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Show 92 Additional Notes. the pleasure, which they have afforded to many of our senses: ~s to our sense of warmth, of touch, of smell, of taste, hunger and thust; and secondly, which bear any analogy of form to such objects. When the babe, soon after it is born into this cold world, is applied to its mother's bosom, its sense of perceiving warmth is first agreeably affected; next its sense of smell is delighted with the odour of her milk; then its taste is gratified by the flavour of it, afterwards the appetites of hunger and of thirst afford pleasure by the possession of their objects, and by the subsequent digestion of the aliment; and lastly, the sense of touch is delighted by the softness and smoothness of the milky fountain, the source of such variety of hap- }liness. 93 ADDITIONAL NOTES. XIV. THE THEORY AND STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. Next to each thought associate sound accords, And forms the dulcet symphony of words. CANTo III. ]. 365. lnE~~ consist of synchronous motions or configurations- of the ext~~m1t1es of th~ o:gans of s~nse; these when repeated by sensation, vohtwn,. or assocmtwn, are either simple or complex, as they were first exc1ted by irritation; or have afterwards some parts abstracted from them.' or some parts added to them. Language consists, of words, wh1ch are the names or symbols of ideas. Words are therefore properly all of them nouns or names of things. Little had been done in the investigation of the theory of languaO'e from the time of Aristotle to the present rera, till Mr. Horne Took~e,. the ingenious and learned author of the Diversions of Purley, explained those undeclined words of all languages, which had puzzled the grammarians, and evinced from their etymology, that they were abbreviations of other modes of expression. 1\llr. Tooke observes, that the first aim of language was to communicate our thoughts, and . the second to do it with dispatch; and hence he divides words into those, which were necessary to express our thoughts, and those which are abbreviations of the former; which he ingeniously styles the wings of Hermes. For the greater dispatch of conversation many words suggest more than one idea; I shall therefore arrange them according to the number and kinds of ideas, which they suggest; and am induced to do this, as a new distribution of the objects of any science may advance the knowledge of it by developing another analogy of its constituent parts. And in thus endeavouring to analyze the theory of language I mean to speak primarily of the English, and occasionaUy to add what may occur concerning the structure of the Greek and Latin. |