Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/263

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 243 It all goes back to what we said in another connection only a few pages ago (p. 233). As the total neurosis changes, so does the total psychosis change. But as the changes of neurosis are never absolutely discontinuous, so must the successive psychoses shade gradually into each other, although their rate of change may be much faster at one moment than at the next. This difference in the rate of change lies at the basis of a difference of subjective states of which we ought immedi- ately to speak. When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or behveen it and something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imagina- tions of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contem- plated without changing ; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. Let us call the resting-places the ' substantive parts,' and the places of flight the ' transitive parts,' of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other sub- stantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclu- sion to another. Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the tran- sitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them