Victorian epistemological debates surrounding the role of language and the relation between thought processes and knowledge, and therefore consciousness, were the legacy of the linguistic turn that took place at the end of the eighteenth century when the philosophical, a priori method of understanding language was abandoned for a historical, a posteriori one. In the nineteenth century, language was no longer conceived as a fixed form, but as a growing and developing medium. It was this shift in understanding that gave a model of thought for Darwin's evolutionary theory and that afforded new depths of investigation. It was against this backdrop that Lady Welby elaborated her significs theory of language, sign, and meaning. She focused on the interrelation between signs, meaning, and value, not only at the level of verbal language, but throughout the universe to show a fundamental continuity between the natural and cultural world as she believed that the universe is permeated with meaning.
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