The Origin and Expression of Ideas

Article 3. The Origin and Expression of Ideas

a) Origin of Ideas B) Expression of Ideas

a) Origin of Ideas

The term idea, comes, as we have seen, from the Greek eidos which means an image. The idea is the image or representation (or, more accurately, the represence) of the essence of a thing, expressed in the intellect. The idea is an image but it is not a picture; for a picture is ever an individual and concrete representation, while an idea is a universal and abstract representation. An idea is the simple intellectual grasp (through species or representation) of an essence as such.

That we possess ideas is manifest from the fact that we constantly use them. We have knowledge that is abstract and universal, and we think and speak in universal terms. Take up a textbook in geometry, and you find chapters on “Angles” and “Circles,” not on this angle or these circles, but on angle and circle in universal, or as such. Listen to a young sportsman who tells you he likes football. He doesn’t speak of this game or that as the object of his liking, but of the game as such. Now, in the world of concrete and individual things, there are no pictured angles or circles, there are no football games in general, or as such, or in universal. Yet we understand these things in universal. We actually have ideas. This being so, the question arises, whence come these ideas ?

We have already answered the question. Ideas come from the activity of the intellect, following sensation. Ideas are due to the abstractive power of the intellect, working out understandable essences (intelligible species) from the findings of the senses and expressing these (as concepts or ideas) within itself. Here is the true origin of ideas. Why, then, raise the question of the origin of ideas, since we already know the answer and have explained that answer in full detail? We raise the question to review and criticize certain fallacious doctrines on the point which have led minds astray. We may reduce these false doctrines to three classes, namely, innatism, traditionalism, sensism. We notice each of these briefly:

r. Innatism teaches that our ideas are born in us. The term innatism is from the Latin in-natus “born in.” Many varieties of this doctrine have, at various times, been put forward by philosophers to account for the universal character of human ideas or concepts. Plato (5 and 4 century b. c.) believed that the soul had a former existence in which it beheld essences as such. In that state, the intellect directly knew subsistent, real essences; it knew, not beauty as exemplified in beautiful things, but beauty itself; not triangle as abstracted from concrete representations, but triangularity as a subsistent reality; and so on. When the soul was joined with a body (and this was a penalty for some offense; the soul was put into a body-prison) all its knowledge was forgotten. Now, through the experience of the senses, the soul takes a kind of reminder or prod to remembrance, and imperfectly recalls what it formerly knew perfectly. Thus ideas are formed. Thus “to know is to remember.”—Descartes (1596-1650) taught that the soul (i. e., the soul-faculty of intellect) is equipped at birth with certain ideas such as those of being, truth, thought, and that it makes up other ideas with the cooperation of sensation.—Leibnitz (1646-1716) identifies the soul and its faculties and teaches that the intellect (and hence the soul) cannot exist without ideas, and hence has been equipped with them from the start. He holds that ideas are inborn in a sort of confused heap, and they are separated out and made clear and distinct by the activity of the intellect following sensation.— Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) makes all valuable and scientific knowledge the product of the mind’s own operation working through set, inborn channels, from the basic inborn ideas of God, self, and the world.— Rosmini (1797-1855) makes the idea of being innate or inborn. The Ontologists,—chiefly Malebranche (1638-1715) and Gioberti (1801-1852),— declare that the idea of God is inborn, and serves as a mental illumination in which it becomes possible to form the ideas of other things.

Innatism is generally rejected by all schools as an inept doctrine. We reject it as plainly fallacious. It is impossible to procure any evidence for it, since no one remembers the time of his own conception and birth, and new-born babies are unable to testify. On the other hand, the newly born give no manifestation of possessing ideas. Further, the doctrine of innatism is needless; it is not required to explain the origin of ideas. The origin of ideas is scientifically accounted for in the activity of intellect following sensation, and this explanation holds even for ideas of supra-sensile things.

