The Life of Reason - George Santayana (great books to read .TXT) 📗

The natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, and its existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind the analogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. This hypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions which imply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smile or a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have been at work in the body while thought occupied the mind—even if, as more often happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce the feeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is said to cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that such involuntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out of feeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion which determines their material character, so that laughter, for instance, becomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just as well have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself is concerned.

In the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage and superficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the point of view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplaying impulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay the budding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies the perfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniably continues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity have known physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hidden complexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; they become recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received by the ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature; through it thought, being expressed in that its material basis is extended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; for its expression enters into the chain of its future conditions and becomes an omen of that thought's continuance, repetition, and improvement. Thought's rational function consists, as we then perceive, in expressing a natural situation and improving that situation by expressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequate state of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions. Expression makes thought a power in the very world from which thought drew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining and self-assured.

A thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute moral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to a fellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, the desire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself in the mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue of its cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy, which even an inarticulate yearning would not have lacked, becomes in language an overt phenomenon, linked observably with all other objects and processes.

Language is accordingly an overflow of the physical basis of thought. It is an audible gesture, more refined than the visible, but in the same sense an automatic extension of nervous and muscular processes. Words underlie the thought they are said to express—in truth it is the thought that is the flower and expression of the language—much as the body underlies the mind.