Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/35

 ON SOME OMISSIONS OF INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 23 previous sentence, for example, is not simply " the sins we commit," nor "the sins we commit as psychologists," nor " the sins we commit as psychologists naming the objects of thoughts ". Its object is nothing short of the entire sen- tence ; and if we wish to speak of it substantively, we must make a substantive of it by writing it out in full with hyphens between all its words. Nothing short of this can possibly name its delicate idiosyncracy. And if we wish to feel that idiosyncracy we must reproduce the thought as it was uttered, with eveiy word fringed and the whole sentence bathed in that original halo of obscure relations, which, like an horizon, then spread about its meaning. In this " fringing " may be included a feeling of continuity with flic prf:ri<, vs thoughts, of there having been no breach of topic, but of the main interest and problem being unchanged. This would justify us psychologists in saying that the "topic " of the successive thoughts was still steel-pens, even although steel-pens as substantive images had long ceased to be pre- sent, and were not represented verbally even in pronominal form. But can anyone pretend, in strict psychology, that the " topic " these incomplete thoughts are said to be " of" or " about," stands in the same relation to the thoughts them- selves as that in which the " reality," steel-pens, stood to the complete thought we began with ? Does it hold the same relation to them that the steel-pen holds to me, as I now take it in my hand and watch it write ? Most as- suredly not : the so-called topic is the immediate object of the complete thought, and of my thought. Each of the incomplete thoughts, whilst we say it is "of" that same topic, has all the time its own immediate object, which stands in the place the topic stands in in the complete thought and in mine. Exactly what that object is, is a question very hard to answer introspectively, when the thought is incomplete and transitive, and it has sped, and its light is out. We may safely say, however, that rontinuiti/-v:ith-tlie- compl'f,-thou>ikt, or with whatever previous thought first brought the topic on the tapis, enters into the object of each of the incomplete thoughts, so far as they can be truly said to be " about " that topic. They do not envelop the topic in a substantive manner, they are thrown at it merely. Their relation to it is that of a sense of the direction in which it lies. That directions unmarked by explicit and substantive termini are among the most frequently dis- criminated objects of our thinking, is a point that needs no proof. When a child, asked for the reason of some-