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From a great body of well-attested observations, showing what may be called the logical quality of the mind of these creatures, I may be allowed to select a few stories which have a singular denotative value.
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.
The sympathetic and affectionate quality of our barnyard fowl is perhaps best indicated by the singular variety and denotative value of their various calls and cries. Those who know these birds well will find no difficulty in recognizing about a score of diverse sounds, each of which indicates a particular turn of their mind.
The first detail we must attend to is the choice of words. Tennyson's task, in the lines that we have just considered, was comparatively easy. He was writing about certain sounds; and it was not especially difficult for him to imitate those sounds with the words that he selected to denote them. In every language those words which are denotative of sounds are nearly always also imitative of them.
The real Caesar, for example, wrote a manuscript of which I see a real reprint, and say 'the Caesar I mean is the author of THAT. The workings of my thought thus determine both its denotative and its connotative significance more fully. It now defines itself as neither irrelevant to the real Caesar, nor false in what it suggests of him.
The writer with the gift of style forehears a web of rhythm into which he weaves such words as may be denotative of his thought; and all the while that he is striving to be definite and clear, he carries in his mind a subtle sense of the harmonic accompaniment of consonants, the melodious eloquence of vowels.
The denotative power of the term 'atman, which is thus proved by itself, is moreover confirmed by the complementary passages 'it desired, may I send forth the worlds', 'it desired, may I be many, may I grow forth. We thus arrive at the following conclusion: Brahman, which by the passage 'Being only this was in the beginning' is established as the sole cause of the world, possessing all those manifold wonderful attributes which are ascertained from the complementary passages, is, in the text under discussion, referred to as something already known, by means of the term 'ether. Here terminates the adhikarana of' ether.
The French, who are more precise than we in their use of denotative terms, are accustomed to divide their novelistic fiction into what they call the roman, the nouvelle, and the conte.
The Bromide is reflective, and the object is thrown back unchanged, unanalyzed; it is accepted without interrogation. The mirrored bromidic mind gives back only what it has taken. To use the phraseology of Harvard and Radcliffe, the Sulphite is connotative, the Bromide denotative. But the theory is constructive rather than destructive. It makes for content, and peace.
Of this view the Sutra disposes by saying 'that which abides in the moving and the non-moving, &c. The meaning is the terms which abide in, i.e. are connected with, the different moving and non-moving things, and hence denote those things, possess with regard to Brahman a denotative power which is not 'bhakta, i.e. secondary or figurative, but primary and direct.
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