Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/18

 6 WILLIAM JAMES. there is no name no entity can exist. All dumb psychic states have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed ; or, if recognised at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts " about " this object or "about" that, the stolid word about engulphing all their delicate idiosyncracies in its monotonous sound. Thus the greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the sub- stantive parts have continually gone on. But the worst consequence of this vicious mode of mang- ling thought's stream is yet to come. From the continuously flowing thing it is, it is changed into a "manifold," broken into bits, called discrete ; and in this condition, approved as its authentic and natural shape by the most opposite schools, it becomes the topic of one of the most tedious and inter- minable quarrels that philosophy has to show. I do not mean to say that the " Associationist " manner of repre- senting the life of the mind as an agglutination in various shapes of separate entities called ideas, and the Herbartiaii way of representing it as resulting from the mutual repug- nancies of separate entities called Vorstellungen, are not con- venient formulas for roughly symbolising the facts. So are the fluid-theories of electricity, the emission-theory of light, the archetype-theory of the skeleton, and the theory that curves are composed of small straight lines. But, if taken as literal truth, I say that any one of these theories is just as false as any other, and leads to as pernicious results. The Associationist and the Herbartiaii psychologies are both false and for one and the same reason, that what God has joined together they resolutely and wantonly put asunder. It would be calamitous for us, a propos of this matter, to get em-bogged in a metaphysical discussion about what real unity and continuity are. So I hasten to say that, by the continuity of the mental stream, all I here contend for is the absence of separate parts in it. It is for the assertors of separate parts to tell us what they mean by their separate- ness a thing which (so far as I know) they have never done, except when the Kaiitians say it is something that nothing short of the agency of categories working under a transcendental Ego can overcome. But, be the definition of the separateness of the parts what it may, the burden of proving its existence lies with its friends. For the stream of our feeling is sensibly continuous, like time's stream. 1 This is surely the natural w T ay of viewing it in 1 Of course I speak only of tracts of it uninterrupted by sleep or other- unconsciousness.