actual life. And this instinctive expression of volition and emotion is,
for the most part, sufficient, often more than sufficient, for the
purposes of communication.

There are, it is true, certain writers on the psychology of language[9]
who deny its prevailingly cognitive character but attempt, on the
contrary, to demonstrate the origin of most linguistic elements within
the domain of feeling. I confess that I am utterly unable to follow
them. What there is of truth in their contentions may be summed up, it
seems to me, by saying that most words, like practically all elements of
consciousness, have an associated feeling-tone, a mild, yet none the
less real and at times insidiously powerful, derivative of pleasure or
pain. This feeling-tone, however, is not as a rule an inherent value in
the word itself; it is rather a sentimental growth on the word's true
body, on its conceptual kernel. Not only may the feeling-tone change
from one age to another (this, of course, is true of the conceptual
content as well), but it varies remarkably from individual to individual
according to the personal associations of each, varies, indeed, from
time to time in a single individual's consciousness as his experiences
mold him and his moods change. To be sure, there are socially accepted
feeling-tones, or ranges of feeling-tone, for many words over and above
the force of individual association, but they are exceedingly variable
and elusive things at best. They rarely have the rigidity of the
central, primary fact. We all grant, for instance, that _storm_,
_tempest_, and _hurricane_, quite aside from their slight differences of
actual meaning, have distinct feeling-tones, tones that are felt by all
sensitive speakers and readers of English in a roughly equivalent
fashion. _Storm_, we feel, is a more general and a decidedly less
"magnificent" word than the other two; _tempest_ is not only associated
with the sea but is likely, in the minds of many, to have obtained a