Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/261

241 THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 241 were tlie tliuncler a contiuuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence ; but iQ feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone ; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went be- fore. Here, again, language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them are always things known a moment ago more clearly ; others are things to be known more clearly a moment hence.* Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know. We have anywhere found of all this is in a buried and forgotten paper by the Rev. Jas. Wills, on ' Accidental Association,' in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxi. part i (1846). Mr. Wills writes: " At every instant of conscious thought there is a certain sum of per- ceptions, or reflections, or both together, present, and together constituting one whole state of apprehension. Of this some definite portion maybe far more distinct than all the rest ; and the rest be in consequence propor- tionably vague, even to the limit of obliteration. But still, within this limit, the most dim shade of perception enters into, and in some infinites- imal degree modifies, the whole existing state. This state will thus be in some way modified by any sensation or emotion, or act of distinct attention, that may give prominence to any part of it ; so that the actual result is capable of the utmost variation, according to the person or the occasion. ... To any portion of the entire scope here described there may be a special direction of the attention, and this special direction is recognized as strictly what is recognized as the idea present to the mind. This idea is evidently not commensurate with the entire state of apprehension, and much perplexity has arisen from not observing this fact. However deeply we may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, any consider- able alteration of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; the most abstruse demonstration in this room would not prevent a listener, however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights. Our mental states have always an essential unity, such that each state of appre- hension, however variously compounded, is a single whole, of which every component is, therefore, strictly apprehended (so far as it is apprehended) as a part. Such is the elementary basis from which all our intellectual operations commence."
 * Honor to whom honor is due ! The most explicit acknowledgment I