Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/242

222 PSYCHOLOOY. son with a thought of it that is more articulate and explicit still. The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its * subject ' stands for an object of acquaintance which, by the addition of the predicate, is to get something known about it. We may already know a good deal, when we hear the subject named — its name may have rich connotations. But, know we much or little then, we know more still when the sen- tence is done. We can relapse at will into a mere condi- tion of acquaintance with an object by scattering our attention and staring at it in a vacuous trance-like way. We can ascend to knowledge about it by rallying our wits and proceeding to notice and analyze and think. What we are only acquainted with is only present to our minds ; we have it, or the idea of it. But when we know about it, we do more than merely have it ; we seem, as we think over its relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to operate upon it with our thought. The words feeling and thought give voice to the antithesis. Through feelings we become acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we know about them. Feelings are the germ and starting point of cognition, thoughts the developed tree. The mini- mum of grammatical subject, of objective presence, of reality known about, the mere beginning of knowledge, must be named by the word that says the least. Such a word is the interjection, as lo ! there! ecco! voild! or the article or demonstrative pronoun introducing the sentence, as the, it, that. In Chapter XII we shall see a little deeper into what this distinction, between the mere mental having or feeling of an object and the thinking of it, portends. The mental states usually distinguished as feelings are the emotions, and the sensations we get from skin, muscle, viscus, eye, ear, nose, and palate. The 'thoughts,' as recognized in popular parlance, are the conceptions and judgments. When we treat of these mental states in par- ticular we shall have to say a word about the cognitive function and value of each. It may perhaps be well to notice now that our senses only give us acquaintance with facts of body, and that of the mental states of other persons