144 THE SCOPE OF MIND. 



may intervene as indubitable links or constituents of 

 ' mental phenomena.' There need be the less hesitation 

 in admitting this latter conclusion from the fact that it is 

 one which each of us can so easily verify for himself. 



We are frequently conscious of the first term of some 

 process of thought, and we become aware of the last, 

 whilst those which intervene, numerous though they 

 may be, do not in the least reveal themselves to our 

 consciousness. We seek, for instance, to recall some 

 name or word at the time forgotten. We are conscious 

 only of a sense of ' effort ' which may, at the time, be 

 fruitless, and yet, after a period, in which we have been 

 thinking of other things, the desired word or name 

 suddenly declares itself in our consciousness. We may 

 say with Dr. Carpenter : "Now it is difficult, if not im- 

 possible, to account for this fact upon any other supposition 

 than that a certain train of action has been set going in 

 the cerebrum by the voluntary exertion which we at first 

 made ; and that this train continues in movement after 

 our attention has been fixed upon some other object of 

 thought, so that it goes on to the evolution of its result, 

 not only without any continued exertion on our parts but 

 also without our consciousness of any continued activity." 

 And that some such view as this has commended itself 

 to so distinguished a philosophical thinker as the late 

 J. S. Mill may be gathered from the following quotation 

 in reference to parallel phenomena. He says*: "If we 

 admit (what physiology is rendering more and more 

 probable) that our mental feelings as well as our sensations 

 have for their physical antecedents particular states of the 

 nerves, it may well be believed that the apparently 

 suppressed links in a chain of association, those which 

 Sir William Hamilton considers as latent, really are so, 



* " Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy," p. 285. 



