Owen — Revision of Pronouns. 131 



Manner, too, is the subject of egocentric distinction. To il- 

 lustrate, noting your method of tying a knot, I remark that "I 

 cannot do it so (in the manner shown by you) ; I do it thus 

 (in the manner now shoT\Ti by me or yelt to be showTi)''. 



Family relation is commonly viewed in the egocentric aspect, 

 "^Tather," as used by me, standing for one who may be to you a 

 nephew, cousin, etc., or an entire stranger. 



Professional status is also at times a matter of purely ego- 

 centric determination, my lawyer being, it may be, your doctor 

 or your spiritual adviser. 



To call upon the science of linguistics to present completely 

 the egocentric categories, plainly would be unfair and useless, 

 particularly since at present even the simpler categories are far 

 from being adequately understood. As a merely interesting 

 suggestion of the extent to which the egocentric tendency enters 

 idea-formation, I offer an illustration from what may be called 

 the social category. In a society made up of a ruling class (in- 

 cluding, say, nobility, clergy, and military), a middle or bour- 

 geois class, and a laboring class, the prestige of the bourgeois 

 depends entirely upon the class view-point from which he is 

 regarded. Suppose now that you are a noble and I a laborer. 

 As used by me the epithet "bourgeois" is an expression of es*^ 

 teem, while in the usage of yourself it is an expression of con- 

 tempt. In fact, in certain styles in French, the designation 

 "bourgeois" (or middle class) has discarded the absolute value 

 and adopted that of "above me" or "beneath me," according to 

 the social status of the speaker. 



THEIR SENTENTIAL EANK. 



Assuming my reader to be no less weary than myself of 

 verifying in actual usage the obvious ability to use any idea 

 as any element of thought, I confine myself to the merest sug- 

 gestions. Preferring an epistolary illustration, because it al- 

 lows a variation in time which does not occur in oral thought- 

 exchange, and using poetic phraseology, to avoid an embarrass- 

 ing auxiliary, I imagine that you write me in the evening a note 

 as follows: "Came you here today?" My answer, dated the 

 following day, is this : "I went there yesterday." In this ex- 