Innatism is opposed to the testimony of consciousness. For we distinguish a threefold moment in human knowledge: a moment of potentiality, when we have not yet formed a certain idea but can do so; a second moment when we actually acquire the knowledge (i. e., form the idea); a third moment, or rather state, in which we keep the knowledge. In other words, we are all conscious of the fact that there was a time when we did not know certain things,—such, for example, as some data of American History. Then there was a time when we learned them. Thereafter we retained them and know them still. Now, if we admit innatism to be true, this threefold moment, or these three stages in the process of knowing, could not be distinguished.

All varieties of innatism either presuppose something fantastic, or they are out of gear with consciousness and experience. Further, innatism ever tends to lead men into skepticism, which bankrupts all certitude and science, and to pantheism, a debased doctrine which, in some manner, identifies God with the material universe. Judged thus by its logical fruit, innatism is to be rejected as a false and pernicious doctrine.

The intellect, to begin with, has no ideas. It is a tabula rasa, or clean washed slate ready to receive the writing of concepts, but having no such writing before sense-experience has been brought under the action of the intellectus agens. We repeat: the true origin of ideas is found in the abstractive power of the intellect working out understandable essences from the findings of sense, and expressing these essences in intelligible species within itself.

2. Traditionalism. De Bonald (1754-1840) says that the intellect can acquire no truth, no knowledge, no ideas, unless instructed, and instruction comes through speech. Now, speech was given to our first parents by a revelation of God, and with speech were revealed the expressible truths that were to be conveyed to the human race down through the generations. Hence all knowledge of intellect comes from a primitive revelation and is handed on by tradition, by speech, to mankind through the ages. The origiij of ideas is tradition. Hence the name traditionalism.

Traditionalism is a fantastic doctrine manifestly out of alignment with consciousness and experience. Speech is the outer expression of knowledge. Knowledge (ideas) can be possessed without being expressed. Further, speech is an arbitrary sign of ideas, not a natural sign. There is no natural connection between a spoken term and the idea expressed by that term; if there were, there could be but one language in the world. Again: speech is meaningless unless the mind of the person addressed is already equipped with ideas. Speech does not of itself beget ideas; it presupposes ideas.

No teaching, divine or human, is needed for the first production of ideas. The Creator has equipped the soul with intellect, and this native power forms ideas after it has come into contact with reality through sensation. Hence, while God undoubtedly made a revelation to the first human beings, and while man in the perfection of innocent nature was undoubtedly able to express ideas in adequate speech, we must assert that neither revelation nor speech is necessary to account for the origin of ideas.

Traditionalism conflicts with common experience. What one of us but has often felt the inadequacy of speech to express the ideas of the mind? We have the ideas; we lack speech. Now, if speech were the origin of ideas, it would be impossible for us to have an idea without the adequate speech to express it, for our idea would be the fruit, the result, of our having its expression.

5. Sensism. The term sensism is taken here as a kind of blanket-expression for doctrines that are more accurately described as materialism, sensism, empiricism, and positivism. But all these doctrines are related; all are sensistic. For our present purpose the term sensism is sufficiently exact to express them all.

Sensism teaches that sensation, without intellection, is the adequate source or origin of what we call ideas. In other words, we have no ideas, but only sensations. Ideas are elaborated sensations, or collections of sensations.

We have already seen that ideas represent essences in universal, and that sensations are perceptions of non-essentials in concrete and individual existence. It is manifestly absurd to identify things which are thus not only different but flatly opposed. Consider the idea: it represents an essence; and an essence is something changeless, necessary, independent of place and time. To know an essence is to know something changelessly the same, necessarily the same, everywhere and always the same. When, for example I know what man is, when I grasp the essence man, I know what man means; I know what a being must be if it is to have the essence man; I know what such a being must be necessarily, changelessly, everywhere, always. Such is essence, and the mental grasp of essence which is an idea. Contrast with this the sensile object and the sense-apprehension of such an object, which is a sensation. Sense lays hold of objects that happen to be there within range of the sense-activity; these objects are apprehended as singular, concrete realities, at this time and in this place, realities nonessential and subject to change and contingency. Hence it is manifest that sensations and ideas are in no wise to be identified.

