Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/36

 24 WILLIAM JAMES. thing, says simply "Because . . . ," and is satisfied; or when a man, after hearing a long plan, says " No ! we cannot do it so, . . . " ; each of them draws a line of definite relation between some substantive thing and a term not realised in the thought, but hidden out of sight and towards which the thinker merely points or looks. Let us continue to use the name " topic " to designate the substantive reality towards which each of the incomplete thoughts looks, and to some conclusion from or about which the whole procession of them will probably lead. We, as outside observers of the thoughts, knowing them in this their function of being connected with it, have a perfect right to say that they are " thoughts concerning this topic ". But we are absolutely wrong if we say that their object is the topic, or that the topic is present to them, or that they are in any direct way "of" or "about" it. We then not only thrust into them our object, and the object of another thought with which they are only remotely connected ; but we by the same act excuse ourselves from seeking and if we chance to seek, prevent ourselves from finding what their own immediate objects really are. Every thought has its own object immediately present to it ; and the only question in each particular case is as to what that object is. For the traditional psychologists, how- ever, who say that many differing thoughts may have the same object, the great question is, how is that object present to them all, since they seem to resemble each other as little as they do. And the difficulties of answering that question are such that we find as clear-headed writers on the whole as Reid and Stewart throwing up the sponge. Even in sense-perception, they say, the reality is no more represented by our feeling than it is in our most remotely and indirectly referential thought. There is never the least resemblance or consanguinity between the thing we know and the feeling's content. The latter is merely a signal to awaken the UnowUdge of the thing, which knowledge is an act of pure intelligence, of which absolutely nothing can be said, and whose connexion with the signal is for us an arbitrary and unintelligible fact. Now the truth is that in certain selected cases the signal is the reality. In complete sense-perception, for example, we normally believe that we see the latter face to face. Of what we have called the incomplete thoughts, however, this reality is only the "topic"; that is, a whole procession of them may occur without the reality's features being once directly present therein ; but yet be a procession that takes