the words, may on occasion identify themselves with either of
the two functional units; more often they mediate between the two
extremes, embodying one or more radical notions and also one or more
subsidiary ones. We may put the whole matter in a nutshell by saying
that the radical and grammatical elements of language, abstracted as
they are from the realities of speech, respond to the conceptual world
of science, abstracted as it is from the realities of experience, and
that the word, the existent unit of living speech, responds to the unit
of actually apprehended experience, of history, of art. The sentence is
the logical counterpart of the complete thought only if it be felt as
made up of the radical and grammatical elements that lurk in the
recesses of its words. It is the psychological counterpart of
experience, of art, when it is felt, as indeed it normally is, as the
finished play of word with word. As the necessity of defining thought
solely and exclusively for its own sake becomes more urgent, the word
becomes increasingly irrelevant as a means. We can therefore easily
understand why the mathematician and the symbolic logician are driven to
discard the word and to build up their thought with the help of symbols
which have, each of them, a rigidly unitary value.

But is not the word, one may object, as much of an abstraction as the
radical element? Is it not as arbitrarily lifted out of the living
sentence as is the minimum conceptual element out of the word? Some
students of language have, indeed, looked upon the word as such an
abstraction, though with very doubtful warrant, it seems to me. It is
true that in particular cases, especially in some of the highly
synthetic languages of aboriginal America, it is not always easy to say
whether a particular element of language is to be interpreted as an
independent word or as part of a larger word. These transitional cases,
puzzling as they may be on occasion, do not, however, materially weaken
the case for the psychological validity of the word. Linguistic
experience, both as expressed in standardized, written form and as
tested in daily usage, indicates overwhelmingly that there is not, as a
rule, the slightest difficulty in bringing the word to consciousness as
a psychological reality. No more convincing test could be desired than
this, that the naive Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of the
written word, has nevertheless no serious difficulty in dictating