Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/37

ON SOME OMISSIONS OF INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 25 note of its existence after a fashion, and is aware of itself as a procession leading to or from it as a terminus. That there is a semblance of paradox here cannot be dem'ed. Grant the procession to know its own existence as a procession ; still how can it know itself as a procession to or from that reality, or even in the direction of that reality, without also knowing that reality itself immediately and face to face ? But this apparent paradox comes from the confusion of the incomplete thought's standpoint with our own. We think the reality must be known in the pro- cession as it is known to us, when naming the procession we call it a procession to or from that reality, also ex- plicitly naming and imagining the latter too. We cannot name the topic without the reality becoming a direct present object to us. But the procession can and does feel its topic in an entirely different way. To substitute our way for this way is a complete falsification of the data into which, as psychologists, we are supposed to inquire. What the actual way is, is excessively difficult to make out, on account of the elusive character of those transitive and relational ele- ments of subjectivity on which we commented at the outset of our essay, and of which the procession is mainly com- posed. Considering our feeling of a tune may make the matter a little clearer. A tune is a processional feeling, in which the idea of the whole is present to each note, so far as to tinge or " fringe " that note differently from the way in which it finds itself tinged or fringed in any other tune. Now the " topic " is to each incomplete thought in the pro- cession what the " tune " is to each note. We have to name the topic and the tune explicitly whenever we speak of them ; but as we do not pretend that each note in the tune names and hums the entire tune on its own account, at the same time that it hears itself ; so we ought not to pretend that each thought in the procession names and knows the topic of the procession in the same articulate and explicit way that we do, when we try to define just which proces- sion it is. What sort of a feeling each thought in the procession has of which procession it is, is as much a mystery for us to-day as what sort of a sense each note has of the tune it is in. These are the problems for the introspection of the future. I have said enough to show, I hope, their difficulty, and some of the causes on which that difficulty depends, the main one being that our thought is a teleological organism, of which large tracts exist only for the attainment of others ; and that our perception of these others, which were called