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CHAPTER II.

UNIT OF EXPRESSION THE SENTENCE.

A form of speech which hath a beginning and an end within itself, and is of such length as to be easily comprehended at once.-ARISTOTLE.

ONSIDERED as an internal consciousness, the recog

CONSIDERED

nition of congruence or confliction between two objects of thought is called a judgment; as expressed in language, it is called a proposition. An act of thought is thus a process of comparison in which three elements are involved the determined or qualified notion, technically called the Subject; the determining or qualifying notion, called the Predicate, the affirmation or denial of identity between these two, called the Copula. The regular form for the copula is, affirmatively, the substantive 'is'; negatively, 'is not.' Thus

Philosophy is the science of realities.-Emerson.

Each is bound to all.-Spencer.

Heaven is not to be expected in this world.—Dr. A. Alexander. It should here be remarked that copula and predicate often coalesce, as

Do to-day thy nearest duty.-Goethe.

Men can now believe everything but the Bible.-Napoleon.

A single proposition, however much expanded by the modification of its essential parts, constitutes a simple sentence:

Artists are nearest God.-Holland.

The human heart refuses to believe in a universe without a purpose.--Kant.

Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought, borne by the electric pulse. -Bryant.

If the sentence consists of several propositions, one of which is leading and the others dependent or subordinate, it is said to be complex:

The command that the waters should be gathered was the command that the earth should be sculptured.-Ruskin.

The most foolish of all errors is, that clever young heads think that they lose their originality when they recognize the truth which has already been recognized by others.-Goethe.

The highest minds live in thought with the great dead far more than [they live] with the living, and, next to the dead, with those ideal human beings yet to come, whom they are never destined to see.-Comte.

If the sentence consists of two or more coördinate combinations of subject, predicate, and copula, it is said to be compound. The mutually independent divisions- often called members-may themselves be complex:

I did not fall into love I rose into love.-Bulwer.

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Not only strike while the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking.-Cromwell.

The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled.-Lowell.

A judgment may be expressed categorically —

To do is to succeed.-Schiller.

Conditionally

Could we rest, we must become smaller in soul.-Robertson.

Old truths are always new to us, if they come with the smell of Heaven upon them.-Bunyan.

Imperatively

Love me, and tell me so sometimes.-Gail Hamilton.

Interrogatively

In this God's world, with its wild whirling eddies and mad foam oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law and judgment for an unjust thing sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice?-Carlyle.

Emotionally, that is, in the form technically known as exclamatory

Hang it! how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked! — Lamb.

For the collocation of words, every language has its peculiar usage. If inflected, there is large scope for variety in the arrangement, since verbal relations are indicated by terminal syllables. If uninflected, like modern English, the relation of words is determined by the relation of thoughts, syntax is positional, and logical analysis precedes grammatical. Hence we find here a prescribed order, according to which the subject precedes the predicate, the object follows the verb, and modifying words are placed as near as practicable to the words modified. This syntactical and customary succession is observed so long as it coincides with the usual order of thought. To express the latter suitably, however, the former is sometimes violated. Such a departure is called inversion. Whatever fixes the attention most strongly, or excites the passion of the speaker, will naturally seek utterance first. Thus we are told that the preaching of Paul at Ephesus produced a general uproar, in which the people cried without intermission, 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians!' Observe that the translators would have destroyed the signature of impetuosity by adhering to the habitual order, which is the order of a cool and temperate mood.

Sentences, whether simple, complex, or compound, obviously fall into two great classes-long and short. The first gives gravity and dignity to composition, but requires careful handling and a high degree of elaboration, that

the clauses be properly arranged, and the leading subject be retained prominently before the mind. If too long or too frequent, the effect is to fatigue by the difficulty of perceiving clearly the connection of the several parts, and of taking in the whole at one view. The second, requiring less attention, and easier to understand, always suits a brisk and brilliant movement; but, wanting the cement of thought, the connections, the 'hooks-and-eyes of the memory,' they are not so easily remembered. 'Like idle morning visitors,' says Coleridge, 'the brisk and breathless periods hurry in and hurry off in quick and profitless succession; each indeed for the moment of its stay prevents the pain of vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth; but all together they leave the mistress of the house (the soul, I mean) flat and exhausted, incapable of attending to her own concerns, and unfitted for the conversation of more rational guests.' The long sentence, full of additions or exceptions, clumsy and unwieldy, prevails in German literature; the short, in French. 'Kant,' says De Quincey, 'might naturally enough have written a book from beginning to end in one vast hyperbolical sentence.' But, 'A long, involved sentence could not be produced from French literature, though a sultan were to offer his daughter in marriage to the man who should find it.' Long sentences characterize the writings of Hooker, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Johnson, Gibbon, De Quincey; short ones, the essays of Bacon, the works of Addison, Lamb, Macaulay, Emerson. Some authors exhibit an equal proportion of both. The most pleasing effect, as a rule, calls for an intermixture of the two- the stately and the sprightly. The following are examples of each:

To

It is not hard to die. It is harder a thousand times to live. die is to be a man. To live is only to try to be one. To live is to see God through a glass darkly. To die is to see him face to face. To live is to be in the ore. To die is to be smelted and come out

pure gold. To live is to be in March and November. To die is to find midsummer where there is perfect harmony and perfect beauty. -Beecher.

Our immense extent of fertile territory opening an inexhaustible field for successful enterprise, thus assuring to industry a certain reward for its labors, and preserving the lands for centuries to come from the manifold evils of an overcrowded and consequently degraded population; our magnificent system of federated republics, carrying out and applying the principles of representative democracy to an extent never hoped or imagined in the boldest theories of the old speculative republican philosophers, the Harringtons, Sydneys, and Lockes of former times; the reaction of our political system upon our social and domestic concerns, bringing the influence of popular feeling and public opinion to bear upon all the affairs of life in a degree hitherto wholly unprecedented; the unconstrained range of freedom of opinion, of speech, and of the press, and the habitual and daring exercise of that liberty upon the highest subjects; the absence of all serious inequality of fortune and rank in the condition of our citizens; our divisions into innumerable religious sects, and the consequent co-existence, never before regarded as possible, of intense religious zeal with a degree of toleration in feeling and perfect equality of rights; our intimate connection with that elder world beyond the Atlantic, communicating to us, through the press and emigration, much of good and much of evil not our own; high science, refined art, and the best knowledge of old experience, as well as prejudices and luxuries, vices and crimes, such as could not have been expected to spring up in our soil for ages; all these, combined with numerous other peculiarities in the institutions, and in the moral, civil, and social condition of the American people, have given to our society, through all its relations, a character exclusively its own.-Choate.

I intrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables. If a melancholy thought is importunate, I give another glance at my Spencer. When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally; I like to lean my head against them.-Hunt.

Whether long or short, sentences may be further classified into periodic and loose. The criterion of the former is, that the parts remain suspended in the mind till the

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