Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/26

 14 WILLIAM JAMES. innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto coelo other than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it ; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalising effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words. Again, what is the strange difference between an experi- ence tasted for the first time and the same experience recog- nised as familiar, as having been enjoyed before, though we cannot name it or say where or when ? A tune, an odour, a flavour sometimes carry this inarticulate feeling of their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that we are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. But strong and characteristic as this psychosis is it probably is due to the submaximal excitement of wide-spreading associational brain-tracts the only name we have for all its shadings is " sense of familiarity ". When we read such phrases as " naught but," " either one or the other," "a is b, but," "although it is, neverthe- less," "it is an excluded middle, there is no tertium quid," and a host of other verbal skeletons of logical relation, is it true that there is nothing more in our minds than the words themselves as they pass ? What then is the meaning of the words which we think we understand as we read ? What makes that meaning different in one phrase from what it is in the other? "Who?" "What?" "When?" "Where?" Is the difference of felt meaning in these interrogatives no- thing more than their difference of sound ? And is it not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and under- stood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it, though so impalpable to direct examination ? Is not the same true of such negatives as " no," " never," " not yet " ? The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever. Sensorial images are stable psychic facts ; we can hold them still and look at them as long as we like. These bare images of logical movement on the contrary are psychic transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be