THE DEVELOPING CONCEPT AND ITS FUNCTIONS 193 



ual and relatively automatic act, and where the act has been 

 undertaken with no conscious purpose. In such a case the ap 

 parent purposelessness of the act is largely a matter of attention. 

 Once failure attracts attention to the outcome, the potential 

 purpose of the act is at once recognized the failure, in other 

 words, is in effect a failure of definite expectation. This being 

 so, it is at once attributable to some more or less definite factor 

 in the preceding conduct. For it must be recognized that this 

 conduct, however simple it may seem if regarded as a mere 

 objective act (for instance the throwing of the ball at a critical 

 point in a baseball game), is as a piece of conduct exceedingly 

 complex, and capable of many possibilities of modification. 

 Moreover, where conduct is controlled by conceptual thought, 

 it is never directed by a single concept. Just as the import of a 

 concept is expressible only in terms of indirect conditionalities 

 of conduct, so the nature of a given act its meaning for the 

 individual is expressible only in terms of an organized group of 

 concepts. Thus the modification of the act requisite to satisfy 

 the purpose for \vhich it has been undertaken involves a change 

 in this initiatory group of concepts, the specific nature of the 

 change demanded depending on the specific nature of the failure 

 in expectation. 



A further advantage of the general concept in the control of 

 conduct is to be found in its greater communicability as compared 

 with the concept of the simple object. It is notorious that the 

 development of language, other than that merely expressive of 

 emotion, proceeds pari passu with the growth of general concepts. 

 Imagine the futility of attempting to communicate the meaning 

 of an unclassified, unindividualized object, or the paucity of a 

 language made up wholly of proper names and interjections. 

 Such a state of affairs temporarily exists in every child s life, 

 when it is just beginning to talk. But obviously where speech 

 has progressed no further than the mere attaching of names to 

 different objects there can be little communication of meaning. 

 What makes possible an effective communication is an apprecia- 

 14 



