132 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



change of tlioiiglit, what you express is a desire to learn my 

 opinion about an act; what I express is my opinion of that 

 act. But as neither your desire nor my opinion materially af- 

 fects the description of the act, we may neglect them both and 

 merely regard the letters as act-descriptions. Xow it is some- 

 what striking that in these descriptions, though the act is the 

 game, the words elected to describe it are, without exception, 

 different. That is, we both of us abide, in every element of 

 thought, by the egocentric point of view. And in our sentences 

 we hold to our view-point in every sentence-element or "part 

 of speech" employed. The "I" and "you," indeed, are special- 

 ly linguacausate ; but in "Kam jener hier diesen Tag?" and 

 "Dieser ging dort jenen Tag," all words but "Tag^' are alio- 

 causate, that is, demonstrative. Examining their rank as parts 

 of speech, I find in each sentence an adjective (diesen, jenen), 

 an adverb (hier, dort), a verb (kam, ging) and a pronoun (jener, 

 dieser), or, as I ha^'e previously urged, what should in no 

 way be distinguished, in substantive usage, from a noun. 



Passing to more difficult parts of speech, I note that Avhat is 

 ''a house" from your point of view may very well be 'Hhe house" 

 from mine, the article, or weakened demonstrative, assuming, 

 as would be expected, the egocentric aspect. Verbal nouns and 

 verbal adjectives follow the lead of the verb itself. Preposi- 

 tions are even specially prone to presuppose an egocentric point 

 of view, as abundantly illustrated above. That such at least of 

 the so-called conjunctions as name a relation between two 

 thoughts should deal with that relation from the special view- 

 point of self, is a foregone conclusion. In illustrating this, I 

 must first make sure that your view-point is actually different 

 from my own. Accordingly I imagine you to be a physician and 

 myself a teacher. Of your patient. Brown, who is also my 

 pupil, you say, following your medical tendencies : "He is 

 ill; for he cannot study," deducing his illness from his men- 

 tal incapacity, and putting the former in a sort of effect-to-cause 

 relation with the latter. But I, as his teacher, following very 

 different tendencies, may also say: "He is ill; hence he can- 

 not study," deducing from his illness his mental incapacity, 

 and putting the former in the cause-to-effect relation with the 

 latter. That is, illness being our common point of departure 



