Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/32

20 WILLIAM JAMES. vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as " rat- trap " or "plumber's bill" in a philosophical discourse, the sentence detonates, as it were, we receive a shock from the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of rationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord, between the terms of thought. Provided only the right substantive conclusion be reached, the train of images that lead us to it is comparatively in- different. They may be purely verbal, they may be mixed verbal and pictorial, or they may not be verbal at all, as in the interesting account by Mr. Ballard of his deaf-rnute philosophising. They may be what they please ; but if they only bring us out right, they are rational operations of thinking. 1 Let us now pass to another introspective difficulty and source of fallacy, different from the one hitherto considered, but quite as baleful to psychology. I mean the confusion between the psychologist's standpoint and the standpoint of the feeling upon which he is supposed to be making his report. The standpoint of the psychologist is external to that of the consciousness he is studying. Both itself and its own object are objects for him. They form a couple which he sees in relation, and compares together, and it follows from this that he alone can verify the cognitive character of any mental act, through his own assumed true knowledge of its object. Now he may err either by foisting his own know- ledge of the object into the feeling, and representing the latter as aware of it just as he is. Or he may err by repre- senting the feeling as if it felt itself to be what he knows it to be. Thus the psychologist may misrepresent the feeling in either of two ways, or in both. 1 Hegel's celebrated dictum that pure being is identical with pure nothing, results from his taking the words statically, or without the fringe they wear when in a context. Taken in isolation, they agree in the single point of awakening no sensorial images. But taken dynamically, or as signi- ficant, as thought, their fringes of relation, their affinities and repug- nances, their function and meaning, are felt and understood to be absolutely opposed.