422 FROM BRUTE 



it becomes more analytic, to be able to express them: 

 and inversely those who are born to be the heirs of a 

 highly analytic language, must needs learn to think up to 

 it, to observe and distinguish all the relations of objects, 

 for which they find the expressions already formed, so 

 that we have an instructor for the thinking powers in that 

 speech, which we are apt to deem no more than their 

 handmaid and minister." 



Leibnitz, in an important passage concerning the 

 symbolical nature of many of our processes of cogni- 

 tion or thought, was the first to call attention to a kind 

 of fusion or identification of Thought and Word, which is 

 habitually taking place in our ordinary mental processes. 

 General and abstract names or words are often, as 

 Thomson says,* " Symbols both to speaker and hearer, 

 the full and exact meaning of which neither of them stops 

 to unfold, any more than they regularly reflect that every 

 sovereign which passes through their hands is equivalent 

 to 240 pence. Such words as the state, happiness, 

 liberty, creation, are too pregnant with meaning for us 

 to suppose that we realize their full sense every time wo 

 read or pronounce them. If we attend to the working of 

 our own minds, we shall find that each word may be 

 used, and in its proper place and sense, though perhaps 

 none or few of its attributes are present to us at the 

 moment." 



The process of Conception by which such general or 

 Abstract Notions are arrived at, is only possible by a prior 

 use of Language ; and the marking of these com]3lex 

 notions by Words subsequently to be used as ' symbols ' or 

 counters equivalent to such Notions, is a fusion into one 

 of cerebral Thought-processes and Word-processes- -the 

 Word in future is the Thought. 



* Lcc. cit. p. 36. 



