Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/536

494 and complete knowledge of them, they are found to be likes and unlikes, and are associated and dissociated accordingly.

The elements of coherent systems, whether of thought or language, always have their relations facilitated by likeness and impeded by unlikeness; hence we find in such systems that it is resemblance which is the bond of their union. Just as views in science or philosophy, schools in literature or art, are related to each other by varying degrees of likeness, the whole forming a group through which each of the parts thereof is rendered intelligible, so concepts and the words representing them are interrelated by degrees of resemblance, and so every term we can use is really intelligible to us only through its connection—a connection of likeness more or less x>roximate, more or less remote—with all other terms whatsoever. This is true, moreover, not only of all words as they exist at a particular moment, and are in use for particular concepts, but also for all the forms through which particular words have passed in their structural development. We bring new words into existence by connecting them, through likeness either of sound or of form, with words already familiar to us; and such new words, when we meet with them, become intelligible to us largely because of the likeness which connects them with known and intelligible elements of speech. When, moreover, a word is unfamiliar, the mental system rejects it as long as it remains a stranger and an unlike; but as soon as the mind, insisting on assimilation, obtains the satisfaction it seeks by change of form, the modified term, no longer meeting with resistance, becomes one of the system of likes. It is the same kind of assimilation as that seen in the use of Shotover for Château Vert which leads races to spell any foreign word they adopt in accordance with the analogy of their own tongue, and children to construct such grotesque plural forms as "foots," "mouses," "goodest," and "bringed." That in nearly all languages the vowels within a word tend to be assimilated to one another is a phenomenon encountered very early in the study of linguistics. The use of metaphor, again, which is largely the mental assimilation of a thing more or less unknown to something much better known, is universal.

Passing from the allied realms of cognition and speech to the sphere of human relationships, we shall find that here also likes tend to be associated and unlikes dissociated; that the resistance is greatest where the association is of unlikes, and least where the association is of likes. At the outset we must understand that likeness or unlikeness between human beings is a likeness or unlikeness not merely in structure but also in manner of acting; not only in structure and acting, as these are popularly understood, but also in thinking, in belief not only, that is to say, in