For the rest, we have already gone to great lengths to prove that man has a faculty which is supra-organic, and which apprehends reality that lies beyond the grasp of any sense. In other words, man has an intellect which forms ideas and knows essences. This faculty, which is, by definition, of a character different from sense, and superior to sense, is manifestly not identified with sense.

The service of sense in the forming of ideas is not to be dispensed with or minimized. The intellect forms ideas, but the intellect must work with sense-data to form its ideas. We declare that the true origin of ideas is to be found in the activity of intellect working out understandable essences from the findings of the senses. Thus intellectual knowledge begins with the senses. The fault and fallacy of sensism is that it makes intellectual knowledge end with the senses.

b) Expression of Ideas

We have learned that an idea is an essence expressed (in intelligible species) in the intellect. But it is of the outer expression of ideas that we now speak. The inward expression in intellect is the forming of ideas; the outer expression which we now discuss is the conveying of ideas by sensible signs to other minds.

Man is a social being. He has a natural need of life with his fellows. And out of this natural need arises the further need of communicating with others. For such communication, some system of signs,—and sensible or sensile signs,—is required. Now, a system of signs for the communication of ideas is language or speech.

In a wide sense, speech is any system of sensible signs for the outward expression of ideas, and of the other intellectual entities which have ideas as their basic material element, viz., judgments reasonings. In a word, speech, in its widest scope, is any sensible system for communicating human knowledge. Speech may be a system of gestures, sounds, letters, pictures. In a stricter sense, speech is a system of spoken or written symbols or signs by which human knowledge is outwardly expressed and communicated.

The element of speech which expresses an idea is called a term. A term is a word or group of words which manifests an idea. Notice carefully that a term expresses an idea. There are signs which manifest feelings, emotions, or conditions of body or mind,— such as a sigh, a sob, paleness, a worried expression, —but these are not terms. A term is a word, or group of words, which manifests an idea. The term also manifests the object of the idea, the reality which has the essence that the idea represents in the mind of the speaker.

Not every word is a term. The words, of, by, after, happily, too, and, if, are not terms. For a term must completely express an idea. The following words are terms: God, man, earth, spirit, opinion. The following groups of words are terms,—that is, each group is a single term: the love of God; the President of these free and independent States; the great, wide, wonderful, beautiful world. It is evident that each group-term contains words which, if taken alone, would be terms, but they would not then have the same exact implication that they have in the group. Love is a term; but the term love taken singly does not express the full idea love of God. The adjective-phrase of God, specifies love, limits it to a definite kind of love.

An idea expressed in speech is a term, oral or written or even gesticular. A judgment expressed in terms is a proposition. A piece of reasoning expressed in propositions is argumentation, and, when it is set forth in strict order, it is a syllogism.

It is interesting to speculate on the origin of speech. It is certain that man could have invented it. It is, however, likely that God gave it to our first parents, for He created them in full and mature nature, and they had need of speech from the beginning. Yet human nature in the state of innocence was equipped with such a luminous intellect that adequate speech might have been invented by our first parents with great rapidity. At all events, the Creator has equipped man with bodily members naturally suited for the expression of articulate sounds, and man’s intellect, as well as his normal sentient tendencies, prompts him to use with signification what is so readily uttered. Man has, as a fact, invented many varieties of speech, as the multiplicity of existent languages attests. Even if the first language were divinely communicated to our first parents, it has long been lost, and many languages now in use among men have little or no possible derived relationship with that primordial system of speech.

Summary of the Article

In this Article we have studied the idea in its origin and in its outward expression. We have reviewed the truth already mastered in an earlier Article, that an idea finds its origin in the activity of the intellect working out understandable essences from sense-findings. In the present study we have considered fallacious doctrines on the origin of ideas, viz., Innatism, Traditionalism, Sensism. We have briefly set forth the tenets of each of these doctrines, and have shown that all three are inadmissible. In our discussion of the expression of ideas we have found that an idea is outwardly expressed by a term, which is an element of speech. We have defined speech and have offered some remarks about its character and its origin.