The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain grammatical
expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part of our impression
that a sentence has a meaning and is dominated by the Unity of one
Thought. Nonsense in grammatical form sounds half rational; sense
with grammatical sequence upset sounds nonsensical; e.g., "Elba the
Napoleon English faith had banished broken to be Saint because Helena
at." Finally, there is about each word the psychic 'overtone' of
feeling that it brings us nearer to a forefelt conclusion. Suffuse all
the words of a sentence, as they pass, with these three fringes or
haloes of relation, let the conclusion seem worth arriving at, and all
will admit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughly continuous,
unified, and rational thought.[238]
Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as a word, but as
having a _meaning_. The 'meaning' of a word taken thus dynamically in a
sentence may be quite different from its meaning when taken statically
or without context. The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the bare
fringe we have described, of felt suitability or unfitness to the
context and conclusion. The static meaning, when the word is concrete,
as 'table,' 'Boston,' consists of sensory images awakened; when it is
abstract, as 'criminal legislation,' 'fallacy,' the meaning consists of
other words aroused, forming the so-called 'definition.'
Hegel's celebrated dictum that pure being is identical with pure
nothing results from his taking the words statically, or without the
fringe they wear in a context. Taken in isolation, they agree in the
single point of awakening no sensorial images. But taken dynamically,
or as significant,--as _thought_,--their fringes of relation, their
affinities and repugnances, their function and meaning, are felt and
understood to be absolutely opposed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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