United States or Tunisia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
WE ARE DISPOSED, AS AN INCURABLE MENTAL VICE, TO ACCUMULATE INTENSION IN TERMS. If I say to you Wodget or Crump, you find yourself passing over the fact that these are nothings, these are, so to speak mere blankety blanks, and trying to think what sort of thing a Wodget or a Crump may be.
Nevertheless Ponocrates, to divert him from this vehement intension of the spirits, thought fit, once in a month, upon some fair and clear day, to go out of the city betimes in the morning, either towards Gentilly, or Boulogne, or to Montrouge, or Charanton bridge, or to Vanves, or St.
Then he ostentatiously and with the widest publicity declared his intension to make restitution. Such a cackling sensation it made! The price of Erie stock at once bounded up, and his brokers sold quantities of it to his great accruing profit.
It is as if the force evolving in living forms, being a limited force, had had to choose between two kinds of limitation in the field of natural or innate knowledge, one applying to the extension of knowledge, the other to its intension.
This indeed is the tradition of language, and to-day even, we, when we hear a name, are predisposed and sometimes it is a very vicious disposition to imagine forthwith something answering to the name. We are disposed, as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate intension in terms.
For what love gains in intension it is apt to lose in extension; so that in practice it may even come to frustrate the very end it seeks, limiting instead of expanding, narrowing just in proportion as it deepens, and, by causing the disruption of all other ties, impoverishing the natures it should have enriched. Or don't you think that this happens sometimes, for instance in married life?"
But there is another higher part of language that is not so abjectly tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and has its being in the field of concepts rather than percepts, which, to use Earle's distinction, is symbolic and not presentative, that describes thinking that is not mere contiguity in space or sequence in time but that is best in the far higher and more mental associations of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical terminology, is connotative and not merely denotative, that has extension as well as intension, that requires abstraction and generalization.
But we must guard against such terms and the mental danger of excessive intension they carry with them. The child takes a stick and says it is a sword and does not forget, he takes a shadow under the bed and says it is a bear and he half forgets.
The correct physiological conception of the most perfect physical life is that which will continue the longest in use, not that which can display the greatest muscular force. The ideal is one of extension, not of intension. Religious art indicates the gradual recognition of these principles.
But whereas at the beginning the community was the narrow and exclusive community of the family or tribe, at the end it is a community which may include all mankind. Thus, the idea of God has increased in its extension. In its intension, so to speak, it has deepened: God is disclosed not as the master and king of his subjects and servants, but as the Father in heaven of his children on earth.
Word Of The Day