This has been done, in great measure, already, in the corollaries to the twelfth proposition. I will here insert some observations of a like kind, which would have interrupted the reader too much in that place, but may properly follow the account of language given in this section.
Let a, b, c, d, &c. the several letters of an alphabet, supposed to be sufficiently extensive for the purpose, represent respectively the several simple sensible pleasures and pains, to which a child becomes subject upon its first entrance into the world. Then will the various combinations of these letters represent the various combinations of pleasures and pains, formed by the events and incidents of human life; and, if we suppose them to be also the words of a language, this language will be an emblem or adumbration of our passage through the present life; the several particulars in this being represented by analogous ones in that.
Thus the reiterated impressions of the simple sensible pleasures and pains made upon the child, so as to leave their miniatures, or ideas, are denoted by his learning the alphabet; and his various associations of these ideas, and of the pleasures and pains themselves, by his putting letters and syllables together, in order to make words: and when association has so far cemented the component parts of any aggregate of ideas, pleasures and pains, together, as that they appear one indivisible idea, pleasure or pain, the child must be supposed by an analogous association to have learnt to read without spelling.
As the child’s words become more and more polysyllabic by composition and decomposition, till at length whole clusters run together into phrases and sentences, all whose parts occur at once, as it were, to the memory, so his pleasures and pains become more and more complex by the combining of combinations; and in many cases numerous combinations concur to form one apparently simple pleasure.
The several relations of words, as derived from the same root, as having the same prepositions and terminations, &c. represent corresponding relations in the compound ideas, pleasures, and pains.
When the complex pleasures and pains, formed from miniatures of the sensible ones, become the means of gaining other and greater pleasures, viz. by fading from frequent repetition, and so becoming mere ideas, or by any other method, we must suppose, that our present knowledge in language is used as a means of attaining farther knowledge in it.
As the sight and sound of words, impressed upon us on common occasions, do not at all suggest the original of these words from simple letters, this being a light in which grammarians and
