Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/281

Rh proper sense, part of the discussion which they accompany, but form an independent source of value. Their service to the understanding is also twofold—they make clear to us relations too complex to be successfully conveyed by words, or conveyable only at inordinate length. Of this class of pictures the spatial diagram is typical. Their second function is to bring before us a scene whose splendor and richness can not be successfully represented in imagination. The latter bears to material content the relation which explanatory diagrams sustain to formal synthesis. Pictures of buildings and natural scenery, of the human figure and organic forms at large, indeed all concrete objects which are either unfamiliar or present subtle complications and gradations of quality, fall within this category.

While pictures have their own distinct place in literature, they can not be substituted for the textual description in any degree without affecting the place of the whole composition in the evolutionary scale. Language sets as its ideal the development of an adequate system of symbols for the representation of experience. The spoken sentence has fulfilled its function only when, through its own elements and syntactical form alone, it has adequately expressed the content of meaning intended by him who utters it. Writing is a transliteration of speech, and merely substitutes another medium in its performance of the same ideal office. Each in its own field aims at the development of a pure system of symbols, that is, a system which without accessories is capable of indicating the whole range of distinctions with which thought is concerned. Among civilized peoples both speech and writing approach adequacy in this regard, but in so far as pantomime persists in the one case, or illustration is relied on in the other, it marks a deficiency in the medium. In its ideal form language should no more depend upon gestures and pictures than upon the presence of the original objects and relations themselves which it seeks to represent through conceptual forms.

One has mastered the uses of language only when he is able to make a continuous translation of experience into its symbols and, with a similar facility, to interpret these signs in terms of their ideal meanings. In writing, then, such mastery is attained when adequacy in the expression of thought has been secured without any recourse to pictures, diagrams, models or objects. It is part of the mental training at which a cultivation of language aims to render the mind so far as possible independent of pictorial or other concrete ways of presenting the materials with which discourse deals. Like the use of the abacus in numbering, these aids may be indispensable in certain forms and at particular stages of development, but they must be superseded if any high degree of attainment is to be secured

Language will doubtless always fall short of this ideal aim. Speech will continue to be made more picturesque as well as intelligible by gesture, and illustration will enrich while it illuminates the printed page.