240 PSYCHOLOGY. or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensibly felt as such, which cuts the conscious stream across at the moment at which it appears ? Do not such interruptions smite us every hour of our lives, and have we the right, in their presence, still to call our consciousness a continuous stream ? This objection is based partly on a confusion and partly on a superficial introspective view. The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, taken as subjective facts, and the things of which they are aware. It is natural to make this confusion, but easy to avoid it when once put on one's guard. The things are discrete and discontinuous ; they do pass before us in a train or chain, making often explosive appearances and rending each other in twain. But their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the time and the space in which they lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we may be so stunned and confused for a moment by the shock as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has hap- pened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the hamhoo. The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted with each other most violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still re- main between the thoughts by whose means they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues ; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting- with-it.* Our feeling of the same objective thunder, com- ing in this way, is quite different from what it would be
- Of. Brentano ; Psychol ogie, vol. i. pp. 219-20. Altogether this
chapter, of Brentano's on the Unity of Consciousness Is as good as anything with which I am acquainted.
