LA GUERRA COMO INSTRUMENTO DE LA POLÍTICA

GRAPHIC language, comprising dictation and reading, contains articulate language in its complete mechanism (auditory channels, central channels, motor channels), and, in the manner of development called forth by my method, is based essentially on articulate language.

(a) That of the conquest of a new language of eminent social importance which adds itself to the articulate language of natural man; and this is the cultural significance which is commonly given to graphic language, which is therefore taught in the schools without any consideration of its relation to spoken language, but solely with the intention of offering to the social being a necessary instrument in his relations with his fellows.

(b) That of the relation between graphic and articulate language and, in this relation, of an eventual possibility of utilising the written language to perfect the spoken: a new

consideration upon which I wish to insist and which gives to graphic language a physiological importance.

Moreover, as spoken language is at the same time a natural function of man and an instrument which he utilises for social ends, so written language may be considered in itself, in its formation, as an organic ensemble [Page 311] of new mechanisms which are established in the nervous system, and as an instrument which may be utilised for social ends.

In short, it is a question of giving to written language not only a physiological importance, but also a period of development independent of the high functions which it is destined to perform later.

It seems to me that graphic language bristles with difficulties in its beginning, not only because it has heretofore been taught by irrational methods, but because we have tried to make it perform, as soon as it has been acquired, the high function of teaching the written language which has been fixed by centuries of perfecting in a civilised people.

Think how irrational have been the methods we have used! We have analysed the graphic signs rather than the physiological acts necessary to produce the alphabetical signs; and this without considering that any graphic sign is difficult to achieve, because the visual

representation of the signs have no hereditary connection with the motor representations necessary for producing them; as, for example, the auditory representations of the word have with the motor mechanism of the articulate language. It is, therefore, always a difficult thing to provoke a stimulative motor action unless we have already established the

movement before the visual representation of the sign is made. It is a difficult thing to arouse an activity that shall produce a motion unless that motion shall have been previously established by practice and by the power of habit.

Thus, for example, the analysis of writing into little straight lines and curves has brought us to present to the child a sign without significance, which therefore does [Page 312] not interest him, and whose representation is incapable of determining a spontaneous motor impulse. The artificial act constituted, therefore, an effort of the will which resulted for the child in rapid exhaustion exhibited in the form of boredom and suffering. To this effort was added the effort of constituting synchronously the muscular associations co-ordinating the movements necessary to the holding and manipulating the instrument of writing.

All sorts of depressing feelings accompanied such efforts and conduced to the production of imperfect and erroneous signs which the teachers had to correct, discouraging the child

still more with the constant criticism of the error and of the imperfection of the signs traced. Thus, while the child was urged to make an effort, the teacher depressed rather than revived his psychical forces.

Although such a mistaken course was followed, the graphic language, so painfully learned, was nevertheless to be immediately utilised for social ends; and, still imperfect and

immature, was made to do service in the syntactical construction of the language, and in the ideal expression of the superior psychic centres. One must remember that in nature the spoken language is formed gradually; and it is already established in words when the superior psychic centres use these words in what Kussmaul calls dictorium, in the syntactical grammatical formation of language which is necessary to the expression of complex ideas; that is, in the language of the logical mind.

In short the mechanism of language is a necessary antecedent of the higher psychic activities which are to utilise it.

There are, therefore, two periods in the development of language: a lower one which prepares the nervous [Page 313] channel and the central mechanisms which are to put the sensory channels in relation with the motor channels; and a higher one determined by the higher psychic activities which are exteriorized by means of the preformed mechanisms of language.

Thus for example in the scheme which Kussmaul gives on the

mechanism of articulate language we must first of all distinguish a sort of cerebral diastaltic arc (representing the pure mechanism of the word), which is established in the first formation of the spoken language. Let E

be the ear, and T the motor organs of speech, taken as a whole and here represented by the tongue, A the auditory centre of speech, and M the motor centre. The channels EA and MT are peripheral channels, the former centripetal and the latter centrifugal, and the channel

AM is the inter-central channel of association.

The centre A in which reside the auditive images of words may be again subdivided into three, as in the following scheme, viz.: Sound (So), syllables (Sy), and words (W).

That partial centres for sounds and syllables can really be formed, the pathology of language seems to establish, for in some forms of centro- sensory dysphasia, the patients can pronounce only sounds, or at most sounds and syllables. Small children, too, are, at the beginning, particularly sensitive to [Page 314] simple sounds of language, with which indeed, and especially with s, their mothers caress them and attract their attention; while later the child is sensitive to syllables, with which also the mother caresses him, saying: "ba, ba, punf, tuf! "