Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/621

Rh not, of course, all distinctly, or all together; otherwise, our mental picture of an orange would be as vivid and all-embracing as the sight of the actual orange itself.

Now, the name orange calls up more or less definitely the picture of several among these separate qualities. But it doesn't call them all up; indeed, the word in itself may not perhaps call up any of them. For instance, in the phrase, the Prince of Orange, where identical symbols meet the eye, I don't think of the fruit at all; I think, according to circumstances and context, either of William III of blessed memory, or of the eldest son of the present King of the Netherlands, whose memory (in Paris especially) is somewhat more doubtful. An Orangeman and an orange-woman are not, as one might innocently imagine, correlative terms. Even without this accidental ambiguity, derived from the name of the town of Orange on the Rhone, the word orange need not necessarily connote anything more than the color by itself; as when we say that Miss Terry's dress was a deep yellow or almost orange. Nay, when we actually mean the fruit in person, not the tree, flower, or color, the picture called up will be different according to the nature of the phrase in which the word occurs. For, if I am talking about ordering dessert, the picture in my mind is that of five yellow fruits, piled up pyramid-wise on a tall center-dish; whereas, if I am talking to a botanical friend, my impression is rather that of a cross-section through a succulent fruit (known technically as a hesperidium), and displaying a certain familiar arrangement of cells, dissepiments, placentas, and seeds. In short, the word orange, instead of being a single unity, localizable in a single ganglion, represents a vast complex, of which now these elements are uppermost in consciousness and now those, but which seems to demand for its full realization an immense co-operation of very diverse and numerous brain-organs.

Every thought, even the simplest, involves for its production the united or associated action of a vast mass of separate brain-cells and separate brain-fibers. One thought differs from another dynamically rather than statically. It differs as running differs from dancing—not because different muscles are employed, but because the same muscles are employed in a different manner.

Trains of thought are therefore like a quadrille. One set of exercises is followed by another, which it at once suggests or sets in motion.

Of course, I do not mean to deny that every cell and fiber in the brain has its own particular use and function, any more than I would deny that each particular muscle in the body is intended to pull a particular bone or to move a particular definite organ. But what I do mean is that each such separate function is really elementary or analytical: its object is to assist in forming a conception or idea, not to contain, as it were, a whole conception ready made. Chinese