me to be the one which Mr. Max Müller suggests: let any one try to think of a dog without using mentally the word dog, or some equivalent word, or to think the phrase, 'Cogito ergo sum,' without those words in one language or other, and he must, I think, if honest, confess that the attempt is like trying to breathe without air, or to see in the dark. It is prohibiting yourself from using the only means by which the required thing can be done.

A strong illustration of the truth of this view is to be found in one of the popular arguments against it. Thoughts, it is said, must in some cases be deeper than words, because no words can express the thoughts which are excited by particular objects. A beautiful woman, a beautiful piece of music, a beautiful view, all raise, as the phrase is, thoughts too deep for words. To ask that the thoughts so raised may be indicated in some other way than by words is, no doubt, to ask an impossibility; but if this is so, how can any one be sure that he has such thoughts? A thought which cannot be expressed or recalled to the mind, or be in any way fixed in a definite shape, is not a thought at all, but only a state of feeling; and though it is impossible to imagine a state of feeling which cannot be named, there is no state of feeling which can be adequately described. This is shown by all attempts to do so.

A lady once described to a friend her feelings on having a strong double tooth pulled out, by saying that she felt as if her head was coming off. The friend asked what it felt like to have your head come off. Pain, pleasure, hope, fear, in all their innumerable varieties, are words with which we cannot dispense, but which tell us very little. How much do we learn by being told that a rose smells sweet, or that flowers in a bedroom are often oppressive? The noblest piece of music ever written conveys no definite meaning whatever, nothing which can be called thought, because it is not sufficiently definite. It is sometimes said of a first-rate player on the violin that he can make it speak. The phrase indicates in its exaggeration the impassable limit between language or thought and mere sound, however expressive. Every one knows what is meant by the speaking of a musical instrument, but no two persons, asked what it said, would give the same answer. The beginning of 'The heavens are telling' is identical, or nearly identical, with that of The Lass of Richmond Hill.' Do the notes say, "The heavens. are telling the glory of God,' or, 'On Richmond Hill there lives a lass, more fair than Mayday morn'? The truth is that a thought which cannot be put into words is not thought at all; it is only an attempt to think. A word which does not call up a thought is not a word but a mere noise.

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The practical consequences of admitting this doctrine are the subject of the whole of Mr. Max Müller's book, and I believe he is the first person who has ever recognised them, or set them forth in

an intelligible form. In his examination of the views of different philosophers who have treated of it, and after quoting Humboldt, Schelling, and Hegel, he says, 'None of them seems to have had a suspicion how, if these words be true, all that we call philosophy will have to be put on a new footing.'

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I do not think that any one who carefully reads the Science of Thought will be able to deny this, though there are many particular parts of the contents of the book which are open to great question, and many others in which Mr. Max Müller's assertions can be tested by only an infinitesimal number of persons.

The principal and the strongest point in his case seems to me to be that, whatever may be said of thought, language is, at all events, a definite, permanent thing, which can be studied and discussed according to fixed rules. A very large part of what is commonly called philosophy consists of statements which it is impossible to test, and which it is often impossible to understand at all, or at least without an amount of labour probably disproportionate to the advantage to be derived from it. Both of these defects arise from the notion that indistinct feelings in the philosopher's own mind are thoughts, and that the task before him is that of devising language fitted to express them. The result frequently is the invention of a whole mass of new words and new names, or the use of old ones in question-begging senses which greatly puzzle both writers and readers, and often have no distinct meaning whatever.

If the identity of thought and language were fully understood, it would have a stronger tendency than anything else to the encouragement of plainness and simplicity in speculation, especially upon subjects which have been under discussion for thousands of years.

It would be still more useful in marking the limits of such discussion. The whole tone of them would be changed, if it were generally understood that they are discussions about words, and that they can be conducted to advantage only by definitions of the fundamental terms contained in them. They might thus in most cases be brought to an end in a reasonable time. Suppose, for instance, the subject of discussion is free will. How much more likely it is that it will be brought to some conclusion if the meaning of the two monosyllables'free' and 'will' be considered as the meaning of any other word would be than if the disputants assume without any such examination that they know what they respectively admit and deny, and appeal on the one side to their own consciousness by assertions which no one can test, or to arguments about statistics and other matters the relevancy of which is continually denied, and is impossible to be proved on the other.

Suppose, again, that the history of all important words were to be made known; and that the degree to which they originally were, or

in the course of time came to be, metaphors were fully understood, what a flood of light would this throw upon all sorts of controversies! Fifty or perhaps even forty years ago Coleridge was a great name in English speculation. In all Carlyle's writings there is no more striking description than that which depicts him as sitting in the character of a giver of oracles at Highgate, entreating mankind to prepare themselves for his work on the Logos (which never was written) by grasping the fundamental and all-important distinction between the Reason and the Understanding, which, says Carlyle, you could never understand. How much trouble it would have saved to him and to others to learn that Reason and Understanding are only two metaphors which describe mental operations respectively as 'counting,' and resisting or standing up against external facts until you can conceive their relations and connections. So that the distinction is as important as one by which I was puzzled as a boy, the distinction namely between the Tully who was so much admired in the last century and the Cicero to whom my admiration was directed on similar grounds in the present.

This, however, is a matter to which I shall return in a later part of this article.

