CHAP. III. of spech ex 122. This will appear more evident, and the exaggerated notions of the school of Hobbes as to the absolute necessity of language to the mutual Necessity relations of mankind will be checked by considering aggerated. what was not so well understood in his age as at present, the intellectual capacities of those who are born deaf, and the resources which they are able to employ. It can hardly be questioned, but that a number of families thrown together in this unfortunate situation, without other intercourse, could by the exercise of their natural reason, as well as the domestic and social affections, constitute themselves into a sort of commonwealth, at least as regular as that of ants and bees; and if the want of language would deprive them of many advantages of polity, it would also secure them from much fraud and conspiracy. But those whom we have known to want the use of speech, have also wanted the sense of hearing, and have thus been shut out from many assistances to the reasoning faculties, which our hypothesis need not exclude. The fair supposition is that of a number of persons merely dumb, and although they would not have laws or learning, it does not seem impossible that they might maintain at least a patriarchal, if not a political, society for many generations. Upon the lowest supposition, they could not be inferior to the Chimpanzees, who are said to live in communities in the forests of Angola. names. 123. The succession of conceptions in the mind Use of depending wholly on that they had one to another when produced by the senses, they cannot be recalled at our choice and the need we have of III. CHAP. them, "but as it chanceth us to hear and see such things as shall bring them to our mind. Hence brutes are unable to call what they want to mind, and often, though they hide food, do not know where to find it. But man has the power to set up marks or sensible objects, and remember thereby somewhat past. The most eminent of these are names or articulate sounds, by which we recall some conception of things to which we give those names; as the appellation white bringeth to remembrance the quality of such objects as produce that colour or conception in us. It is by names that we are capable of science, as for instance that of number; for beasts cannot number for want of words, and do not miss one or two out of their young, nor could a man without repeating orally or mentally the words of number, know how many pieces of money may be before him."* We have here another assumption, that the numbering faculty is not stronger in man than in brutes, and also that the former could not have found out how to divide a heap of coins into parcels without the use of words of number. The experiment might be tried with a deaf and dumb child. Names universal not realities. 124. Of names some are proper, and some common to many or universal, there being nothing in the world universal but names, for the things named are every one of them individual and singular. "One universal name is imposed on many things for their similitude in some quality or other accidents; and whereas a proper name * Hum. Nat. c. 5. III. bringeth to mind one thing only, universals recall CHAP. any one of those many."* "The universality of one name to many things hath been the cause that men think the things are themselves universal, and so seriously contend that besides Peter and John, and all the rest of the men that are, have been, or shall be in the world, there is yet something else that we call man; viz., man in general, deceiving themselves by taking the universal or general appellation for the thing it signifieth. † For if one should desire the painter to make him the picture of a man, which is as much as to say, of a man in general, he meaneth no more, but that the painter should chuse what man he pleaseth to draw, which must needs be some of them that are, or have been, or may be, none of which are universal. But when he would have him to draw the picture of the king, or any particular person, he limiteth the painter to that one person he It is plain therefore that there is chuseth. * Lev. c. 4. "An universal," he says in his Logic, "is not a name of many things collectively, but of each taken separately (sigillatim sumptorum). Man is not the name of the human species, in general, but of each single man, Peter, John and the rest, separately. Therefore this universal name is not the name of any thing existing in nature, nor of any idea or phantasm formed in the mind, but always of some word or name. Thus when an animal, or a stone, or a ghost (spectrum) or any thing else is called universal, we are not to understand that any man or stone or any thing else was, or is, or can be, an universal, but only that these CHAP. nothing universal but names, which are therefore called indefinite." * III. How im posed. 125. "By this imposition of names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations." Hence he thinks that though a man born deaf and dumb might by meditation know that the angles of one triangle are equal to two right ones, he could not, on seeing another triangle of different shape, infer the same without a similar process. But by the help of words, after having observed the equality is not consequent on any thing peculiar to one triangle, but on the number of sides and angles which is common to all, he registers his discovery in a proposition. This is surely to confound the antecedent process of reasoning with what he calls the registry, which follows it. The instance, however, is not happily chosen, and Hobbes has conceded the whole point in question, by admitting that the truth of the proposition could be observed, which cannot require the * Hum. Nat. c. 5. as + It may deserve to be remarked that Hobbes himself, nominalist as he was, did not limit reasoning to comparison of propositions, some later writers have been inclined to do, and as in his objections to Descartes, he might seem to do himself. This may be inferred from the sentence quoted in the text, and more expressly, though not quite perspicuously, from a passage in the Computatio, sive Logica, his Latin treatise published after the Leviathan. Quomodo autem animo sine verbis ta cita cogitatione ratiocinando addere et subtrahere solemus uno aut altero exemplo ostendendum est. Si quis ergo e longinquo aliquid obscurè videat, etsi nulla sint imposita vocabula, habet tamen ejus rei ideam eandem propter quam impositis nunc vocabulis dicit eam rem esse corpus. Postquam autem propius accesserit, videritque eandem rem certo quodam modo nunc uno, nunc alio in loco esse, habebit ejusdem ideam novam, propter quam nunc talem rem animatam vocat, &c. p. 2. III. use of words.* He expresses the next sentence with CHAP. more felicity. "And thus the consequence found in one particular comes to be registered and remembered as an universal rule, and discharges our mental reckoning of time and place; and delivers us from all labour of the mind saving the first, and makes that which was found true here and now to be true in all times and places." + continued. 126. The equivocal use of names makes it often The subject difficult to recover those conceptions for which they were designed "not only in the language of others, wherein we are to consider the drift and occasion and contexture of the speech, as well as the words themselves, but in our own discourse, which being derived from the custom and common use of speech, representeth unto us not our own conceptions. It is therefore a great ability in a man, out of the words, contexture and other circumstances of language to deliver himself from equivocation, and to find out the true meaning of what is said; and this is it we call understand *The demonstration of the thirty-second proposition of Euclid could leave no one in doubt whether this property were common to all triangles, after it had been proved in a single instance. It is said, however, to be recorded by an ancient writer, that this discovery was first made as to equilateral, afterwards as to isosceles, and lastly as to other triangles. Stewart's Philosophy of Human Mind, vol. ii. chap. iv. sect. 2. The mode of proof must have been different from that of Euclid. And this might possibly lead us to suspect the truth of the tradition. For if the equality of the angles of a triangle to two right angles |