Language and Reason

As we have seen, ‘experience’, according to the (proto-)pragmatist conception, could no longer be confined to the thoughts and feelings of a single, clearly defined body, but was taken to ramify across the unbounded historical and spatial field in relation to which individual lives unfold. As a result, the distinctions between inside and outside, the past and the present, the conscious and the unconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary, as well as the ‘animal organism’ and the ‘social organism’, inevitably started to blur. ‘Who shall draw the line,’ Samuel Butler asks, between that which is and that which is not part of the human self. ‘There is no line possible. Everything melts away into everything else; there are no hard edges; it is only from a little distance that we see the effect as of individual features and existences.’ It barely needs saying that this general blurring of boundaries responded to, and was influenced by, the rise of evolutionary theory, with the most hotly debated of all dividing lines being that between the human and the animal. Yet, one of the most noteworthy aspects of this debate was that it compelled even some of the most stalwart defenders of the development hypothesis to reconsider their own kind of being anew, ‘from a little distance’, so as to work out what, in spite of all similarities, might still render the animal other than themselves.

A welcome way to answer this question, to be unpacked in this chapter, was suggested by the emergent science of language. For it was the use of words and symbols that was widely considered to make the difference between the physical world of feelings and sensations, and the ideal world of representations and thoughts. While humans were taken to share the material world with their animal kin, it was the ideal sphere in which ‘man’ was considered to shape ‘the programme’ peculiar to his very own human ‘existence’, as Lewes puts it in a representative statement. ‘Language is the creator and sustainer of that Ideal World in which the noblest part of human activity finds a theatre, the world of Thought and Spiritual Insight, of Knowledge and Duty, loftily elevated above that of Sense and Appetite’ (P I, 154).