helpless without objects of sense. Conversation is increasingly concrete, if not of
material things and persons present in time and even place. Instead of dealing
with thoughts and ideas, speech and writing is close to sense and the words used
are names for images and acts. But there is another higher part of language that
is not so abjectly tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and has its being
in the field of concepts rather than percepts, which, to use Earle's distinction, is
symbolic and not presentative, that describes thinking that is not mere contiguity
in space or sequence in time but that is best in the far higher and more mental
associations of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical
terminology, is connotative and not merely denotative, that has extension as well
as intension, that requires abstraction and generalization. Without this latter
element higher mental development is lacking because this means more than
word-painting the material world.
Our school youth today suffer from just this defect. If their psychic operations
can be called thought it is of that elementary and half animal kind that consists
imagery. Their talk with each other is of things of present and immediate
interest. They lack even the elements of imagination, which makes new
combinations and is creative, because they are dominated by mental pictures of
the sensory. Large views that take them afield away from the persons and things
and acts they know do not appeal to them. Attempts to think rigorously are too
hard. The teacher feels that all the content of mind must come in through the
senses, and that if these are well fed, inferences and generalizations will come of
themselves later. Many pupils have never in their lives talked five minutes
before others on any subject whatever that can properly be called intellectual. It
irks them to occupy themselves with purely mental processes, so enslaved are
they by what is near and personal, and thus they are impoverished in the best
elements of language. It is as if what are sometimes called the associative fibers,
both ends of which are in the brain, were dwarfed in comparison with the
afferent and efferent fibers that mediate sense and motion.
That the soul of language as an instrument of thought consists in this non-
presentative element, so often lacking, is conclusively shown in the facts of
speech diseases. In the slowly progressive aphasias, of late so carefully studied,
the words first lost are those of things and acts most familiar to the patient, while
the words that persist longest in the wreckage of the speech-centers are generally
words that do not designate the things of sense. A tailor loses the power to name
his chalk, measure, shears, although he can long talk fluently of what little he
may chance to know of God, beauty, truth, virtue, happiness, prosperity, etc. The