ition, and it can only
be conceived as a statement of activity carried out by a person (or
thing) other than you or me. It is not so with such a word as the
English _act_. _Act_ is a syntactic waif until we have defined its
status in a proposition--one thing in "they act abominably," quite
another in "that was a kindly act." The Latin sentence speaks with the
assurance of its individual members, the English word needs the
prompting of its fellows. Roughly speaking, to be sure. And yet to say
that a sufficiently elaborate word-structure compensates for external
syntactic methods is perilously close to begging the question. The
elements of the word are related to each other in a specific way and
follow each other in a rigorously determined sequence. This is
tantamount to saying that a word which consists of more than a radical
element is a crystallization of a sentence or of some portion of a
sentence, that a form like _agit_ is roughly the psychological[79]
equivalent of a form like _age is_ "act he." Breaking down, then, the
wall that separates word and sentence, we may ask: What, at last
analysis, are the fundamental methods of relating word to word and
element to element, in short, of passing from the isolated notions
symbolized by each word and by each element to the unified proposition
that corresponds to a thought?

[Footnote 79: Ultimately, also historical--say, _age to_ "act that
(one)."]

The answer is simple and is implied in the preceding remarks. The most
fundamental and the most powerful of all relating methods is the method
of order. Let us think of some more or less concrete idea, say a color,
and set down its symbol--_red_; of another concrete idea, say a person
or object, setting down its symbol--_dog_; finally, of a third concrete
idea, say an action, setting down its symbol--_run_. It is hardly
possible to set down these three symbols--_red dog run_--without
relating them in some way, for example _(the) red dog run(s)_. I am far
from wishing to state that the proposition has always grown up in this
analytic manner, merely that the very process of juxtaposing concept to
concept, symbol to symbol, forces some kind of relational "feeling," if
nothing else, upon us. To certain syntactic adhesions we are very
sensitive, for example, to the attributive relation of quality (_red
dog_) or the subjective relation (_dog run_) or the objective relation
(_kill dog_), to others we are more indifferent, for exampl