TIIE IMAGINATIVE UNIVERSAL
23
fied: ideas and modes of signification or language mutually require each
other. The connection involved here is therefore logicai and not causai.
This is a Cardinal point, which had often been completely misunder-
stood by other philosophers28, many of whom had treated language as a
useful, but not necessary, aspect of our relationship to thè world as we
understand it. A reference to Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Un-
derstanding, may be helpful here. In thè Essay, in which thè concept of
an idea is so fundamental as to amount almost to a philosophy of ideas,
ideas are taken to be constituents present to thè mind that are causally
dependent upon sense perception, while language stands at one further
remove, thus implying that there could be perception without ideas and
ideas without language29. But this is a wholly mistaken conception, al-
beit widely shared at thè time. Ideas cannot be some sort of phenome-
nal objects which arise causally from thè contents of perception and
stand somewhere between perception and language. In fact, they are not
in any sense objects at all, mental or otherwise: they are simply what it is
that we understand when we understand thè different semantic elements
and relationships involved in language. Thus to understand thè meaning
of thè expression ‘Edinburgh has a population of three quarters of a mil-
lion people’ is not to have some sort of mental image of Edinburgh with
an associated image of three quarters of a million people, nor even to
know that thè word ‘Edinburgh’ denotes a particular city, though that is
part of what is required, but to know also how thè word ‘Edinburgh’ re-
lates to other linguistic expressions, such as ‘thè capital of Scotland’ and
‘thè name of a city’ and to know that thè name ‘Edinburgh’ and thè ex­
pression ‘thè capital of Scotland’ can be interchanged in different sen-
tences without change of truth value, as in ‘thè city named Edinburgh
lies on thè east coast of Scotland’ and ‘thè capitai of Scotland lies on thè
east coast of Scotland’.
28 In particular, by thè British empiricists, all of whom, with thè exception of Berkeley,
shared thè assumption, developed initially by Locke, that ideas were in some sense, derived
from, and copies of, thè contents of sense perception
29 There are so many ambiguities in Locke’s use of thè word ‘idea’, that it is not possible
at this point to attempt to give anything more than this crude description of thè way in which
thè notion is employed in thè Essay. At I, I, 8, however, he says of thè word ‘idea’ that it is
«that term which serves best to stand for whatever is thè object of thè understanding when a
man thinks» but, unfortunately, he then adds that he has used it to express «whatever is meant
by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is that thè mind can be employed about in think-
ing and 1 could not avoid frequently using it». I describe this addendum as ‘unfortunate’ be-
cause thè items mentioned in it are of entirely different types, including images, concepts and
thoughts and, by associating them, Locke converted concepts onto some kind of object pre­
sent in or to thè mind, i.e., some kind of mental image.
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