Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/22

10 WILLIAM JAMES. and-the-contrast-of-these-two-colours, the state of mind in which that fact comes to knowledge must be quite other than the state of mind in which either pure red or pure green comes to knowledge. In other words, if we start the stream with a feeling of pure red as its first segment, we must follow that up with a second segment which is a feeling of green- as-sequent-upon-the-red-and-contrasted-with-it ; or, if we insist on having a "pure" feeling of green, we may let it come in the second segment, and then follow with a third in which the complex relation of the objects of the first two segments is perceived. In either case, the stream must con- tain segments that are not "pure" elementary feelings. It must contain feelings of qualities-in-relation as well as of qualities absolute. But these feelings do not cease for that to be consubstantial with the rest of the stream. They can all be figured in the same straight line. They involve no new psychic dimension, as when the transcendentalists, after letting a number of " pure" feelings successively go " bang," bring their dev.s ex machind of an Ego swooping down upon them from his Olympian heights to make a cluster of them with his' wonderful " relating thought ". The only thing that can see the pure feelings as a cluster (if pure feelings there be) is a later segment of the stream, to which the " pure " segments and their content appear as objects. It is a peculiarity of the stream that its several parts are susceptible of becoming objects for each other. We cannot explain this pecu- liarity any more than we can explain any other cogni- tion. As a matter of fact, every segment of the stream is cognitive, and seems to look at an object other than itself; and when this object turns out to be a past seg- ment, we say the present one remembers it. The present 6ne in our supposed case is the remembrance of something complex, but that does not keep it from being a single seg- ment. All the arguments used by the transcendentalists to prove the real unity of the Ego, the oneness of the relating principle, apply perfectly to the case before us, and forbid us for an instant to suppose that the segment in which a com- plex fact is remembered is not just one feeling and no more. 'Whatever is known together is and must be known through a single modification of thought's stream. When I think the seven colours of the rainbow, I do not have seven thoughts of a colour, and then a thought of a bow ; that would be eight thoughts. What I have is just one thought of the whole object. And the first reasonable word has yet to be said to prove that such a "thought" as this is not, when