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This notion is due to the bias that Latin grammar has given us. It is not always, however, that we can clearly set off the suffixes of a language as a group against its prefixes. In probably the majority of languages that use both types of affixes each group has both delimiting and formal or relational functions.
It is our object to make this background as rich and full and orderly as possible, so that whatever is brought to the focus of consciousness shall be set in a relational background, which shall give it meaning; and so that our pupils may be able to feel the truth which Browning puts into the mouth of Fra Lippo Lippi: This world's no blot for us Nor blank; it means intensely and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink."
Spirituality, which might have resided in the elementary values, sensuous or passionate, before the relational process supervened, can now exist only in the ultimate activity to which these processes are instrumental.
It is a somewhat venturesome and yet not an altogether unreasonable speculation that sees in word order and stress the primary methods for the expression of all syntactic relations and looks upon the present relational value of specific words and elements as but a secondary condition due to a transfer of values. This sort of evolution by transfer is traceable in many instances.
All the whats as well as the thats of reality, relational as well as terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception. Yet the remoter unperceived arrangements, temporal, spatial, and logical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know as well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help.
In fact, the sense of relation is here the essence of the object itself, and the activity of passing from term to term, far from taking us beyond our presentation to something extrinsic, constitutes that presentation. The pleasure of this relational activity is therefore the pleasure of conceiving a determined form, and nothing could be more thoroughly a formal beauty.
It would seem a little far-fetched to make of masculinity and femininity, crassly material, philosophically accidental concepts that they are, a means of relating quality and person, person and action, nor would it easily occur to us, if we had not studied the classics, that it was anything but absurd to inject into two such highly attenuated relational concepts as are expressed by "the" and "that" the combined notions of number and sex.
If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own exists in any sense less for itself or less distinctly, when it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there distinguished and defined.
My own view is a belief in the relational theory both of space and of time, and of disbelief in the current form of the relational theory of space which exhibits bits of matter as the relata for spatial relations. The true relata are events.
What we are doing in these sentences is what most languages, in greater or less degree and in a hundred varying ways, are in the habit of doing throwing a bold bridge between the two basically distinct types of concept, the concrete and the abstractly relational, infecting the latter, as it were, with the color and grossness of the former.
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