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To hear some theorists discourse on sensory aphasia, we might imagine that they had never considered with any care the structure of a sentence. They argue as if a sentence were composed of nouns which call up the images of things. What becomes of those parts of speech, of which the precise function is to establish, between images, relations and shades of meaning of every kind? Is it said that each of such words still expresses and evokes a material image, more confused, no doubt, but yet determined? Consider then the host of different relations which can be expressed by the same word, according to the place it occupies and the terms which it unites. Is it urged that these are the refinements of a highly-developed language, but that speech is possible with concrete nouns that all summon up images of things? No doubt it is, but the more primitive the language you speak with me and the poorer in words which express relations, the more you are bound to allow for my mind's activitiy, since you compel me to find out the relations which you leave unexpressed: which amounts to saying that you abandon more and more the hypothesis that each verbal image goes up and fetches down its corresponding idea. In truth, there is here only a question of degree: every language, whether elaborated or crude, leaves many more things to be understood than it is able to express. Essentially discontinuous, since it proceeds by juxtaposing words, speech can only indicate by a few guide-posts placed here and there the chief stages in the movement of thought. That is why I can indeed understand your speech if I start from a thought analogous to your own, and follow its windings by the aid of verbal images which are so many sign-posts that show me the way from time to time. But I shall never be able to understand it if I start from the verbal images themselves, because between two consecutive verbal images there is a gulf which no amount of concrete representations can ever fill. For images can never be anything but things, and thought is a movement.
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