III.  EXPRESSION OF IDEAS ACQUIRED THROUGH LANGUAGE

+25.  Language as a Medium through Which Ideas are Acquired.+—­We have been considering language as a means of expression, an instrument by which we can convey to others the ideas which come to us from experience and imagination.  We shall now consider it from a different point of view.  Language is not merely a means of expressing ideas, but it is also a medium through which ideas are acquired.  It has a double use:  the writer must put thought into language; the reader must get it out.  A large part of your schooling has been devoted to acquiring ideas from language, and these ideas may be used for purposes of composition. Since it is absolutely necessary to have ideas before you can express them, it will be worth while to consider for a time how to get them from language.

+26.  Image Making.+—­Read the following selection from Hawthorne and form a clear mental image of each scene:—­

At first, my fancy saw only the stern hills, lonely lakes, and venerable woods.  Not a tree, since their seeds were first scattered over the infant soil, had felt the ax, but had grown up and flourished through its long generation, had fallen beneath the weight of years, been buried in green moss, and nourished the roots of others as gigantic.  Hark!  A light paddle dips into the lake, a birch canoe glides around the point, and an Indian chief has passed, painted and feather-crested, armed with a bow of hickory, a stone tomahawk, and flint-headed arrows.  But the ripple had hardly vanished from the water, when a white flag caught the breeze, over a castle in the wilderness, with frowning ramparts and a hundred cannon....  A war party of French and Indians were issuing from the gate to lay waste some village of New England.  Near the fortress there was a group of dancers.  The merry soldiers footing it with the swart savage maids; deeper in the wood, some red men were growing frantic around a keg of the fire-water; and elsewhere a Jesuit preached the faith of high cathedrals beneath a canopy of forest boughs.

Did you form clear mental images?  Can you picture them all at the same time, or must you turn your attention from one image to another?  The formation of the proper mental images will be aided by making a persistent effort to create them.

Many words do not cause us to form images; for example, goodness, innocence, position, insurance; but when the purpose of a word is to set forth an image, we should take care to get the correct one.  In this the dictionary will not always help us.  We must distinguish between the ability to repeat a definition and the power to form an accurate image of the thing defined.  The difficulty of forming correct images by the use of dictionary definitions is so great that the definitions are frequently accompanied by pictures.

EXERCISES