On intelligence Author:Hippolyte Taine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and for two millions of men, the first term invariably calls up the second. III. Suppose now that instead of dwelling on the word Tuileries, and calling up th... more »e different images connected with it, I glance quickly at a phrase like this :—" There are many public gardens in Paris, both small and great, some no bigger than a drawing-room, others as large as a park, the Jardin des Plantes, the Luxembourg, the Bois de Boulogne, the Tuileries, the Champs Elysees, the squares, besides the new parks which are being laid out, all very neat and well looked after." I ask the ordinary reader who has just gone through this list with ordinary speed, if, when his eye ran over the word Tuileries, he saw mentally, as before, some fragmentary image, some patch of blue sky appearing through trees, the attitude of some statue, some vaguely extending avenue, the sparkling of water in a basin?— Assuredly not, his eye ran over it too quickly; there is a notable difference between this and the preceding operation. In the first, the sign aroused pictures more or less faded of the sensation, revivals more or less enfeebled of the experience; in the second, the sign did not arouse them. In the one case, the two links of the couple appear; in the other, the first link alone appears. Between these two operations are an infinite number of intermediate states occupying the whole interval; these states connect the intense half-sight with the dry notation, by a series of degradations, rubbings out, and losses, which strip by degrees the complete and puissant image, till they leave us nothing but a simple word. This word so reduced is not however a lifeless symbol, without trace of signification ; it is more like the trunk of a tree, stripped indeed of its leaves and branches, but capable of reproducing them ...« less