LITERARY COLUMN.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 11753, 30 November 1903, Page 4

LITERARY COLUMN.

"WHAT IS MEANING?"

(By 0. F. Bj__ok», 31.A., LectuKf «a Mental Science, Canterbury College.) * "What it Meaning? Stadias hi tha P«----v-topmant of Sig-flcanca" (V. Welby; published bj Macmilkfi and Co.) _ a recent book which should receive a welcome from tlik—en, scientists, and educationists alik*. In it the author Beaks to show how we may win to the inner significance of life, and Una' he doea, not by promulgating a new and rigid system of philosophy, but by sketching out for nj in a number of tetse stadias a naw method by which we may men to tho inner h*_t of all tha question* of science, ethics, religion, Bathetic*, now discussed so endlessly in the world of thought. This method ia nothing more than to make a searching scrutiny of our means of expression, our use of language, in order to discover tha real sense, meaning, and significance of the' terms we use. The author insists that the real Talue of our various departments of thought, their meaning, that which alone makea them worth our atteution, has hitherto remained for us a virtually unstudied subject, and he wishes to take the first steps towards a study of what he call* Signifies, i.e., a scienca which shall have for its object the interpretation of significance, a search into the hidden meaning of» our thought-expres-sion, and so into the meaning of the universe of which we are tha expression. By laying baro our present chaotic method of expressing our thought, by showing how far our means of expression lags behind our need of expression, and how far our ever-evolving forms of thought, forced into dead forms of language, axo rendered feebly, confusedly, or wrongly, such a etady would not only shad new light on all our. v#xed questions, but would give an immense impetus towards a more rational method of education.

It is first pointed out that the word Meaning is itself used most indefinitely and ambiguously, and may be taken in any one of three senses—(l) as equivalent to sense, as when we say, "In what sense!" wishing to know what a term is a sign of, what It stands for, what is its application, what things it denotes; (2) aa equivalent to meaning proper, i.e., the implication of a term, ita purport, its intention; and (3) as equivalent to significance, as when we speak of the significance of some great movement. We may perhaps throw light on this distinction by taking, as#concrete example, some such term aa "alphabet," and asking what are its meanings? In the first place, then, the term "alphabet" is a sign, a mark, standing for something, namely, a collection of the letters of any language: this fat tha serum of the term. In the second place "alphabet" mee-s those signs which, in any language, denote its primary sounds which, by infinite variety-of grouping, form the expression of thought. And, lastly, the significance of the term is surely the importance and wonder of the thought suggested by it, namely, that by any mere grouping and manipulation, primary and meaningless sounds should at length become so surcharged with mea__g that they become the expression of man's deepest thought. It mutt be noted bene, bowerer, that this distmctiom of sense, meaning, and dgnifioance, is applicable not only to terms (individual words), but also to forms of expression (phrase and sentence), and it is in this latter case that the aspect of sjgnificance is often most prominent. The second and .third senses of meaning, then, are more important than the first, sad it is our failure to grasp clearly the intention, theN purport of our terms, and above all, their significance, that makes our thinking so confused, halting and limited. The book is particularly forcible in its appeal for » strenuoai effort by thinkers towards a grasping of the significance of terms. The significance of a word " intenoifiea its sense as well as its meaning by expressing its j importance, its appeal to us, ita moment for us, its emotional force, its ideal value, its moral aspect, its universal or at least social range. All science, all logic, all philosophy, tha whole controversy about aesthetics, about ethics, about religion, ultimately concentrate on this: What is the sense of, what do we mean by, what ia the significance of, why do we care for Beauty, Truth, Goodness!"

