Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/27

ON SOME OMISSIONS OF INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 15 glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images to another. As they pass, we feel both the waxing and the waning images in a way altogether peculiar and a way quite different from the way of their full presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direction, the full presence comes and the feeling of direction is lost. The blank verbal scheme of the logical movement gives us the fleeting sense of the movement as we read it, quite as well as does a rational sentence awakening definite imagina- tions by its words. What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one's meaning which we have, when in vulgar phrase we say we "twig" it? Surely an altogether specific affection of our mind. And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it ? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness therefore ; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything ! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind ; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. It has therefore a nature of its own of the most positive sort, and yet what can we say about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts that replace it ? The intent ion-to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One may say that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to emphasise all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modi- fies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it the proper accent as he utters it ? Emphasis of this kind is almost altogether a matter of grammatical construction. If we read " no more " we expect presently to come upon a " than "; if we read " however " at the outset of a sentence it is a " yet," a " still," or a " nevertheless," that we expect. A noun in a certain position demands a verb in a certain mood and number, in another position it expects a relative pronoun. Adjectives call for nouns, verbs for adverbs, &c., &c. And this foreboding of the coming grammatical