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display of fact or logic, though they may nevertheless be extremely effective in determining action.

(4) The expression and communication of emotion. Few of us have failed at some time to be deeply moved by the sensuous rhythms of skillfully manipulated words. Language can be used to play upon us as though we were an organ of many stops and so indeed we are. The music of words stops-and varies from language to language, and is no doubt both an index and a cause of some of the differences in the feeling life of the peoples of different cultures.

(5) Ritual uses. Certain phrases and expressions of the language become entangled in the meshes of great institutions, so that they can never be used without at least an oblique reference to their primary institutional associations. Certain words have played important rôles in the formulas of religion, the law, philosophy, science, popular thought, until about many of them there hovers an aura of sanctity and importance that affects all their uses. Even when these words are almost entirely devoid of objective content they are heavily weighted with traditional meanings, until it is hardly possible cavalierly to sweep them aside in favor of new terms as men's ideas change. Thus words like God, justice, experience, cause, atom, gain new life with every alteration of man's views, and wax strong instead of dying as the old interpretations decay and disappear. They have taken their places among the formulas of our life, and do not lightly to give way to competitors which claim the right to displace them.

(6) The labeling of things. It is unwieldy always to be under the necessity of having a thing specifically before us when we think of it, and so we quickly fall into the habit of using the names of things as surrogates for the things themselves. We are often vaguely uneasy when we cannot give an object a name, or otherwise place it in a terminological system. This function of language should not be under

*The author once attended a performance of Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped with a friend, who was extremely dissatisfied with everything that occurred on the stage, until finally he settled back with a sigh of relief, and was heard to mutter, "Oh, I see, he's a masochist."

estimated. Often only by naming things systematically can they be understood and controlled.

(7) The abbreviation of thinking. Words in many instances accelerate the processes of analysis and abstraction, and in some cases make these activities possible. This is one of the chief functions of symbols in mathematics. A good symbolism greatly assists even simple operations-thus it is much more difficult to multiply XLVIII by XXXIV than to find the product of 48 times 34. In the next section the question of the relation between language and thinking will be very briefly discussed.

(8) The accumulation and storing of the social heritage. Thanks to the existence of language, many otherwise quickly forgotten aspects of the social heritage are treasured up for the pleasure and advantage of times to come. This was the case even before the invention of writing. Every primitive group has a large body of lore and wisdom which is handed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next. This material to a considerable extent supplements the customs and habits of the group by providing a setting and rationale for the prevailing behaviors.

The dependence of a complex culture like our own upon the transmission of its accumulated knowledge and attitudes is thoroughgoing, and so extensive use is made of the verbal and written language apparatus in this connection. The accumulations of data in our culture have become so overwhelming as regards both amount and variety that we have been forced to devise means of keeping it under control. We have card catalogues, indexes, technical periodicals listing, digesting, and reviewing the materials bearing upon specified topics, bibliographies, guides to literature, encyclopedias, etc. It sometimes seems as though we were doomed to be swamped either in our indexes or in our inaccessible data.

Language and thinking 15

In order to prove that language affects thought, it is necessary to show that the relations of the symbols to each other-whether by way of their pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary connections, structural relations, or linguistic

overtones-are of influence in determining the result. For conclusive evidence on this point, one need not search further than the common word-association experiment, in which the subject is presented with a list of words, one by one, and requested to respond to each word by uttering the first word that comes to mind. Those responses are linguistically determined whose relations to the stimulus word would be significantly altered were both words translated into a foreign language. Thus if the response given to the stimulus true is the word false, the connection is probably not dependent on the language employed (since in French the two words in question would be vrai and faux, which are connected essentially as their English equivalents); but if the response to true were blue, the connection would be at least in part linguistically determined (since the corresponding French words, vrai and bleu, are not connected in the same manner as their English equivalents-i.e., as rhymes).* The comparative study of a considerable number of wordassociations according to this plan would speedily set at rest any doubt as to the importance of linguistic relations in determining the course of our mental operations.

