Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/427

No. 4.] it. It is one more particular existence which can in no wise transcend itself. Why, then, the duplication of mental elements? The first picture is no less simply a picture because it has a duplicate in attendance.

To the minds of some, I fancy, the effective agent in the business is the belief. It is belief that lifts a mental image to the dignity of a cognition, and endows it with the privilege of breaking through the trammels of its own identity. The conception of belief in popular psychology offers one of the most curious studies in philosophical folk-lore. Belief seems to be an intellectual essence, a magic metaphysical drug, quite distinct from the matter of thought, but having the virtue when plentifully applied thereto, of communicating validity and meaning. It is perhaps worth while for the purposes of our inquiry to turn for a moment to the psychological analysis of belief.

Of the numerous theories of belief – theories that assimilate it to the feelings, to the will, to the phenomena of association, etc. – I select two that are for our purposes fairly typical. The first is that of J. S. Mill, who held that the characteristic which distinguishes a belief from an imagination is an ultimate and irreducible one, a specific feeling. A similar doctrine is clearly expressed in Professor William James's Principles of Psychology:

"In every proposition ..., so far as it is believed, questioned, or disbelieved, four elements are to be distinguished, the subject, the predicate, and their relation (of whatever sort it be) these form the object of belief and finally the psychic attitude in which our mind stands towards the proposition taken as a whole and this is the belief itself."

The 'psychic attitude' in the case of affirmative belief is described as 'a sense of reality,' 'an emotion of conviction' – that is to say, applying Professor James's general principles, probably a bodily sensation of some kind. The psychic attitude is the accompaniment and mental record of an affection of the body – or, as one may say, a physical attitude.

The other theory of belief which I shall mention makes it a 'psychic attitude' in a more literal sense; – not a feeling over