If we examine into our use of language, popular, scientific and! philosophical, we, j shall find full evidence thai the author of ] "What is Meaning!" is fully justified : in j calling our chaotic method oft expression abuse rather than use of language. For not only in popular language', do we often unconsciously use the same words ia dif- I ferent senses, and with no accurate or full ■ insight into their meaning, bat even ia scientific and philosophic language meaning is often indefinite, fluctuating, and unstable. If we take in their popular use such term* sat Mind, Idea, Image, Conception, Sensation, and ask in what sense or senses they are used, and with what degree of definite meaning employed, we shall find that tha man in the street uses them in happy indifference tot sense and meaning. We have such phrases as "• mind to do a thing,"" " a mind of his own," "the mind of man," "tile common mind," "an animal's mind." Is what senses with what meanings do we «se such phrases? Again, we have "a sensation of cold,* "a sensation of sight,** "a sensation of horror" even, and "it caused a asnsa- ! tion."' There are no word* more loosely j used tnah Idea sad: Conception, and this even by —* best writers, and in such generally perspicuous writing «s May be found in the pages of a publication like the "Spectator." And the popular usa of terms lingers on in science, so that it seema impossible, especially in the mental sciences, to get clear of ambiguity. In psychology, for example, such terms ax. Consciousness, Perception, Memory, Feeling, *~"»f>fT* ; '—, ; and many others are difficult to veduoa to exactness bocw_* of their loose «• in ordinary language-; each psychologist in turn wishes to define with more prer cisk>n. In ethics, again, such tenqs as Pleasure, Happiness, Motive, Inientaoo, give endless trouble in the matter of clear- ! ing of ambiguity ia pop*—r use. Much. I discussion might have been avoided in i ethical thought if dispadtentx bad only taken care to see that they were using words in the same sense. Even * writer of John SuwrtMilTs calibre baerf p_rt ot hisarguaaa_t o_ bahsli of Utilitarianism on a* wroDg Interpretation of the* msamsy ot _t« simple- word Be_r*Ue; and Kutapbyaxa ia by no mea_t free front this taint ft is, indeed, true that not a few ot the- lusterm

costawvessita in tha. worid of thought a*q now seen to have been what w» wtoagly call SMwij; twbai disps_«%. that ia, dV pntes arising fens* daff«tat> intefftrataiiMtt of tha manning of a word. And if we en in. Ceiling to sea tha foil meaning of terms, wa got st—l nor* astray in our use of figmtrse hagwge, notably in eat «cc of thus* figj»es at wpmtth &*• pew__g on tho detection of smflarity, that is, on analogy. Since all thinking dreads

on analogy, it *w.l&«*-t* first ftecrmty of valid thought that we should be careful in our use of analogies m the matter of their range and application, but this w, unfortunately, far from being the case. Camp_rwot„ may be of various «nds, ranging from those expressing casual likeness, though all grade* of partial and general likeness to equivalence or complete correspondence, hot at present "all manner of comparisons from the most absurdly inapplicable to the truest and most com; plcte are lamped together as analogies.' The merely -picturesque- simile, though,; of coon*, if relevant and fitting, of great bse ! for the brightening of style, is on a ouite different footing from the true analogy working out ia detail after detail, and the trouble is that we do not take caw to distinguish the two, not noticing that a partial analogy, however brilliant, is of all things the most misleading for purposes of accurate thought. "Mere figures of speech,' safS Jowett, K bave unconsciously influenced tha minds of great thinkers;" and, according to Lord Palmerston, more mistakes in politics ore due to false analogies than to anything elsa. The need of testing our analogies, and so of distinguishing the true from the falsa, the complete from tb» merely partial, is surely imperative. Now the test of an analogy ir its conformity to fact, the possibility of working it out in detail, its power to explain, "to make each other understand." It needs little j examination of current simile and metaphor to sea how few of them stand the test. Let us take a few txamples of absurd of inapt analogies and compare i them with those that are true through and through. The author gives the following Cir of similes taken from an obsolete j tin book, and remarks that one of them Uas good as the other: "As the scum rise* to the surface of the pot, so the | worst man take leading parts in a revolu-! tion," and "As the cream mounts to the surface of the milk, so the best men take the lead in the state." Why the community is a bowl of milk when the best men rise to the top, and an unsavoury pot when the worse men come up, is not evident. Again, from the work of a writer who himself rightly inveighs against the use of metaphors that may give a wrong suggestion, the author procures the following:—"Either the creative fancy scorning a solid masonry of facts, builds its castle in Spain without carpenter and architect, or a hesitating exactness may become the fetish to which the children of the imagination are sacrificed." Again, linguistic symbola are "used as the support ing trellis around which" the mental life grows up"; speech is "the raw material from which literature is hewn," and the "rank" of a phrase is determined "by the company it keeps and the place where it is born." . Analogies that will bear test are somewhat long for quotation, but one or two may be girth. Huxley has -. —"Hume does not really bring his mature powers to bear upon bis early apeculationa in the later work. The crude fruits have not been ripened, but they have been ruthlessly pruned away, along with the branches that bore them. The result is ! a pretty shrub enough, but not) the tree of knowledge, with its roots firmly fixed in fact, its branches perennially budding forth into new truths, which Hume might have reared." Here are examples from science which serve to show that even partial analogies may be of use as long as they are recognised as such:—"The analogy between the systole and diastole of the heart and the waking and sleeping of the bramay be profitably pushed to a very considerable extent/ and "Just as visual impulsM caa be excited by light only through tha mediation' of the retina, so auditory impulses can be excited by. sound only through the mediation of the auditory epithelium; but here the analogy between the optic and auditory nerves seems to end." One of the teats of 1 a metaphor is that it is able to be translated back in other words. A good example of this is given in the following quotation bearing on Christ's metaphor of the light and salt of the earth:—"Christ is welcomed aa a light for revelation to the Oentiles; His disciples are pronounced by Him to be the light of tha world, the *alt of the earth, the power which allows "finite being in its tfue. bejuity, the element which keeps that which la corruptible from decay." ,

