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questions, and possible for the first time to frame them explicitly and
thereby open a door on explicit, if remote, answers. The prospect is
liberating. A revival of interest in abstract underlying forms and in
universal grammar announces a linguistic science commensurate with
the magnitude of its subject. It -subordinates objectivity to insight; it
removes the exaggerated premium set on operational tactics and the
accumulation of evidence (evidence is embarrassingly plentiful now, in
contrast to explanations) . Linguists are turning again
to
the study of mind.
This orientation gives hope that ·sometime, by specifying universals
of linguistic structure, linguists may reach sound inferences about the
structure of our mental capacities. Already, generative grammar has
collaborated with work in p-sychology to make simplistic models of
learning, perceiving, thinking, and behaving quite untenable. Certainly
the notion that we learn by reinforcement of unguided responses and
perceive by classification fails in the case of speech, which would be
impossible for an "empty organism." In short, we seem
to
have over–
estimated for a time the role of experience, while neglecting that of mind.
What one learns and knows may, as Chomsky ·says, reflect "not so much
the course of one's experience, but rather the general character of one's
capacity to acquire knowledge, in the traditional sense, one's innate
ideas and innate principles."
Richard Ohmann
THE IMAGINATION GOES TO COLLEGE
THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION. By Northrop Frye. India na University
Press. $4.50.
The Educated Imagination
will be of little importance to those
familiar with Mr. Frye's critical position. Originally a series of six radio
talks, it might serve as an introduction for those who have managed some–
how
to
isolate themselves from the incessant din of academic quarrels
and who prefer the prose of extension-course lecturing to the anfractuosi–
ties of scholastic argument. For the rest of us,
The Educated Imagination
may start an intellectual hare or two, but the chase will lead across
terrain that has already been mapped in greater detail by Mr. Frye's
previous books. Here is the same synoptic vision of literature as an alI–
encompassing system, a field of study that may be taught as surely as
an -adequate training in physics may tum out competent scientists, what–
ever the measure of each ·student's individual genius and natural endow-
