rcise of self-conscious attention. At least to begin
with, for habit soon makes the association nearly as automatic as any
and more rapid than most.

But we have traveled a little too fast. Were the symbol "house"--whether
an auditory, motor, or visual experience or image--attached but to the
single image of a particular house once seen, it might perhaps, by an
indulgent criticism, be termed an element of speech, yet it is obvious
at the outset that speech so constituted would have little or no value
for purposes of communication. The world of our experiences must be
enormously simplified and generalized before it is possible to make a
symbolic inventory of all our experiences of things and relations; and
this inventory is imperative before we can convey ideas. The elements of
language, the symbols that ticket off experience, must therefore be
associated with whole groups, delimited classes, of experience rather
than with the single experiences themselves. Only so is communication
possible, for the single experience lodges in an individual
consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable. To be
communicated it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly
accepted by the community as an identity. Thus, the single impression
which I have had of a particular house must be identified with all my
other impressions of it. Further, my generalized memory or my "notion"
of this house must be merged with the notions that all other individuals
who have seen the house have formed of it. The particular experience
that we started with has now been widened so as to embrace all possible
impressions or images that sentient beings have formed or may form of
the house in question. This first simplification of experience is at the
bottom of a large number of elements of speech, the so-called proper
nouns or names of single individuals or objects. It is, essentially, the
type of simplification which underlies, or forms the crude subject of,
history and art. But we cannot be content with this measure of reduction
of the infinity of experience. We must cut to the bone of things, we
must more or less arbitrarily throw whole masses of experience together
as similar enough to warrant their being looked upon--mistakenly, but
conveniently--as identical. This house and that house and thousands of
other phenomena of like character are thought of as having enough in
common, in spite of great and obvious differences of detail, to be
classed