Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/159

Rh we awaken significance-feelings, which in turn through the sound of the word-connexions evoke further relation-feelings. Our schooling in speech trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form not only light-things and light-relations, but also thought-things and thought-relations. Words are only named, not used definitively, and the hearer has to feel what the speaker means. This and this alone amounts to speech, and hence mien and tone play a much greater part than is generally admitted in the understanding of modern speech. Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many of the animals even, but verb-signs never.

The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb. This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For substantives are words whereby things sense-defined in illuminated space become evocable also in after-thought, while verbs describe types of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. "Falling stone" is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement and thing moved and then isolate falling as one kind of movement from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof — sinking, tottering, stumbling, slipping. We do not "see" the distinction, we "know" it. The difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is only apprehensible by a word-trained consciousness. But now, with this verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection. Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness, out of the ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imitative, leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself — namely, singularity of occurrence — is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest, as effect of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant ploughs), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable places in the sign-system. One has to bury oneself completely in the solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive, present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but in the verb something inorganic has been put in place of something organic. The fact that we live — namely, that we at this instant perceive something — becomes eventually a property of the something perceived. In terms of word-thought, the perceived endures — "is." Thus, finally, are formed the categories of thought, graded according to what is and what is not natural to it; thus Time appears as a dimension, Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or psychical mechanism. It is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial, and dogmatic thought arises.