Notes: On Grammar...

Grammar is an experimental knowledge of the usages of languages as generally current among poets and prose writers.  It is divided into six parts:

1.  Trained reading with due regard to prosody [versification]

2.  Exposition, according to poetic figures [rhetoric]

3.  Ready statement of dialectical peculiarities and allusion

4.  Discovery of etymologies

5.  The accurate account of analogies

6.  Criticism of poetical productions which is the noblest part of grammatical art.

The function of language is threefold;  to communicate thought, volition and emotion.

Volition (desires) or appetition (appetites) may be expressed by cries or exclamations, as when a baby cries or a dog barks for food.

Imitation:  an imitation is an artificial likeness, for example, a painting, photograph, cartoon, statue, pantomime, a gesture such as threatening with a clenched fist or rejecting by pushing away with the hands, and picture writing.

Symbol:  a symbol is an arbitrary sensible sign having a meaning imposed on it by convention.

A percept is like a portrait being painted by the artist while she looks at the model.

A phantasm is like that same portrait possessed and looked at whenever one wishes for years afterward although the person painted is absent or even dead.

There are four internal senses:  the imagination, the sensuous memory, the common or central or synthesizing sense, and instinct.

The intellect through abstraction produces the concept.  The imagination is the meeting ground between the senses and the intellect.  From the phantasms in the imagination, the intellect abstracts that which is common and necessary to all the phantasms of similar objects ( for example trees and chairs);  this is the essence (that which makes a tree a tree and that which makes a chair a chair).  The intellectual apprehension of this essence is the general or universal concept (of a tree or a chair).

A general concept is a universal idea existing only in the mind but having its foundation outside the mind in the essence which exists in the individual and makes it the kind of thing it is.  Therefore, a concept is not arbitrary although the word is.  Truth has an objective norm in the real.