We have so far extracted from “Cartesian linguistics” certain characteristic and quite important doctrines regarding the nature of language and have, quite sketchily, traced their development during the period from Descartes to Humboldt. As a by-product of this study of langue, and against the background of rationalist theory of mind, certain views emerged as to how language is acquired and used. After a long interlude, these views are once again beginning to receive the attention that they deserve, although their appearance (like the reappearance of the central ideas of transformational grammar) was, in fact, a largely independent development. The central doctrine of Cartesian linguistics is that the general features of grammatical structure are common to all languages and reflect certain funda- mental properties of the mind. It is this assumption which led the philosophical grammarians to concentrate on “grammaire générale” rather than “grammaire particulière” and which expresses itself in Humboldt’s belief that deep analysis will show a common “form of language” underlying national and individual variety.107 There are, then, certain language universals that set limits to the variety of human language.108 The study of the universal conditions that prescribe the form of any human language is “grammaire générale.” Such universal conditions are not learned; rather, they provide the organizing princi- ples that make language learning possible, that must exist if data are to lead to knowledge. By attributing such principles to the mind, as an innate property, it becomes possible to account for the quite obvious fact that the speaker of a language knows a great deal that he has not learned. In approaching the question of language acquisition and linguistic universals in this way, Cartesian linguistics reflects the concern of seventeenth-century rationalistic psychology with the contribution of the mind to human knowledge. Perhaps the earliest exposition of what was to become a major theme, through- out most of this century, is Herbert of Cherburys De Veritate (1624),109 in which he develops the view that there are certain “principles or notions implanted in the mind” that “we bring to objects from ourselves … [as] … a direct gift of Nature, a precept of natural instinct” (p. 133). Although these Common Notions “are stimulated by objects,” nevertheless, “no one, however wild his views,

imagines that they are conveyed by objects themselves” (p. 126). Rather, they are essential to the identification of objects and the understanding of their properties and relations. Although the “intellectual truths” comprised among the Common Notions “seem to vanish in the absence of objects, yet they cannot be wholly passive and idle seeing that they are essential to objects and objects to them … It is only with their aid that the intellect, whether in familiar or new types of things, can be led to decide whether our subjective faculties have accurate knowledge of the facts” (p. 105). By application of these intellectual truths, which are “imprinted on the soul by the dictates of Nature itself,” we can compare and combine individual sensations and interpret experience in terms of objects, their properties, and the events in which they participate Evidently, these interpretive principles cannot be learned from experience in their entirety, and they may be independent of experience altogether. According to Herbert: [They] are so far from being drawn from experience or observation that, without several of them, or at least one of them, we could have no experience at all nor be capable of observations. For if it had not been written in our soul that we should examine into the nature of things (and we do not derive this command from objects), and if we had not been endowed with Common Notions, to that end, we should never come to distinguish between things, or to grasp any general nature. Vacant forms, prodigies, and fearful images would pass meaninglessly and even dangerously before our minds, unless there existed within us, in the shape of notions imprinted in the mind, that analogous faculty by which we distinguish good from evil. From where else could we have received knowl- edge? In consequence, anyone who considers to what extent objects in their external relationship contribute to their correct perception; who seeks to estimate what is con- tributed by us, or to discover what is due to alien or accidental sources, or again to innate influences, or to factors arising from nature, will be led to refer to these principles. We listen to the voice of nature not only in our choice between what is good and evil, beneficial and harmful, but also in that external correspondence by which we distinguish truth from falsehood, we possess hidden faculties which when stimulated by objects quickly respond to them. (pp. 105–106) It is only by the use of these “inborn capacities or Common Notions” that the intellect can determine “whether our subjective faculties have exercised their perceptions well or ill” (p. 87). This “natural instinct” thus instructs us in the nature, manner, and scope of what is to be heard, hoped for, or desired” (p. 132). Care must be taken in determining what are the Common Notions, the innate organizing principles and concepts that make experience possible. For Herbert, the “chief criterion of Natural Instinct” is “universal consent” (p. 139). But two qualifications are necessary. First, what is referred to is universal consent among “normal men” (p. 105). That is, we must put aside “persons who are out of their minds or mentally incapable” (p. 139) and those who are “headstrong, foolish, weak-minded and imprudent” (p. 125). And although these faculties “may not ever be entirely absent,” and “even in madmen, drunkards, and infants extra- ordinary internal powers may be detected which minister to their safety”

