Fifthly, _one and the same meaning may attach to several experiences_.
You walk into a room, and there see a table; you go into the same room
in the dark and hurt yourself, and you complain that you ran against
the table; you hear a noise overhead, and wish that the maid would
not drag that table about. Here the meaning of a particular table is
carried by three modes of perceptive experience. In certain forms of
mental disorder one obsessing meaning colours all the experiences of
the daily life. The patient “scents poison and treachery on all sides.
He has slowly convinced himself by numerous tests in little things
that he is no longer liked. The workmen are refractory and disobedient
with him more than with anyone else. His chiefs and his fellows play
malicious tricks upon him. His food tastes differently, and does not
agree with him. When he goes to another town, it is plain that his
enemies have anticipated him by writing letters to his injury.” Every
experience that this man has means persecution.
Sixthly, _meaning and mental process are not covariants_. Richness
and fullness of experience do not necessarily correspond with wealth
of meaning; you may, in fact, be bewildered, and fail to find a
meaning just because there is so much material to take in; your first
hearing of a Wagner opera gave you, probably, more sound than sense.
Conversely, poverty of experience does not necessarily mean loss or
reduction of meaning; if that were the case, we could not pack so much
meaning into such little things as words.
All this evidence would be greatly strengthened if we went beyond the
limits of individual experience, and compared man with man, profession
with profession, race with race, age with age. What is meaningless to
me might be full of meaning to you; the same landscape yields different
meanings to the geologist and the farmer; a protruded tongue means
insult here, but politeness in Thibet; the art of the telegrapher
would have spelled black magic a few centuries ago. Enough has perhaps
been said to give plausibility, at any rate, to the statement that
=mental processes do not intrinsically mean=, that meaning is not a
constituent part of their nature; and that may suffice for the present;
we shall come back again to meaning later. Value and use need hardly be
discussed; they are, far more clearly than meaning, additional to (and
detachable from) experience. If, however, the reader thinks that the
point should be worked out in their case also, he may put them through
the same sort of examination as that to which we have just subjected
meaning; evidence will at once be forthcoming.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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