Page:The Concept of Nature.djvu/22

Rh originally meant, he almost certainly now takes his former statement as couched in elliptical phraseology, and assumes that he was meaning,

Here the demonstrative phrase or the gesture, which demonstrates the ‘it’ which is commodious, has now been reduced to ‘this’; and the attenuated phrase, under the circumstances in which it is uttered, is sufficient for the purpose of correct demonstration. This brings out the point that the verbal form is never the whole phrase ology of the proposition; this phraseology also includes the general circumstances of its production. Thus the aim of a demonstrative phrase is to exhibit a definite ‘it’ as a bare objective for thought; but the modus operandi of a demonstrative phrase is to produce an awareness of the entity as a particular relatum in an auxiliary complex, chosen merely for the sake of the speculative demon stration and irrelevant to the proposition. For example, in the above dialogue, colleges and buildings, as related to the ‘it’ speculatively demonstrated by the phrase ‘this college building,’ set that ‘it’ in an auxiliary complex which is irrelevant to the proposition

Of course in language every phrase is invariably highly elliptical. Accordingly the sentence

means probably

But it will be found that in the above discussion we can replace ‘commodious’ by ‘commodious as a college building’ without altering our conclusion; though we can guess that the recipient, who thought