Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/14

2 the naming, classing, and knowing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not also here? Comte is quite right in laying stress on the fact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, must be already past. No subjective state, whilst present, is its own object; its object is always something else. There are, it is true, cases in which we appear to be naming our present feeling, and so to be experiencing and observing the same inner fact at a single stroke, as when we say "I feel tired," "I am angry," &c. But these are illusory, and a little attention unmasks the illusion. The present conscious state, when I say "I feel tired," is not the direct feeling of tire ; when I say "I feel angry," it is not the direct feeling of anger. It is the feeling of saying-I-feel-tired, of saying-I-feel-angry',—entirely different matters, so different that the fatigue and anger apparently included in them are considerable modifications of the fatigue and anger directly felt the previous instant. The act of naming them has momentarily detracted from their force.

The only sound grounds on which the infallible veracity of the introspective judgment might be maintained, are empirical. If we have reason to think it has never yet deceived us, we may continue to trust it. This is the ground actually maintained by Herr Mohr in a recent little work. "The illusions of our senses," says this author, "have undermined our belief in the reality of the outer world; in the sphere of inner observation our confidence is intact, for we have never found ourselves to be in error about the reality of an act of thought or feeling. We have never been misled into thinking we were not in doubt or in anger when these conditions were really states of our consciousness."

But, sound as the reasoning here is, I fear the premisses are not correct; and I propose in this article to supplement Mr. Sully's chapter on the Illusions of Introspection, by showing what immense tracts of our inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities.

When we take a rapid general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its different portions. Our mental life, like a bird's life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and