Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/511

THE CONSTITUTION OF THOUGHT. 497 their suggestive tendencies to the mutual determination of a suggestion of some significance of which one can proceed to avail oneself. The conjoining of the foreign determinants, whenever it is intended to arouse imaginative suggestions as expectations actually meet to be entertained, however indefinitely and remotely, about the objects named, is not purely attributive, but predicative. Indeed, if a name alone is used with the intent of awaking in expectant form some imaginative sug- gestion attached to it, it is so far used predicatively. Now it will often happen that the group of associations of some name applied to an object lie nearer to a speaker's purpose in referring to the object, than do the group of associations attaching to some other name, by which, how- ever, his hearer is more likely to have his attention readily directed to the object itself. And this, in a rough way per- haps, may indicate the type of occasion which calls for the use of a proposition of two terms, connected by a copula, or mentally connected in a way which may find expression in a copula. 1 Of the predicate I should say, as I say of all names in accordance with the view of the essential nature of intel- lection here implied throughout, that it is the mention of an object, or of objects, which can only be effectively mentioned in so far as they are capable of being determined, more or less through human activity, to the realisation of some kind of ulterior significance. Though an object be mentioned, for instance, purely as calculated to affect my aesthetic sensibilities, or solely as influencing my state of mind in very far-off contemplation, I still think the very reasonableness of its mention will depend on an assumption that some actual development of a contingent significance of its presentation be that contingent significance only 1 An important distinction seems to develop between these " is " propositions and the " does " propositions, with their active verb for copula and predicate. The former point to the anticipated or considered functions of objects indirectly, by means of a second name added to what we may call the remoter first term. The latter point more directly : but their simpler efficiency, dependent as it is upon well-differentiated nominal and verbal functions in language, appears to be something not more primitive, but more advanced. Psychologically, it seems to involve (1) a consciousness of one's own activity as what continues in time, however briefly as distinguished from mere arising new and critical phases or features of being ; and (2) a sympathetic transference of the idea of this to objects not now considered hastily and narrowly as some mere phase of them may affect iis, but (in a wider intellectual leisure) as if they were objects of interest " in themselves," to whose now more continuously conceived actions we attended as their own.