If we once realty set to work, our author argues, to distinguish carefully the tested from the untested simile, we should, in the. use of comparison, gain a new world. If we recognised the "crucial importance" of verifying our analogies, we should make] for a new departure in thought. If we thus test our analogies in the region of philosophy and religion, "we shall find many answers of which, without this key to all problems, w* have Justly despaired; w« shall approach the questions of life from a new starting-point." The author then proceeds to show, in a striking way, thai many of the analogies that hare entered into thought, when brought face to face with the new world of fact, brought within our ken by modern science, notably by biology and astronomy, are false through and through, making u» cling, in spite of ourselves, to false conceptions of life. Many of man's analogies were natural and fitting to "his thought when he believed the centre ot the universe to be bis little the sun.revolving round it, and the hosts of the starry heavens for ita lamps; many of his analogies, the* is, are pre-Copemkan, or even Ptolemaic; and- a* a Jtime when man, through sck-os, has discovered this e«rth t« be but » speck in an infinite cosmos, they still lie hidden in language and falsely colour all our thought. When man has learned to embody in the expression of his thought that, just as this world is "Planetary and Batellitie," dependent <m a greater world round which it retoWes, "Solar,"! not;giving energy'to itself, but with the energy of a gft—ter body, outside itself streaming upon it and giving it life, and "Obs-Jo* part and parcel of an infinite whole and interwoven in its warp and woof, so is' hia life. Planetary, Solar, Cosmic, dependent on some, embracing divine agency through which, it gains breath and light, by which It Is infinitely permeated, and -ith wktab it is one. Here tie author works out in a fflggestive way this triple analogy of planetary, solar- and cosmic, and slows us that we are brought face to fM» agate with tlto triad of sense, meanjot and gg-tfl--"-* llie sense-worid is t_e planetary world, the meaning world tha solar world, the world of significance the risible ] which inchtdes , both. When, therefore, the _*oritivist, the modern materialist} insists upon our putting aside from our thought all that is not within our grasp, he is still only in the sense or planetary world. Why should we limit our inalogy to **• f-nciions of the hand of touch f Is not the comet analogy in illustrating mental seeing to be borrowed from tfts functions of the eyef And *• must press the analogy right home. We must remember,that sight is binocular; that the eyes are adjusted not to the near tmt to the fax; that it needs no painful effort to discern the far; that, therefore, though, we are in toach with our own' planet, we n_y fnd_«ctly explore by stofcT onr tun and sister planet*. This thffc sites, ns the solar world, the meaning «wld. Again, we may not only Increase the. nags of the eye by means of the telescope, "which reveals farther depths but no mnito," hit we can devise a mechanical aye, the plate, for recort__g a further world of suns and nebuhe beyond even the range <* the telescope. This. i» tho -otM of. w_k&« wa h»v» *, donbiy indite"* vtsSoo, the cosmic world, t_» world of significance. Han la thus endowed with » mind thai can not only know th» near, bnt indirectly and doubly indirectly, tfcs far. ThinMng by means of sMsJoQr is nan's node of indirect thinking, and ft* saav be said to have the poWar oi thb-Jaf dMbly- indirectly, by means of an extenrfen of, analogy, by what tfaff agger CTttslrMtf-aian, ie., the expreHfai of eoa defWWfftt of thought in terns of another. • —thai W which light may be throw- oa both. We can only mention here tha striking example given hy the anutor of transition, of the terms of evolutme, as applied to the science of biology to the --pert-unta of -.fwycbologr. ethics, snd rsTigiwii