(p. 125), still we can expect to find universal consent to Common Notions only among the normal, rational, and clearheaded. Second, appropriate experience is necessary to elicit or activate these innate principles; “it is the law or destiny of Common Notions and indeed of the other forms of knowledge to be inactive unless objects stimulate them” (p. 120). In this respect, the common notions are like the faculties of seeing, hearing, loving, hoping, etc., with which we are born and which “remain latent when their corresponding objects are not present, and even disappear and give no sign of their existence” (p. 132). But this fact must not blind us to the realization that “the Common Notions must be deemed not so much the outcome of experience as principles without which we should have no experience at all” and to the absurdity of the theory that “our mind is a clean sheet, as though we obtained our capacity for dealing with objects from objects themselves” (p. 132). The common notions are “all intimately connected” and can be arranged into a system (p. 120); and although “an infinite number of faculties may be awakened in response to an infinite number of new objects, all the Common Notions which embrace this order of facts may be comprehended in a few propositions” (p. 106). This system of common notions is not to be identified with “reason.” It simply forms “that part of knowledge with which we were endowed in the primeval plan of Nature,” and it is important to bear in mind that “it is the nature of natural instinct to fulfil itself irrationally, that is to say, without foresight.” On the other hand, “reason is the process of applying Common Notions as far as it can” (pp. 120–121). In focusing attention on the innate interpretive principles that are a precondi- tion for experience and knowledge and in emphasizing that these are implicit and may require external stimulation in order to become active or available to introspection, Herbert expressed much of the psychological theory that under- lies Cartesian linguistics, just as he emphasized those aspects of cognition that were developed by Descartes and, later, by the English Platonists, Leibniz, and Kant.110 The psychology that develops in this way is a kind of Platonism without preexistence. Leibniz makes this explicit in many places. Thus he holds that “nothing can be taught us of which we have not already in our minds the idea,” and he recalls Plato’s “experiment” with the slave boy in the Meno as proving that “the soul virtually knows those things [i.e., truths of geometry, in this case], and needs only to be reminded (animadverted) to recognize the truths. Consequently, it possesses at least the idea upon which these truths depend. We may say even that it already possesses those truths, if we consider them as the relations of the ideas” (§26).111 Of course, what is latent in the mind in this sense may often require appro- priate external stimulation before it becomes active, and many of the innate principles that determine the nature of thought and experience may well be

applied quite unconsciously. This Leibniz emphasizes, in particular, throughout his Nouveaux Essais. That the principles of language and natural logic are known unconsciously112 and that they are in large measure a precondition for language acquisition rather than a matter of “institution” or “training” is the general presupposition of Cartesian linguistics.113 When Cordemoy, for example, considers language acquisition (op. cit., pp. 40ff.), he discusses the role of instruction and condition- ing of a sort, but he also notices that much of what children know is acquired quite apart from any explicit instruction,114 and he concludes that language learning presupposes possession of “wholly developed reason [la raison toute entière] for indeed this way of learning to speak is the result of discernment so great and reason so perfect that it is impossible to conceive of any more marvelous” (p. 59). Rationalist conclusions reappear with some of the romantics as well. Thus A. W. Schlegel writes that “human reason may be compared to a substance which is infinitely combustible but does not burst into flame on its own: a spark must be thrown into the soul” (“De l’étymologie en général,” p. 127). Communication with an already formed intellect is necessary for reason to awaken. But external stimulation is only required to set innate mechanisms to work; it does not determine the form of what is acquired. In fact, it is clear “that this acquisition [of language] through communication already presupposes the ability to invent language” (Kunstlehre, p. 234). In a certain sense, language is innate to man; namely, “in the truer philosophical sense in which everything that, according to the usual view, is innate to man, can only be brought forth through his own activity” (ibid., p. 235). While Schlegel’s precise intentions, with many such remarks, might be debated, in Humboldt the Platonism with respect to language acquisition is quite clear. For Humboldt, “to learn is … always merely to regenerate” (op. cit., p. 126). Despite superficial appearances, a language “cannot properly be taught