3. Mr. Max Müller's third proposition is that which gives what I have called the anatomy of thought and language.

There are, he says, four stages in it: sensation, perception, conception, naming. Practically they are inseparable and simultaneous. But they can be conceived of and named separately. I have already made one or two observations on this subject, in considering what I have remembered as his first proposition. I may add to what I have already said, that the proposition to be correct must be confined to human beings. Mr. Max Müller would, I think, admit himself and even insist that animals possess both sensation and perception, which, as he says, imply some power of generalisation. The evidence to each man that animals feel and perceive is, if we except the evidence given by language, precisely the same as the evidence that other men besides himself feel and perceive. That perception is not distinguishable except in name and theoretically from conception seems equally plain. In perceiving a tree or any other natural object, we combine into one an immense number of things which might be separately named and thought of, and what is this but an early stage of conception? The same thing might be said of the perception of a leaf or a grain of dust. It thus seems impossible to separate, and therefore not expedient to distinguish, the two processes. The power of naming seems to be the point at which a plain recognisable difference between men and animals comes in. For this reason I should prefer for Mr. Max Müller's percept and concept to use the word idea.' It is noticeable that he has very little occasion to speak of percepts in the course of VOL. XXIII.-No. 134. RR

his book. Indeed, there is nothing to say of percepts, as he calls them, except that they mark an ideal step in the history of a name.

4. What I have stated as the fourth proposition, namely, that the formation of conceptions is due not merely to our senses but to certain conditions stated by Kant as those under which we think, appears hardly necessary to the main course of his argument, though it is necessary to what he says of Darwin, and though it is easy to understand the satisfaction which Mr. Max Müller feels in connecting himself so emphatically with Kant and his views. To expect him to abstain from doing so would be to show ignorance of the almost invincible attractions which the discussions lying at the basis of all philosophy exercise over all who have ever taken part in them, and are specially likely to exercise over one who celebrated Kant's centenary by publishing an English translation of Kant's greatest work in a form as little difficult to be understood as the nature of the case allows.

The impression left on my mind by a careful study of Mr. Max Müller's book is that, if he is right in his account of the part of Kant's philosophy with which he has to do, it makes no difference at all to the Science of Thought whether it is true or false, for the essence of it is only this, that without sensation thought is impossible, but that as soon as we use our senses we arrange our thoughts with reference to time and space and also with reference to certain lists or categories under one or more of which all our thoughts about our sensations may be arranged, and that neither time nor space nor any of these categories or lists can be referred to experience, because without them no experience would be possible.

That this is true as a general description of human thought and sensation no one disputes or ever did or could dispute, though of course the lists or categories may be differently named and numbered. Kant recognises twelve, Aristotle ten, Mill four, and Schopenhauer only one, but did any sane human being doubt that in all our thinkings time and place are always to be found more or less distinctly, or that our thoughts, if they are not to be chaotic, must be capable of some classification; that, for instance, it is one thing to think of the quantity of water in the sea (πóσov) and another to think of its quality as salt or fresh, green, blue, or transparent (oîov)?

I cannot believe that any sane person ever disputed this statement or any part of it, except the assertion that as time and space and the categories are formative of experience they cannot be derived from it. The answer to the question whether this is so or not depends upon the meaning of the word experience. Mr. Max Müller, like some other writers, sometimes writes as if he thought that a fact learnt by experience must be learnt by degrees. He argues, for instance, that as soon as we understand what is meant by the assertion that two straight lines cannot inclose a space we

assent to it at once and are not strengthened in our assent by any amount of specific evidence as to particular straight lines. It seems to me as reasonable to say that we do not learn by experience that a particular piece of paper is blue or red because after once looking at it carefully we are as sure of the fact as if we had it always under our eyes. He also leaves unnoticed facts from which many people infer that our conceptions of both space and time are acquired gradually. I think anyone accustomed to the proceedings of children will agree with me in saying that for a considerable time their movements show a complete unconsciousness of the nature of space. The young man born blind who was couched by Cheselden in the last century learned to see by very slow degrees. He said that 'all objects seemed to touch his eyes, as what he felt did his skin.' Moreover, 'he knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude." Many of a young child's proceedings give a similar impression. It is by moving about in different directions that it learns what space means.

To say that space is formative of or essential to these experiences appears to me to be true only in the sense in which every object is formative of and essential to our experience of it. Unless the particular piece of paper on which I am writing at this moment were before my eyes, I should have no experience at all of it, and it is essential to and formative of such experience as I have. Our experience of space is derived from seeing its contents, and noticing their positions in it and their distance from ourselves and each other, of which we are warned by slight differences of colour, the meaning of which it takes much experience and reflection to learn.

The truth, I think, is that the word 'experience' is something of a snare, and that it would be better to use instead of it, in reference to this matter, 'sensation' and 'inferences from sensation.' This would show how narrow and unimportant are the differences between (e.g.) Kant and Mill on these subjects. Kant, as interpreted by Mr. Max Müller, would strenuously contend that thought and language rest ultimately upon sensation, and Mill, I think, would have admitted that men are not mere passive recipients of impressions in sensation.

Those who say we get the idea of space from experience, and those who say that space is a form of sensuous intuition 'given' in sensation, both appear to me to mean that without sensation space could not be known, and that sensation makes it known.

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To speak of anything as being given' in sensation instead of being learnt by experience seems to me to be what Mr. Max Müller would call mythology. That is to say, in order to explain sensation itself and to avoid the admission that the nature of space is perceived by the senses as much as colour, it resorts to a fabulous process of

"Quoted by Mill on Bailey; review of Berkeley's theory of vision. Dissertations and Discussions, ii. 110- 12.