Language and thinking.15

It must be acknowledged that language affects thought if it can be shown that the relations of the symbols to each otherwhether 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 wordassociation experiment, in which the subject is presented with a list of words, one by one, and requested to respond with the first word that comes to mind. It may be taken as an axiom that 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 word-associations 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 no doubt 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, 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 the pressure of our affective states. But 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. Lan

guage 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 (London, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 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.

3 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.

6 Cf. H. L. Mencken, The American Language, An inquiry into the development of English in the United States (2 ed., N. Y., Knopf, 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.

9 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 12

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 letting go, hoping and fearing, until it would seem as though we were incurably concerned with moral problems.

Although it is easy to show that we seldom admire and choose exactly the same things, and even that our reasons for preferring the same object are often surprisingly unlike, if not opposed, we are often strongly 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, for 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 estimations of worth appear to depend upon the combination and interaction of three factors, which we may call impulse, group expectation, and natural fact. Although for purposes of judgment and control it is frequently proper and desirable to consider some one of these factors in isolation from its fellows, the thorough analysis of actual value-situations will seldom if ever fail to show all three factors present and active in determining the course of events.

(1) Impulse. By impulse is meant the momentum or drive of reflex arcs under stimulation. As we have seen, the reflex arc functions as a unit, so that stimulation of sensory endings causes energy transformations which push straight through to muscular or glandular action (besides stimulating other reflex patterns which behave in similar fashion). This process is not instantaneous, as the speed of conduction of the nervous impulse along the nerves in certain instances is somewhere near 400 feet per second, the reaction time to a light stimulus under controlled laboratory conditions being something under one-fifth of a second. Thus time is allowed for conflicts and cooperation between impulses, for a certain amount of organic facilitation or inhibition of even the most direct reflex responses.

In the beginning impulses are apparently perfectly objective occurrences, needing no justification and being given none, so transparently right and proper are the demands they lay upon the organism.

Every creature likes its own ways, and takes to the following of them as a matter of course. . It is not for the sake of their utility that they are followed, but because at the moment of following them we feel that it is the only appropriate and natural thing to do. . . . To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.1

How, then, do we learn that some of our impulses are wrong, undesirable, unesthetic, tasteless-in short, possess negative value? How do we ever acquire moral normality? For normality itself is a norm or standard which can be achieved only by training, by the development of habituations and inhibitions not all of which are especially "natural" to the individual considered in his primitive isolation.

The course of individual experience considered artificially quite apart from all other factors would no doubt furnish a certain leverage for the development of notions of value. For one thing, the clash of competing impulses would not fail to raise questions of comparative worth, as when hunger and drowsiness, curiosity and fear, affection and selfishness, present simultaneous claims for attention and action. Or acquaintance with the unhappy results of previously uncriticized responses might lead to a realignment of impulses, while the organization of responses in the course of development in certain cases would lead us retrospectively to judge our past conduct. But as life is lived two other fairly distinct factors are to be found at work in the value situation.

(2) Group expectations. Every group is engaged in certain enterprises in which its members are expected to participate, and every group has elaborated certain attitudes which are held to be objectively descriptive of the things to which they are applied. All the possible ways of performing a given act are never exhibited by a group; and all the possible attitudes towards a given bit of conduct are never enunciated. Always there is selection and bias, usually unconscious, in favor of certain things as against others. This is the social phase of the value situation; just as the initial uninhibited impulses of the individual are taken for granted until some special occasion for questioning them arises, so the folkways of the group govern its conduct as by natural right. And the inertia of the group forms far surpasses that of the reflex arcs, even after well-formed habits have made their appearance, for they can be changed only by altering the habits of many men. Long after the conditions that gave them birth and relevance have passed into the limbo of decay, a society will be found going through the motions pertinent to the former arrangements or perpetuating cherished though moribund conceptions.

Into this world of folkways with its already elaborated valuesystems the individual is expected to fit. Indeed, he himself is already evaluated and placed, in considerable measure, before he ever appears on the scene. Even if the members of his group attached no worth whatever to anything they were engaged in doing a ridiculous assumption-the mere fact of entrance into a fairly fixed scheme of somewhat arbitrary activities would in course of time require no little readjustment and inhibition in the impulsive life. But his fellows are by no means indifferent to his conduct. For his own good and for theirs, they expect a certain minimum of conformity to their standards, and on this basis the necessity for the elaboration of yet other judgments of value arises.

(3) Natural fact. Up to this point the analysis might possibly lead one to the rather hasty conclusion that the process of evaluation is eminently artificial-that it contains no elements of objectivity. Nothing could be further from the truth, as even the preceding discussion would suffice to show. Into every value situation there enters the element of natural fact, of arbitrary objectivity. By a natural fact is meant something which is so, quite irrespective of whether we or anyone else would like to have it so. Death in this sense is a natural fact, and so is birth, the sun, impenetrable objects, disease germs, the space which separates one thing from another, poverty, the growth of trees, love, and all the catalogue of things and processes that really are. Not all of these natural facts are known or even knowable, of course,