Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/342

 society, makes use with comparative ease and certainty. This is the case in proportion as the customary usage of language has become a power. Here a mass of fixed meanings has been elaborated, so that word-idea and object-idea are regularly blended. Nevertheless, in many expressions, especially those which are more remote from everyday life (the expressions of complex ideas) the customary usage is uncertain, and leaves therefore greater freedom to individual application. The more this freedom is used, the more the speaker has recourse to the conditions of the first stage, or must explain his thought (i.e. the meaning which he desires to see attributed to his words), in more ordinary words, hence in words more firmly established in usage, he must as it were “translate” them (explicate the complex ideas). The language of customary usage as a universal opposed to the many dialects, distinguishes itself in advanced states of culture as the written language from the language of intercourse. Here the communication of an individual meaning in a social material is indeed still liable to all the defects which are inevitable in using signs of signs; but knowledge of the language as fixed in writing forces us also to a more conscious subordination to the norms and rules which are imparted by teaching, and the observance of which again facilitates understanding, hence social application. This is true again of oral communication at the third stage. Communication here takes place to a large extent in fixed forms, which are consecrated by age and authorities, and are therefore handed on as valuable inheritances and familiar to every partaker. Here too the communication of ideas which predominates at the second stage is connected with the more easy excitation of feelings which characterises the first stage: of social feelings of a more differentiated kind, we may say of festival-feelings. In so far as this is what is realised, it is not hindered by the language being less comprehensible, or even incomprehensible; it then misses its proper determination, the words being reduced to the associations of their sound-meanings. Allied to this again is poetical language. Although like all art it is originally strictly fettered by popular intuition, tradition, culture, it still inclines in obedience to its imaginative inspiration to a freer use of language, and so becomes more hard to understand, unless this tendency is again frustrated by the imagination to which it has recourse in figurative expressions, in comparisons, in rhythm and metre. True poetry is the purest form of the genius of language itself.

58. In written communication again, artistic, elevated or