Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/259

239 THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 239 liave a hnoiuledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul's last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own last states. He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling ; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what Peter's present thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be matter for future consideration. But whatever past feel- ings appear with those qualities must be admitted to re- ceive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a com- mon self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, al- though not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past. Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as * chain ' or ' train ' do not de- scribe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed ; it flows. A ' river ' or a ' stream ' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let lis call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. But now there appears, even within the limits of the same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are produced by sudden contrasts in the quality of the successive segments of the stream of thought. If the words 'chain' and 'train' had no natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all ? Does not a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain ? Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new object,