THE STREAM OF THOUORT. 271 two things and three things, when I say ' two and three equal five;' there are simply familiar symbols having precise relations. . . . The verbal symbol ' horse,' which stands for all our experiences of horses, serves all the purposes of Thought, without recalling one of the images clustered in the perception of horses, just as the sight of a horse's form serves all the purposes of recognition without recalling the sound of its neighing or its tramp, its qualities as an animal of draught, and so forth.* It need only be added that as the Algebrist, though the sequence of his terms is fixed by their relations rather than by their several values, must give a real value to the Jinal one he reaches ; so the thinker in words must let his conclud- ing word or phrase be translated into its full sensible-image- value, under penalty of the thought being left unrealized and pale. This is all I have to say about the sensible continuity and unity of our thought as contrasted with the apparent discreteness of the words, images, and other means by which it seems to be carried on. Between all their sub- stantive elements there is ' transitive ' consciousness, and the words and images are ' fringed,' and not as discrete as to a careless view they seem. Let us advance now to the next head in our description of Thought's stream. 4. Human thought appears to deal ivith objects independent of itself ; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knoiving. For Absolute Idealism, the infinite Thought and its ob- jects are one. The Objects are, through being thought ; the eternal Mind is, through thinking them. Were a human thought alone in the world there would be no reason for any other assumption regarding it. Whatever it might have before it would be its vision, would be there, in its ' there,' or then, in its ' then ' ; and the question would never arise whether an extra-mental duplicate of it existed or not. The reason why we all believe that the objects of our thoughts have a duplicate existence outside, is that there are many human thoughts, each with the same objects, as
- Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem iv, chapter 5. Com-
pare also Victor Egger : La Parole Interieure (Paris, 1881), chap. vi.
