The Philosophy of Language

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. OF SENTENCES. Forms of 60. The forms of speech to which I have above adverted, thougn We speech are, ..i i c Li i r needed by the employ them, with more or less accuracy, from the very dawn of our ITS0'man reason, are far from being obvious to the great mass of mankind. It is a remarkable...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. OF SENTENCES. Forms of 60. The forms of speech to which I have above adverted, thougn We speech are, ..i i c Li i r needed by the employ them, with more or less accuracy, from the very dawn of our ITS0'man reason, are far from being obvious to the great mass of mankind. It is a remarkable circumstance in the constitution of our nature, that the most complex things are most familiar to us, that the most general laws, by the very reason that they are most general, and most constantly in action, become habitual to us without our reflecting upon, and consequently without our understanding them. We conform to the complex and intricate laws of sight, we judge of distances and magnitudes by the angles which objects subtend, and ret during a great part of our lives we have not the most distant suspicion that any such things as angles exist, or that they are subtended on the retina; nay, ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and probably a much greater proportion of mankind, exercise the power of vision throughout their whole lives, without so much as wasting a thought on its laws. So it is in regard to speech. All men, even the lowest, can speak their mother-tongue; yet how many of this multitude can neither write nor read; how many of those who read know nothing even of the grammar of their own language; and how many who have been instructed so far, have never studied Universal Grammar The fact is, that men at first regard the practice of speech, as the exercise of some natural faculty, which proceeds spontaneously from the wish of communicating their thoughts and feelings. By and by they observe, that this faculty operates partly from sudden impulses, and gives birth to expressions not easily to be analysed into any component parts, as in the ejaculations of P...