Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/558

542 formalities, and are therefore explicable by the law of least effort—the tendency, that is, of man to resolve the difficulties he encounters in the path of civilization by the methods which cost the least mental effort, accepting the most obvious solutions, and contenting himself with these until through the increase of his needs they become entirely inadequate to his requirements."

Ferrero then treats of descriptive symbols, enumerating them separately, and narrating how, from the primitive signs of recognition known to savages, we have arrived at the alphabetic writing, justly called by Ferrero "the most laborious and most complex of all the means of communication of use among men." And he is right, for writing is a most complicated association of optic sensations, acoustic images, and mental images and ideas. To read, we must be able to associate with the sight of a certain number of letters the images of certain sounds, drawing thus from graphic signs the acoustic image of the spoken word. We use these signs as spoken words, associating with them a given idea, a complexity of functions which is demonstrated also by physiology, because a particular nerve center is probably attached to the function of reading, as is shown by those persons who suffer from the malady called verbal blindness—that is, those who lose the sense of sight for graphic signs only, while they can see persons, houses, objects, etc., though they no longer recognize letters, either written or printed.

Symbols of survival, the hinges of the law, form the argument of another chapter. Born from the right of occupation and conquest, the epochs in which the res nullius abounded, they have come down to us, growing gradually, and forming in their turn those which regulate all the social movement of nations. Ferrero examines the analogies between these symbols in different nationalities, and concludes: "We have thus a fresh proof that man has never created institutions and customs, etc., according to a preconceived idea, and that his own determination counts for nothing in the ultimate results of his work. It was not the idea of contract or of pacific discussion which led to the substitution of purchase and judgment for rapine and the duel, but purchase and judgment substituted for rapine and the duel generated by slow suggestion the idea of contract and pacific discussion in the brain of man."

The sensations we experience of complex things are reduced sensations. Spencer also affirms this in his First Principles. The eye sees reduced images; the mind, by the theory of least effort, receives reduced sensations; and this phenomenon exerts a great influence upon the formation of symbols. For example, the reduplication which takes place in many languages in the formation of the plural, when it is the custom to repeat the