The same economy which induces us to analyse a group and to establish
special signs for its component parts, parts which also go to make up
other groups, may likewise induce us to mark out by some single symbol a
whole group.
On the old Egyptian monuments we see objects represented which do not
reproduce a single visual impression, but are composed of various
impressions. The heads and the legs of the figures appear in profile,
the head-dress and the breast are seen from the front, and so on. We
have here, so to speak, a mean view of the objects, in forming which the
sculptor has retained what he deemed essential, and neglected what he
thought indifferent. We have living exemplifications of the processes
put into stone on the walls of these old temples, in the drawings of our
children, and we also observe a faithful analogue of them in the
formation of ideas in our own minds. Only in virtue of some such
facility of view as that indicated, are we allowed to speak of a body.
When we speak of a cube with trimmed corners--a figure which is not a
cube--we do so from a natural instinct of economy, which prefers to add
to an old familiar conception a correction instead of forming an
entirely new one. This is the process of all judgment.
The crude notion of "body" can no more stand the test of analysis than
can the art of the Egyptians or that of our little children. The
physicist who sees a body flexed, stretched, melted, and vaporised, cuts
up this body into smaller permanent parts; the chemist splits it up into
elements. Yet even an element is not unalterable. Take sodium. When
warmed, the white, silvery mass becomes a liquid, which, when the heat
is increased and the air shut out, is transformed into a violet vapor,
and on the heat being still more increased glows with a yellow light. If
the name sodium is still retained, it is because of the continuous
character of the transitions and from a necessary instinct of economy.
By condensing the vapor, the white metal may be made to reappear.
Indeed, even after the metal is thrown into water and has passed into
sodium hydroxide, the vanished properties may by skilful treatment still
be made to appear; just as a moving body which has passed behind a
column and is lost to view for a moment may make its appearance after a
time. It is unquestionably very convenient always to have ready the name
and thought for a group of properties wherever that group by any
possibility can appear. But more than a compendious economical symbol
for these phenomena, that name and thought is not. It would be a mere
empty word for one in whom it did not awaken a large group of
well-ordered sense-impressions. And the same is true of the molecules
and atoms into which the chemical element is still further analysed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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