Thus, by discarding effete metaphor *nd! analogy, and by enriching and transfiguring our means of expression by wealth brought to us by modern science, we may hop* to reach • new insight into significance, a new interpretation of. the universe "profoundly modifying what w* wrongly call the root ideas of religion, of ethics, !of poetry, of art, and, lastly, of practical life in all forms."- We should have in the world of thought a "Copamioaa reversal"; we should leave for ejrer behind the "pre-Oopernioaa" view of man "as his own centre fixed and firm, tha finished product of self-evolution," and reach the Copernican, of man as "the offspring and dependent of a greater, nobler, fuller, stronger, and more energetic centre round which he revolves," a being who recognises that "his emotion, intellect, will, and conscience" are "beams radiated from a nobler iphere, waves running in from a deeper sea of being." Pessimism would fade out aa the blinded vision of a mind still in the lowest plane of the aense-worldj the problem of pain would receive new elucidation, and the view that confine* iti eolution to this world be seen to be founded on a false analogy. The problem then presented to us is: How to reach this interpretative power, and this power to make our expression a more plastic, subtle, far-reaching instrument of thought? And in seeking the answer to this question We are brought „cc to face with a curious fact in the modern world of science and education. For if we seek the help of evolution and psychology, and ask, What is that which first distinctly marks man from the brute? what is the first human queryf We find that man ia the first creature in the course of evolution who asks the question Why. Man is the' why-asker. He alone seeks the meaning of the universe in which he lives; a meaningless world is impossible for man. Yet in the light of this the attitude of science stands out in startling relief. Science, tired of centuries of "philosophic guessing" or "barren dogmatising," sternly puts aside thequestion Why, aivd busies itself with the What and the How of things; its attitude towards the question of design in the frame of things is strictly agnostic. And this can be recognised as good only in so far as it evinces a determination first to master import and purport, to put aside the question of purpose only until it haa attained the means to answer aright. But it is in education that wa come upon the strangest attitude. The little d-ikl in the forerunner of man; he represents primitive man; and the child'a cry of Why can nevef be stilled. Whyf cries the child, till the elder, tired by Its persistence, and perhaps puzzled, at length refuses to answer. The child's energy in seeking the meaning of its little world cannot be subdued. But the heavy hand of the parent himself, whose whyasking instinct has been stifled, and the heavy hand of education comes down Upon the growing mind, and dulls, stunts, .withera. ' Education at present largely stifles what it should mainly encourage, the why-asking instinct, and we have this Bharp contrast brought fcome to Oft m the nursery, the child with its never-weary Why, in the school the boy with hi* auUan dislike of lessons, the drudgery of tasks unwillingly done. And the rational psychological solution is in our own hands. The storing up process in education is in its place necessary: the What and How must have a recognised place; but the place of" the Why » even' more imperative; yet hitherto, we have almost left out this part of education, with immense, far-reaching results, in the mental life of the world. When educationist- recognise that the..crying neiid of education is to encourage "a healthy questioning and a healthy search for the answer," to recognise that Ha work ia to lead tha growing' mind to a search after sense, meaning, and significance, when with this object they seek to train a generation to recognise the importance of the atudy of expression so an to'ensure in the use of language, besides economy, lucidity, and beauty, "power to express what now seems beyond expression, botti ia range and complexity," then the whole mental attitude of man will be swiftly changed. And this co_tuaa——toon ia to be brought about, the author urges, by the new method vt Signifies. The working but into concrete details he leaves to educationists, but he shows us what could be done in this way by sketching for us interesting lemons ia the interpretation of significance. "What is Moaning?'' has a new outlook, and though it contains perhaps tentative and suggestive, rather than finished thought, is a book of deep interest for all thinkers. Perhaps the author,. under the glamour of fresh, discovery, somewhat, exaggerates the importance of the new attitude, and when he telle us that the results of this method of Signifies will be to "profoundly modify" the root conceptions all branches of philosophy, he perhaps unduly slights pact thought, and forget* ■ that ■, the great thinkers, even though they have j time and again been led astray in the wake of false analogies, have been in the truest sense "eignificians," and have thrown ray after ray of light on the deep significance of life. Thinking such a* this, however, tnay well lead to a truer philosophy that may gamer into a rich harvest the sheaves of truth brought in from various fields. Its great service seems to consist in pointing out what impetus abstract thought might gain in its quest for truth by following in the track pointed out by modern science. But the work has also, great value educationally, and seems to be a forerunaer of a revolution in edttcaUonal methods. Though it is, of course, wrong. to say that'this interpretative attitude is quite wanting lb modern education, ytt it is to be feared that it is greatly lacking, and the author of "What ia -leaning r rightly insists that education as a whole, as a system, must .come round to this attitude. The book here is at one Witt the trend of modern thought, and in no uncertain way sounds _>♦ knell of what may be called the old Latin grammar rovtim in education, . .■.'••.'''; :$, : x'>-. "''■'■''■'■ Something may be added in' complaint of the somewhat obscure and - difficult rendering of the thought of the book j the transitions in the author's-, argument are sometimes hard to follow; but perhaps one should be chary of such complaint in criticising an aubhor who holds that a fake lucidity is the moat dangerous defect in style, and that meaning is always difficult to grasp in entirety.