Pointing and Depicting

The great literary critic, I. A. Richards wrote of the ‘contrast between discourse which primarily points and discourse which in one way or another, in some degree depicts’, noting that it is ‘parallel with many accounts of contrasts between sciences and poetries’. ¹ In the preceding chapters we have been concerned with the picturing discourse and its relationship to feeling in the emergence of self. In brief, we have been discussing the growth of symbolization. ‘Symbols,’ wrote Hobson, ‘unlike signals, represent rather that point.’ ²