A comparative study of the idioms and other peculiarities of two or more languages would lead to the same conclusion, as would a close investigation of the styles peculiar, not to individuals, but to all persons habitually using a given language or better still, perhaps, a study of the styles achieved when individuals attempt to write in a foreign language. Care would have to be exercised in making these studies to approach each problem from the symbolic side, rather than from the meaning side, or else the influence of culture in general upon thought would have been investigated, instead of the influence of language.

While it cannot be denied that language greatly influences thought, it seems a mistake to define thought entirely in terms of language. To do this is to ignore the fact that thinking is mainly a matter of the feelings-i.e., it is our name for the internal redistributions that take place under * In addition, the linguistically determined phrase "true blue" undoubtedly influences the course of association.

the pressure of our affective states. Only a few of these refocussings of experience occur at all explicitly out in the open, where they can be consciously followed, and it therefore seems highly unlikely that our language habits play any very large part in determining their outcomes. Language habits can hardly help us in connection with processes which are absolutely unnamed, and perhaps even unnameable. Much thinking, that is to say, goes on far below the level of our language adjustments, though these adjustments are undeniably effective in determining many of our thought

processes.

REFERENCES

1 The writer is indebted to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1923), for the clarification of his views, although his thoughts were running in the channels indicated in this section before he became acquainted with this book.

2 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1.

G. J. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man; Origin of human faculty (N. Y., Appleton, 1889), 157–193.

4 Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar (London, Allen and Unwin, 1924), esp. Chaps. 1-4, is extremely suggestive in this connection, although the author has not entirely freed himself from the formal approach.

5

Cf. Jespersen on formulas and free expressions, 18-24.

Cf. H. L. Mencken, The American Language, An inquiry into the development

of English in the United States (2 ed., N. Y., Knopt, 1921).

7 For information respecting this and other similar dialects, see Otto Jespersen, Language, Its nature, development, and origin (London, Allen and Unwin, 1922), 216-236, and the references given therein.

8 R. R. Marett, Anthropology (Home Univ. Library), 145.

Bronislaw Malinowski, The problem of meaning in primitive languages-in

the appendix to Ogden and Richards, 456-457.

10 Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 39.

11 A. M. Hocart, The "psychological interpretation of language," Brit. Journ. of Psych., Vol. 5 (1912–13), 267–279; the quotations are from 276 and 271.

12 Edward Sapir, Language, An introduction to the study of speech (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 123–125.

13 See A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology (N. Y., Harcourt, Brace, 1923), 95-100.

14 William Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (2 ed., London, Allen and Unwin, 1919), 119.

15 See the symposium on this topic in Brit. Journ. of Psych., Vol. 11 (1921–2), 55-104.

Chapter XII

VALUES

Valuation a universal human phenomenon

Preference and choice are intrinsic features of the human situation. We are continually engaged in distinguishing the good from the bad, the better from the worse, the pleasant from the unpleasant, the profitable from the barren, the significant from the trivial. Nor do we remain neutral and unconcerned after these distinctions have been made, for we are always welcoming one thing and rejecting another, searching for some objects and ignoring or evading others, striving and avoiding, grasping and releasing, hoping and fearing, until it would seem as though we were incurably concerned with moral problems.

Although it is easy to show that different persons seldom admire and choose exactly the same things, and even that their reasons for preferring the same object are often surprisingly unlike or even contradictory, we are easily tempted to believe that our valuations possess objective validity, and to credit those who fail to perceive them with mental or moral obtuseness. This picture is beautiful; that man is a scoundrel; oysters are unpalatable; prize fighting is brutal; Woodrow Wilson was a great man. Such a view of the nature of values can come very close to the erection of ourselves and our whims into standards for the measurement of all creation. It is desirable to understand why it is that we tend to have this feeling respecting our judgments of value, so that we may be helped thereby to determine its validity. To that end an analysis of the bases of our evaluations is undertaken.

The bases of evaluation

All value estimations depend upon the combination and interaction of at least three factors, which we may call im

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