Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/508

 494 HUBERT FOSTON : III. PRACTICAL CONTROL OF CONDITIONAL SIGNIFICANCE. It is not only in his highly developed artifice of language that man shows the outward token of some critical psychical difference between himself and the animals. Most impres- sive, surely, is that appearance, already alluded to, upon the basis of the natural world, of an artificial world, which has been established, and is maintained, through thought work- ing in dependence upon the system of conditioning manifest in the former. And I would suggest that the purpose and work of gradually shaping an imaginatively given unpresented feature in a rough piece of matter might well be important in developing a tendency to abstract in the sense according to which we have described abstraction. Such an exercise seems just what is required for the initiation of mind into the method required for thought abstraction amidst all the suggestions of comparatively definite and multitudinous perception. It may be noted that, as against the perhaps not very intelligible process provided for by Nominalism, of emphasising certain features in relation to a name somehow attached to them, this is abstraction with a mediate intent, so far as the quality is for some desired and anticipated use. Let it now be added, that without developed proneness to intelligent reflexion upon what is being done in accordance with tribal and traditional routine, the primitive artificer, bent upon his continuously formative task, may yet let his mind run over the various possible uses of what he is thus distinctively evolving may fancy for his handiwork, as im- aginatively completed, a variety of significances according to conditioning circumstances, also mentally constructed. He is thus unwittingly giving to his presentations and images a function of essentially relatively determinable, or conditioned, signification. Moreover, he may produce, not a weapon or an instrument for immediate use, but the tool that shall shape the tool nay, the various forms of tool. This having a determinable, but for the moment suspended or arrested, significance with reference to what it shall help to produce, and the mass of what it shall produce having a yet further widely variable significance with reference to what the different items of its content shall each variously do, there is before him, if his mind would take advantage of it, the suggestion of significance, the determination of which is arrested for variously conditioned redirection from point to