Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/29

 OX SOME OMISSIONS OF INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 17 and flesh of its flesh ; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thiny it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood. What is that shadowy scheme of the "form" of an opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on which we pass judgment when the actual thing is done ? What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical system ? Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process. ~Ye all of us have this per- manent consciousness of whither our thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen. This field of view of consciousness varies very much in extent, depending largely on the degree of mental freshness or fatigue. When very fresh, our minds carry an immense horizon with them. The present image shoots its perspective far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which He the thoughts as yet un- born. Under ordinary conditions the halo of felt relations is much more circumscribed. And in states of extreme brain-fag the horizon is narrowed almost to the passing word, the associative machinery, however, providing for the next word turning up in orderly sequence, until at last the tired thinker is led to some kind of a conclusion. At certain moments he may find himself doubting whether his thoughts have not come to a full stop ; but the vague sense of a plus ultra makes him ever struggle on towards a more definite expression of what it may be ; whilst the slowness of his utterance shows how difficult, under such conditions, the labour of thinking must be. In the light of such considerations as these, the old dispute between Nominalism and Conceptualisni seems to receive the simplest of solutions. The Nominalists say that, when we use the word man, meaning mankind, there is in the mind nothing more than either a sound or a particular image, plus certain tendencies which those elements have to awaken an indefinite number of images of particular men, or of other images (verbal or not) which "make sense" with mankind, but not with any individual. These " tendencies " are, however, for them mere physical facts, and not modes of feeling the word as it is uttered. The Conceptualists, on the other hand, see perfectly well that at the very moment of uttering the word, or even before uttering it, we know whether it is to be taken in a universal or a particular sense ; and they see that there is some actual present modifi- cation of the mind which is equivalent to an understanding 2