A THINKING MACHINE. 60 1 



resenting the audible and pronounceable name Grip, or the letters G, 

 R, I, P, and the cell or cells which have to do with the idea dog, and 

 also, I imagine, with the name dog : for both the word Grip is inti- 

 mately connected in my mind with the words " my dog," and the idea 

 Grip is intimately connected in that same humble empirical subjectiv- 

 ity with the idea of dog in general. In fact, I can't think of Grip 

 without thinking at once of his visible appearance, his personal name, 

 and his essential dogginess of name and nature. Grip is to me a sym- 

 bol, primarily, of some dog or other, and secondarily or more particu- 

 larly of my dog. But whether Grip and Ponto are arranged and 

 pigeon-holed in cells next door to one another, as being both by name 

 dogs ; or whether one is arranged under G, as in a dictionary, and the 

 other under P (just after Pontius, for example, and just before Pon- 

 tus Euxinus, both of which form distinct component elements of my 

 verbal memory), I can not imagine. At each step in the effort to 

 realize this wooden sort of localization, is it not clear that we are sink- 

 ing deeper and deeper into a bottomless slough of utter inconceiva- 

 bility ? 



Once more (and this shall be my last attempt to point out the ab- 

 surdity of the extreme cell-theory), what are we to make of the case 

 of a man who knows more than one language ? Take for example the 

 word chien. Here, in one direction, all the associations and connec- 

 tions of idea are exactly the same as in the word dog. If I happen to 

 be speaking English I say, " It's a dog" ; if I happen to be speaking 

 French, I say, ^'Cest lai chien,''^ and in both cases with just about 

 the same idea in my mind. The picture called up by the one word 

 is exactly the same, in most respects, as the picture called up by 

 the other. Yet not precisely. If I write Paris, so, the notion im- 

 mediately aroused in the reader's mind is that of a white and glar- 

 ing brand-new city across the Channel where we all go to waste our 

 hard-earned money at periodical intervals. But if in the preceding 

 line I had happened to talk of Priam and Helen, the idea called up by 

 that self-same combination of one capital letter and four small ones 

 would have been a wholly different one, of an idyllic shepherd, as in 

 Tennyson's " Enone," or of a handsome scamp as in (Homer's) " Iliad." 

 If I write " baker," everybody knows I mean the man who supplies hot 

 rolls for breakfast ; but if I write " Baker," everybody is aware that 

 I allude to Sir Samuel or to his brother the Pasha. Now, this alterna- 

 tive possibility is even worse in the case of chien. For, if I am talking 

 French, the sight of a particular animal which usually calls up to my 

 lips the word " dog," calls up instead the totally different word chien. 

 And if the subject in hand is philology, while dog immediately sug- 

 gests to me the curious practical falling out of our language of the 

 primitive word hund, hound, now only applied to a special class of 

 dogs, and the substitution for it of a Scandinavian and Dutch root not 

 found in Anglo-Saxon, chien immediately suggests to me its ultimate 



