Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/25

 ON SOME OMISSIONS OF INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 13 Let me, by a few examples, bring the fact home for which I contend ; let me show how a state of mind may be quite specific and at the same time quite inarticulate ; let me exhibit some of the modifications that are probably due to nascent and waning excitements of the brain. Suppose three successive persons say to us : " Wait ! " " Hark ! " " Look ! " Our consciousness is thrown in^o three quite different attitudes of expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of the three cases. Counting out different actual bodily attitudes, and counting out the reverberating images of the three words, which are of course diverse, probably no one will deny the existence of a residual conscious affection, a sense of the direction from which an impression is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there. Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names hark, look, and wait. Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein ; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direc- tion, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed- for term. If wrong names are proposed, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding, my con- sciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall the name of Bowles. Here some ingenious persons will say: "How can the two consciousnesses be different when the terms which might make them different are not there ? All that is there, so long as the effort to recall is vain, is the bare effort itself. How should that differ in the two cases ? You are making it seem to differ by prema- turely filling it out with the different names, although these, by the hypothesis, have not yet come. Stick to the two efforts as they are, without naming them after facts not yet existent, and you'll be quite unable to designate any point in which they differ." Designate, truly enough. We can only designate the difference by borrowing the names of objects not yet in the mind. Which is to say that our psychological vocabulary is wholly inadequate to name the differences that exist, even such strong differences as these. But namelessness is compatible with existence. There are