and not any other letters.  If that cognitional act had for its object the spho/t/a—­i.e. something different from the letters of the given word—­then those letters would be excluded from it just as much as the letters of any other word.  But as this is not the case, it follows that that final comprehensive act of cognition is nothing but an act of remembrance which has the letters of the word for its object.—­Our opponent has asserted above that the letters of a word being several cannot form the object of one mental act.  But there he is wrong again.  The ideas which we have of a row, for instance, or a wood or an army, or of the numbers ten, hundred, thousand, and so on, show that also such things as comprise several unities can become the objects of one and the same cognitional act.  The idea which has for its object the word as one whole is a derived one, in so far as it depends on the determination of one sense in many letters[203]; in the same way as the idea of a wood, an army, and so on.  But—­our opponent may here object—­if the word were nothing else but the letters which in their aggregate become the object of one mental act, such couples of words as jara and raja or pika and kapi would not be cognised as different words; for here the same letters are presented to consciousness in each of the words constituting one couple.—­There is indeed, we reply, in both cases a comprehensive consciousness of the same totality of letters; but just as ants constitute the idea of a row only if they march one after the other, so the letters also constitute the idea of a certain word only if they follow each other in a certain order.  Hence it is not contrary to reason that the same letters are cognised as different words, in consequence of the different order in which they are arranged.

The hypothesis of him who maintains that the letters are the word may therefore be finally formulated as follows.  The letters of which a word consists—­assisted by a certain order and number—­have, through traditional use, entered into a connexion with a definite sense.  At the time when they are employed they present themselves as such (i.e. in their definite order and number) to the buddhi, which, after having apprehended the several letters in succession, finally comprehends the entire aggregate, and they thus unerringly intimate to the buddhi their definite sense.  This hypothesis is certainly simpler than the complicated hypothesis of the grammarians who teach that the spho/t/a is the word.  For they have to disregard what is given by perception, and to assume something which is never perceived; the letters apprehended in a definite order are said to manifest the spho/t/a, and the spho/t/a in its turn is said to manifest the sense.

Or let it even be admitted that the letters are different ones each time they are pronounced; yet, as in that case we necessarily must assume species of letters as the basis of the recognition of the individual letters, the function of conveying the sense which we have demonstrated in the case of the (individual) letters has then to be attributed to the species.