Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/289

269 THE STREAM OF TEOVQHT. 269 heard * a thunder-clap I was frightened, and looked up at the sky, fear- ing he was speaking a threatening word." t Here we may pause. The reader sees by this time that it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind- stuff, in what quality of imagery, his thinking goes on. The only images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of rela- tion are everything, and the terms related almost naught. These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the same in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the same. Let A be some experience from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to the conclusion by one line, another by another ; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual images pre- dominate ; with another, tac- tile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not ; some are very abridged, syn- thetic and rapid, others, liesi- fig. 28. tating and broken into many steps. But when the penul- timate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se, finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond shocks and jars that can be felt, even when so slight as to be unnoticed by those who can hear. f Quoted by Samuel Porter : ' Is Thought possible without Language ? ' in Princeton Review, 57th year, pp. 108-12 (Jan. 1881 ?). Cf. also W. W. Ireland : The Blot upon the Braiu (1886), Paper X, part ii ; G. J. Romanes : Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 81-83, and references therein made. Prof. Max Muller gives a very complete history of this controversy in pp. 30-64 of his ' Science of Thought ' (1887). His own view is that Thought and Speech are inseparable ; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of sym- bolism or even mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the word- less summary glimpses which we have of systems of relation and direction.
 * Not literally Jieard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceive