POWELL] PHILOLOGY CLVII 



tences. There will be medals to define the asserters for the 

 purpose of distinguishing- affirmation and negation and all 

 conditional modes of assertion; these modals will be words, 

 phrases or sentences. There will be adverbs to define tlie 

 objects; these also will be words, phrases, and sentences. We 

 may conjecture that to such a stage the parts of speech will be 

 differentiated, guided by the motive for economy in thought 

 and expression. 



SEMA.TOLOGY 



Sematologv is the science of the signification of oral words 

 and sentences. In considering this subject it becomes neces- 

 sary not only to consider the significance of words, bnt also 

 the development of the significance. "Woi'ds are signs of 

 ideas," or, as we say, words are signs of concepts. It is funda- 

 mental that we recognize bodies as such by their properties, 

 and cognize properties as good or evil for our purposes as 

 qualities. The nascent mind speedily learns by experience 

 that diff'erent properties inhere in the same body. The mind 

 thus posits or implicates the existence of one property when it 

 cognizes another. The bodies of the world are cognized by the 

 use of the five senses, every one of which primarily deals with 

 a special property. The senses in highly developed man, 

 though fundamentally devoted to a distinct property, have 

 become highly vicarious, so that one sense seems to cognize 

 all of the properties. The origin of this vicarious action of the 

 senses is founded on the concomitaucy of propei'ties, for in 

 cognizing a property we recognize other properties. In the 

 developed mind every act of cognition is also an act of recog- 

 nition ; it is an act of cognizing one property and of recognizing 

 others. This maybe stated in another way: When we cognize a 

 property we implicate the existence of other properties. All this 

 has been set forth in another volume, but it requii'es restating 

 here that we may properly understand how the meanings of 

 words are produced. 



The first words were calls, then came demonstratives, then 

 adjectives of quality followed. Things were called by such 

 names as "the sweet," "the bitter," "the high," "the low," "the 

 fierce," "the gentle" — so the qualities were parceled out to 



