Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/31

OX SOME OMISSIONS OF INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 19 I wish that space were here afforded to show what, in most cases of rapid thinking, the fringe or halo is with which each successive image is enveloped. Often it cannot be more than a sense of the mutual affinity or belonging together of the successive images, and of their continuity with the main topic. This is the minimal perception of rational sequence, and can obtain between pure series of words, as well as between pictorial images, or between these and words. It gives us a lulling sense that we are " all right " ; and when we have it, we let the image before us " pass " without demur. We feel that the topic is gradually being enriched, and that we are making towards the right conclusion. When we listen with relaxed attention, this facts without exception may be taken ; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions. In the former aspect, the highest as well as the lowest is a feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream. This tingeing is its sensitive body, the irie ihm zu Muthe ist, the way it feels whilst passing. In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as the highest grasps some bit of universal truth I content, even though that truth were as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalised and undated quality of pain. From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts are intellections. From the subjective point of view all are feelings. Once admit that the passing and evanescent are as real parts of the stream as the distinct and comparatively abiding ; once allow that fringes and haloes, inarticulate perceptions, whereof the objects are as yet unnamed, mere nascencies of cognition, premonitions, awarenesses of direction, are thoughts sui generis, as much as articulate imaginings and propositions are ; once restore, I say, the vague to its psychological rights, and the matter presents no further difficulty. And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledge is quite a false issue. If every feeling is at the same time a bit of knowledge, we ought no longer to talk of mental states differing by having more or less of the cognitive quality ; they only differ in knowing more or less, in having much fact or little fact for their object. The feeling of a broad scheme of relations is a feeling that knows much ; the feeling of a simple quality is a feeling that knows little. But the knowing itself, whether of much or of little, has the same essence, and is as good knowing in the one case as in the other. Concept and image, thus discriminated through their objects, are consubstantial in their inward nature, as modes of feeling. The one, as particular, will no longer be held to be a relatively base sort of an entity, to be taken for granted, whilst the other, as universal, is celebrated as a sort of standing miracle, to be adored but not explained. Both concept and image, qua subjective, are singular and particular. Both are moments of the stream which come, and in an instant are no more. The word universality has no meaning as applied to their psychic body or structure, which is always finite. It only has a meaning when applied to their use, import, or reference to the kind of object they may reveal. The representation, as such, of the universal object is as particular as that of an object about which we know so little that the interjection " Ha ! " is all it can evoke from us in the way of speech. Both should be weighed in the same scales, and have the same measure meted out to them, whether of worsliip or of contempt.