The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

74 THE STOIC CREED
indispensable to knowledge. As he is carried to and
fro in the nursery, and is
brought
this object and with that, he is laying
impressions that will stand him in good
day. But by means of Language,
into contact with
in a store of
stead some
into which he is
born, he is introduced to knowledge far beyond his
own experience. When he is taught, as he is at the
earliest moment, to call this a dog, that a cat, this
a tree, that a house, and when he hears these animals
and things so denominated in all kinds of circumstances
and with many specific differences (dogs
and colours and in many
"dogs"),
he is
thereby taught
of all sizes
different attitudes are still
to assimilate and to
discriminate in a most effective, albeit unconscious,
fashion, and has, moreover, imparted to
him, through
the word-symbol, the idea of an object, whose complex
could be
presentation (form, size, colour, solidity, etc.)
reduced to unity only after long and laborious effort.
Otherwise put, words are
bottled-up knowledge; and
thereby the process of acquiring knowledge is vastly
hastened and the possibility of further progress
secured.
These, then, are two great advantages that the indi
vidual gets from being a social creature the member
of a family and of a race, and not a simple isolated
unit. As he develops in society, heredity and formed
language tell
powerfully upon him, and show us that
his mind must be viewed as more than a tabula
rasa.
4
Next, objection may
be taken to the doctrine of
apprehending representations." Yet perhaps
it is