and other senses besides hearing and sight—causes an impression of one sensory order to be automatically and involuntarily linked on to an impression of another totally different order. In other words, we may say that the one impression becomes the symbol of the other impression, for a symbol—which is literally a throwing together—means that two things of different orders have become so associated that one of them may be regarded as the sign and representative of the other.
There is, however, another still more natural and fundamental form of symbolism which is entirely normal, and almost, indeed, physiological. This is the tendency by which qualities of one order become symbols of qualities of a totally different order because they instinctively seem to have a similar effect on us. In this way, things in the physical order become symbols of things in the spiritual order. This symbolism penetrates indeed the whole of language; we can not escape from it. The sea is deep and so also may thoughts be; ice is cold and we say the same of some hearts; sugar is sweet, as the lover finds also the presence of the beloved; quinine is bitter and so is remorse. Not only our adjectives, but our substantives and our verbs are equally symbolical. To the etymological eye every sentence is full of metaphor, of symbol, of images that, strictly and originally, express sensory impressions of one order, but, as we use them to-day, express impressions of a totally different order. Language is largely the utilization of symbols. This is a well-recognized fact which it is unnecessary to elaborate.[1]
An interesting example of the natural tendency to symbolism, which may be compared to the allied tendency in dreaming, is furnished by another language, the language of music. Music is a representation of the world—the internal or the external world—which, except in so far as it may seek to reproduce the actual sounds of the world, can only be expressive by its symbolism. And the symbolism of music is so pronounced that it is even expressed in the elementary fact of musical pitch. Our minds are so constructed that the bass always seems deep to us and the treble high. We feel it incongruous to speak of a high bass voice or a deep soprano. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this and the like associations are fundamentally based, that there are, as an acute French philosophic student of music, Dauriac (in an essay "Des Images Suggerées par l'Audition musicale") has expressed it, "sensorial correspondences," as, indeed, Baudelaire had long since divined; that the motor image is that which demands from the listener the minimum of effort; and that music almost constantly evokes motor imagery.[2]
- ↑ Ferrero, in his "Lois Psychologiques du Synibolisme" (1895), deals broadly with symbolism in human thought and life.
- ↑ The motor imagery suggested by music is in some persons profuse and apparently capricious, and may be regarded as an anomaly comparable to a synesthesia. Heine was an example of this and he has described in "Florentine
