Page:An introduction to Dravidian philology.djvu/109

Rh terpretation of linguistic facts. From this standpoint, it is no longer sufficient to study the word in its isolated aspect, but as a part of the sentence The sentence forms a unit of expression and hethe [sic] words havet no existence apart from the sentence, in the same way as a perception is a complete unit with simple ideas forming its elements. A simple idea, unrelated with other ideas, cannot exist. An idea in the mind of the advanced animal, man, is by its very nature complex. Ideas, are always found clustered together and have to be interpreted in various ways according to the several degrees of distance or nearness which they assume one to another within the group. It has to be borne in mind that the spoken sound is but an imperfect and conventional representation of the idea that it stands for, and that the more of the content of the idea that it denotes, the more accurately is it com-