with " the 

 black horse," for it is an utter fallacy that " black horse " and " cheval 

 noir " are, in speech, ever broken up into " black " [here ponder on 

 " black "] and " horse " ; " cheval " and " noir." And we shall not be 

 entirely brutal if we disregard the distress of an American critic of 

 style who thinks of " bay-horse " when he hears " cheval " and is pained 

 to have his impression corrected by " noir " : What an agony " the [bay] 

 horse is black " must cause him. Nor need we make a prolix appeal to 

 grammar or psychology to prove that " black horse " is, in the evolu- 

 tion of speech, shorthand for " the horse is black." This probably did 

 not trouble our savage forefathers any more than it troubled the 

 Eomans, to whom either niger equus or equus niger alike meant " black 

 horse " and " the horse is black." 



Equally unhappy is Professor Hill's analysis of the Caesar sentence 

 cut at random after the manner of the sortes Virgiliance. In its own 

 context the sentence stands in the middle of a paragraph, and the reader 

 coming upon it knows that Sextius has jumped from a sick-bed to rush 

 with a few followers upon the attacking foe: paulisper una proelium 

 sustinent . . . relinquit animus Sextium . . . gravibus acceptis vulner- 

 ibus. To me also it seems incredible that the thought that formed itself 

 in Caesar's mind was anything like " Leaves it the soul Sextius by or to 

 grave by or to received by or to wounds." The thought of Caesar was in 

 three phrases, " for-a-little together the struggle they endure . . . swoons 

 Sextius . . . from dangerous received wounds." It can not be said too 

 often that for the understanding the phrase is the unit. Ay, whether 

 the medium of interpretation be the ear or the eye, the hearer or 

 reader is simultaneously conscious of the whole phrase. When I say 

 hearer or reader I mean, of course, Caesar's predetermined hearer or 

 reader, not the tiny learner spelling out r-e-l, etc., nor the older dullard 

 who calls out words like sums standing in a column to be added. There 

 is a trick of rhetoric, to be sure, in Caesar's chiastic order, meant to 



