Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/17

Rh feeling"; and that, "notwithstanding its extreme brevity, its qualitative character is appreciable". The phrase "feeling of relation" will be sure to shock certain fastidious ears, but I nevertheless think we had better use it. Surely if any objective truth whatever can come to be known during, and through the instrumentality of, a feeling, there seems no a priori reason why a relation should not be that truth; or why, since the feeling has no proper subjective name of its own, we should hesitate to psychologise about it as " the feeling of that relation". There is no other way of talking about it at all.

But, though I have praised Mr. Spencer for being the first to use the phrase, I cannot praise him for having seen very deeply into the doctrine. Like most English psychologists, he tries to reduce the number of relations among things to a minimum; and in other passages says they are limited to likeness and unlikeness, coexistence in space and sequence in time. Whether this be true of real relations, does not here concern us. But it is certainly false to say that our feelings of relation are of only these four kinds. On the contrary, there is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward colouring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of 'and, a feeling of 'if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognising the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. In a later place we shall see how the analogy of speech misleads us in still other ways. The Empiricists have always dwelt on its influence hi making us suppose that where we have a separate name, a separate thing must needs be there to correspond with it; and they have rightly denied the existence of the mob of abstract entities, principles and forces, in whose favour no other evidence than this could be brought up. But they have said nothing of the obverse error, which in psychology is just as bad, the error, namely, of supposing that where