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Augustine, emitted without intention, but we could lose a lot of time wondering about the criteria followed on the left side of the classification. For the present purpose it is enough to remark that the signs of the right side are, as in Abelard, those produced by an intention of the soul, and on this side we, as in Abelard, find again the distinction between a voluntary intention and a natural one. |
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It is definitely interesting that, once again, there is a difference between the crow of the cock taken as a symptom of the presence of the cock and the crow of the cock taken as a somewhat intentional sound emitted in order to communicate. When it appears among the signs ordinata ab anima, it is called cantus galli; when it appears among signa naturalia, it is defined by an infinitive construction: "gallum cantare," the fact that the cock crows. It is, as the Stoics would have said, an "incorporeal," a symptomatic sequence of events. As such it can be interpreted by human beings: "cantus galli nihil proprie nobis significat tamquam vox significativa sed gallum cantare significat nobis horas." |
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Bacon does not arrive where Augustine dared to, that is, he is not putting the barking of the dog and the word of God under the same headings. But as Abelard did, he does not consider the voice uttered by the animal (when the animal communicated by a natural impulse) only as a mere symptom. His description of animal language is as sensitive as the Augustinian one: dogs, hens, and pigeons, in his examples, are not mere topoi but "real" animals observed with naturalistic interest in their usual behavior. |
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The Baconian classification mirrors a new attitude toward nature and direct experience. Bacon has a sharp feeling for the relativity of human languages, but also for the necessity of learning languages. He is strongly convinced that cocks crow and dogs bark in order to communicate to their interspecific mates. Perhaps we do not understand their language in the very sense in which a Greek does not understand a Latin, and vice versa, but the ass is understood by the ass, the lion by the lion. For humans it is enough to have a little training and, as Latins understand Greeks, it will be possible to understand the language of beasts: such a conclusion is reached a little later by the Pseudo-Marsilius of Inghen. |
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Thus the night of the Middle Ages seems to be haunted by a crowd of barking dogs and crying sick people: the landscape designed by so many theoretical pages cannot but suggest a more real landscape of stray dogs running through the streets of medieval cities while people, not yet comforted by aspirin, celebrated with uncontrolled lamenta- |
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