but only awakened in the mind; it can only be given the threads by which it develops on its own account”; thus languages are, in a sense, “self-creations” [Selbstschöpfungen] of individuals (p. 50; Humboldt 1999: 43–4): Language-learning of children is not an assignment of words, to be deposited in memory and rebabbled by rote through the lips, but a growth in linguistic capacity with age and practice. (p. 71) That in children there is not a mechanical learning of language, but a development of linguistic power, is also proven by the fact that since the major abilities of humans are allotted a certain period of life for their development, all children, under the most diverse conditions, speak and understand at about the same age, varying only within a brief time- span. (p. 72; Humboldt 1999: 58) In short, language acquisition is a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions. The form of

the language that is acquired is largely determined by internal factors; it is because of the fundamental correspondence of all human languages, because of the fact that “human beings are the same, wherever they may be” [der Mensch überall Eins mit dem Menschen ist], that a child can learn any language (p. 73).115 The functioning of the language capacity is, furthermore, optimal at a certain “critical period” of intellectual development. It is important to emphasize that seventeenth-century rationalism approaches the problem of learning – in particular, language learning – in a fundamentally nondogmatic fashion. It notes that knowledge arises on the basis of very scattered and inadequate data and that there are uniformities in what is learned that are in no way uniquely determined by the data itself (see note 114). Consequently, these properties are attributed to the mind, as preconditions for experience. This is essentially the line of reasoning that would be taken, today, by a scientist interested in the structure of some device for which he has only input–output data. In contrast, empiricist speculation, particularly in its modern versions, has character- istically adopted certain a priori assumptions regarding the nature of learning (that it must be based on association or reinforcement, or on inductive procedures of an elementary sort – e.g., the taxonomic procedures of modern linguistics, etc.) and has not considered the necessity for checking these assumptions against the observed uniformities of “output” – against what is known or believed after “learning” has taken place. Hence the charge of a priorism or dogmatism often leveled against rationalistic psychology and philosophy of mind seems clearly to be misdirected. (For further discussion, see the references in note 110.) The strong assumptions about innate mental structure made by rationalistic psychology and philosophy of mind eliminated the necessity for any sharp distinction between a theory of perception and a theory of learning. In both cases, essentially the same processes are at work; a store of latent principles is brought to the interpretation of the data of sense. There is, to be sure, a differ- ence between the initial “activation” of latent structure and the use of it once it has become readily available for the interpretation (more accurately, the deter- mination) of experience. The confused ideas that are always latent in the mind may, in other words, become distinct (see note 111), and at this point they can heighten and enhance perception. Thus, for example, a skilful and expert limner will observe many elegancies and curiosities of art, and be highly pleased with several strokes and shadows in a picture, where a common eye can discern nothing at all; and a musical artist hearing a consort of exact musicians playing some excellent composure of many parts, will be exceedingly ravished with many harmonical airs and touches, that a vulgar ear will be utterly insensible of. (Cudworth, op. cit., p. 446; Cudworth 1996: 109) It is the “acquired skill” that makes the difference; “the artists of either kind have many inward anticipations of skill and art in their minds” that enable them to interpret the data of sense in a way that goes beyond the “mere noise and sound

and clatter” provided by passive sense, just as the informed mind can interpret the “vital machine of the universe” in terms of “interior symmetry and harmony in the relations, proportions, aptitudes and correspondence of things to one another in the great mundane system” (ibid.). Similarly, in looking at and “judging of” a picture of a friend, one makes use of a “foreign and adventitious” but preexistent idea (pp. 456–457; Cudworth 1996: 109). Once this distinction between learning and perception has been noted, however, the essential parallel between the cognitive processes that are involved outweighs the relatively superficial differences, from the point of view of this rationalist doctrine. For this reason, it is often unclear whether what is being discussed is the activity of the mind in perception or in acquisition – that is, in selecting an already distinct idea on the occasion of sense, or in making distinct what was before only confused and implicit. Descartes’s theory of cognition is clearly summarized in his Comments on a Certain Broadsheet (1648): …if we bear well in mind the scope of our senses and what it is exactly that reaches our faculty of thinking by way of them, we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking. So much so that there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience, such