Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/30

 18 WILLIAM JAMES. of the sense. But they call this modification, or conceptual character of the word, an act of pure intelligence, ascribe it to a higher region, and deem it not only other than, but even opposite to, all " facts of feeling" whatsoever. Now why may we not side with the Conceptualists in saying that the universal sense of the word does correspond to a mental fact of some kind, but at the same time, agreeing with the Nominalists that all mental facts are modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a "feeling"? Man meant for mankind is in short a different feeling from man as a mere noise, or from man meant for that man, to wit, John Smith alone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when taken universally, the word has one of Mr. Galton's " blended " images of man associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that these blended, or as Prof. Huxley calls them, " generic," images, are equivalent to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as a sharp thing ; and the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on its being felt with its representative function. This function is the mysterious phis, the understood meaning. But it is nothing applied to the image from above, 110 pure act of reason inhabiting a supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. ' It can be diagrammatised as continuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is just that staining, fringe or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of other imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we have so abundantly set forth. 1 If the image come unfringed it reveals but a simple quality, thing, or event ; if it come fringed it reveals something expressly taken universally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought and feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence or absence of " fringe ". And this in turn reduces itself, with much probability, in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub-excitements of an effective degree of ' strength in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges underlie the more definite nucleus, the substan- tive ingredient, of the thought, in this instance, the word or image it may happen to arouse. 1 1 The contrast is not, as the Platonists would have it, between certain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others called acts of relating intelligence ; the former being blind perishing things, knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combine past and future, the north pole and the south, in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep. The contrast is really between two aspects, in which all mental