Significs [Encyclopedia Britannica] (1911)

Abstract

“The term “Significs” may be defined as the science of meaning or the study of significance, provided sufficient recognition is given to its practical aspect as a method of mind, one which is involved in all forms of mental activity…” These are the opening lines of Lady Welby’s article on Significs in the famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica—an edition that functioned as a hinge of European intellectual life. The article was written in the same year as her Significs and Language, London 1911, Macmillan & Co. Her famous article and the specific encyclopedia volume is reprinted in Petrilli: Signifying and Understanding, 2009. We offer here the integral version as a cornerstone of the path from significs/semiotics toward a deeper understanding of meaning and signification processes as the source of meaning.

Signifying and interpreting are two major interests in law. They are also a condition of mental human achievement. The innumerable forms of protection, precaution, artificial aid and special facilities, which modern civilization implies and provides and to which it is always adding, have changed their context and conditions. In modern culture we realized that through disuse we have partly lost these greatest and most universal human prerogatives. So we need to recover and develop the power of interpretation in a world, which is essentially significant to any human being. These conditions apply not only to linguistics but to all forms of human energy and expression, which before all else must be significant in the most active, as the highest, sense and degree.