as the fact that we judge this or that idea which we now have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgement not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs except certain corporeal motions … But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the sense organs … Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us. The ideas of pain, colours, sounds, and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions. Is it possible to imagine anything more absurd than that all the common notions within our mind arise from such motions and cannot exist without them? I would like our author to tell me what the corporeal motion is that is capable of forming some common notion to the effect that ‘things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other’, or any other he cares to take. For all such motions are particular, whereas the common notions are universal and bear no affinity with, or relation to, the motions. (CSM I, 304–305) Rather similar ideas are developed at length by Cudworth.116 He distin- guished the essentially passive faculty of sense from the active and innate “cognoscitive powers” whereby men (and men alone) “are enabled to under- stand or judge of what is received from without by sense.” This cognoscitive power is not a mere storehouse of ideas, but “a power of raising intelligible ideas and conceptions of things from within itself” (p. 425; Cudworth 1996: 75). The function of sense is “the offering or presenting of some object to the mind, to

give it an occasion to exercise its own activity upon.” Thus, for example, when we look into the street and perceive men walking, we are relying, not merely on sense (which shows us at most surfaces – i.e., hats and clothes – and, in fact, not even objects), but on the exercise of the understanding, applied to the data of sense (pp. 409–410; Cudworth 1996: 57–59).117 The “intelligible forms by which things are understood or known, are not stamps or impressions passively printed upon the soul from without, but ideas vitally protended or actively exerted from within itself.” Thus prior knowledge and set play a large role in determining what we see (e.g., a familiar face in a crowd) (pp. 423–424; Cudworth 1996: 74). It is because we use intellectual ideas in perception “that those knowledges which are more abstract and remote from matter, are more accurate, intelligible and demonstrable, – than those which are conversant about concrete and material things,” as Aristotle has observed (p. 427; Cudworth 1996: 78).118 This claim is illustrated by a discussion of our conceptions of geometrical figures (pp. 455f.; Cudworth 1996: 103ff.). Obviously every sensed triangle is irregular, and if there were a physically perfect one, we could not detect this by sense; “and every irregular and imperfect triangle [is] as perfectly that which it is, as the most perfect triangle.” Our judgments regarding external objects in terms of regular figures, our very notion of “regular figure” therefore have their source in the “rule, pattern and exemplar” which are generated by the mind as an “anticipation.” The concept of a triangle or of a “regular propor- tionate and symmetrical figure” is not taught but “springs originally from nature itself,” as does, in general, the human concept of “pulchritude and deformity in material objects”; nor can the a priori truths of geometry be derived from sense. And it is only by means of these “inward ideas” produced by its “innate cognoscitive power” that the mind is able to “know and understand all external individual things” (p. 482; Cudworth 1996: 101–128 passim). Descartes had discussed the same question in very similar terms, in his Reply to Objections V: Hence, when in our childhood we first happened to see a triangular figure drawn on paper, it cannot have been this figure that showed us how we should conceive of the true triangle studied by geometers, since the true triangle is contained in the figure only in the way in which a statue of Mercury is contained in a rough block of wood. But since the idea of the true triangle was already in us, and could be conceived by our mind more easily than the more composite figure of the triangle drawn on paper, when we saw the composite figure we did not apprehend the figure we saw, but rather the true triangle. (CSM II, 262) For Cudworth, the interpretation of sensory data in terms of objects and their relations, in terms of cause and effect, the relations of whole and part, symmetry, proportion, the functions served by objects and the characteristic uses to which they are put (in the case of all “things artificial” or “compounded natural things”), moral judgments, etc., is the result of the organizing activity of the

