Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/253

233 THE STREAM OF TROUOET. 233 speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an un- modified feeling an impossibility ; for to every brain-modi- fication, however small, must correspond a change of equal amount in the feeling which the brain subserves. All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure and single and not combined into 'things.' Even then we should have to confess that, however we might in ordinary conversation speak of getting the same sensation again, we never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so ; and that whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elemen tary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus, that we never descend twice into the same stream. But if the assumption of ' simple ideas of sensation ' recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought ! For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our suc- cessive views of the same thing. We wonder hoAv we ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter. We have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows ; the women, once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common ; the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable exist- ences ; the pictures so empty ; and as for the books, what was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more