mind (pp. 433f.; Cudworth 1996: 83–100). The same is true of the unity of objects (or, for example, of a melody); sense is like a “narrow telescope” that provides only piecemeal and successive views, but only the mind can give “one comprehensive idea of the whole” with all its parts, relations, proportions, and Gestalt qualities. It is in this sense that we speak of the intelligible idea of an object as not “stamped or impressed upon the soul from without, but upon occasion of the sensible idea excited and exerted from the inward active and comprehensive power of the intellect itself” (p. 439; Cudworth 1996: 91).119 Ideas of this sort regarding perception were common in the seventeenth century but were then swept aside by the empiricist current, to be revived again by Kant and the romantics.120 Consider, for example, Coleridge’s remarks on active processes in perception: Instances in which a knowledge given to the mind quickens and invigorates the faculties by which such knowledge is attainable independently cannot have escaped the most ordinary observer, and this is equally true whether it be faculties of the mind or of the senses … It is indeed wonderful both how small a likeness will suffice a full apprehen- sion of sound or sight when the correspondent sound or object is foreknown and foreimagined and how small a deviation or imperfection will render the whole confused and indistinguishable or mistaken where no such previous intimation has been received. Hence all unknown languages appear to a foreigner to be spoken by the natives with extreme rapidity and to those who are but beginning to understand it with a distressing indistinction.121 Does nature present objects to us without exciting any act on our part, does she present them under all circumstances perfect and as it were ready made? Such may be the notion of the most unthinking … not only must we have some scheme or general outline of the object to which we could determine to direct our attention, were it only to have the power of recognizing it …122 It is, once again, with Humboldt that these ideas are applied most clearly to the perception and interpretation of speech. He argues that there is a fundamen- tal difference between the perception of speech and the perception of unarticu- lated sound (cf. note 38). For the latter, “an animal’s sensory capacity” would suffice. But human speech perception is not merely a matter of “mere mutual evocation of the sound and the object indicated” (Verschiedenheit, p. 70; Humboldt 1999: 57). For one thing, a word is not “an impression of the object in itself, but rather of its image, produced in the soul” (p. 74). But, furthermore, speech perception requires an analysis of the incoming signal in terms of the underlying elements that function in the essentially creative act of speech production, and therefore it requires the activation of the generative system that plays a role in production of speech as well, since it is only in terms of these fixed rules that the elements and their relations are defined. The underlying “rules of generation” must, therefore, function in speech perception. If it were not for its mastery of these, if it were not for its ability “to actualize every

possibility” the mind would no more be able to deal with the mechanisms of articulated speech than a blind man is able to perceive colors. It follows, then, that both the perceptual mechanisms and the mechanisms of speech production must make use of the underlying system of generative rules. It is because of the virtual identity of this underlying system in speaker and hearer that communi- cation can take place, the sharing of an underlying generative system being traceable, ultimately, to the uniformity of human nature (cf. pp. 101–102 above and note 115). In brief, There can be nothing present in the soul, save by one’s own activity, and understanding and speaking are but different effects of this power of speech. Conversing together is never comparable with a transfer of material. In the understander, as in the speaker, the same thing must be developed from the inner power of each; and what the former receives is merely the harmoniously attuning stimulus … In this way language in its entirety resides in every human being, which means, however, nothing else but that everyone possesses an urge governed by a specifically modified, limiting and confining power, to bring forth gradually the whole of language from within himself, or when brought forth to understand it, as outer or inner occasion may determine. But understanding could not, as we have just found, be based upon inner spontaneity, and communal speech would have to be something other than mere mutual arousal of the hearer’s speech capacity, did not the diversity of individuals harbor the unity of human nature, fragmented only into separate individualities. (p. 70; Humboldt 1999: 57 [with modifications]) Even in the case of perception of a single word, an underlying system of generative rules must be activated. It would be inaccurate, Humboldt maintains, to suppose that speaker and hearer share a store of clear and totally formed concepts. Rather, the perceived sound incites the mind to generate a correspond- ing concept by its own means: [People] do not understand one another by actually exchanging signs for things, nor by mutually occasioning one another to produce exactly and completely the same concept; they do it by touching in one another the same link in the chain of their sensory ideas and internal conceptualizations, by striking the same note on their mental instrument, where- upon matching but not identical concepts are engendered in each. (p. 213; Humboldt 1999: 152) In short, speech perception requires internal generation of a representation both of the signal and the associated semantic content. Contemporary research in perception has returned to the investigation of the role of internally represented schemata or models123 and has begun to elaborate the somewhat deeper insight that it is not merely a store of schemata that function in perception but rather a system of fixed rules for generating such schemata.124 In this respect too, it would be quite accurate to describe current work as a continuation of the tradition of Cartesian linguistics and the psychol- ogy that underlies it.