CHAPTER IX.* 



THE STREAM OP THOUGHT. 



We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most 

 books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, 

 and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage 

 from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical 

 method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensa- 

 tion by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a 

 teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we 

 call simple sensations are results of discriminative atten- 

 tion, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing 

 what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the 

 outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless 

 contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves 

 later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the 

 whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations, 

 being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in 

 psychology is one of these suppositions. The only thing 

 which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is 

 the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up 

 and analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the 

 elements of the thinking, we shall be no worse ofi" as re- 

 spects them than if we had taken them for granted at the 

 start. 



The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking 

 of some sort goes on. I use the word thinking, in accordance 

 with what was said on p. 186, for every form of conscious- 

 ness indiscriminately. If we could say in English 'it 

 thinks,' as we say * it rains ' or 'it blows,' we should be 



* A good deal of this chapter is reprinted from an article 'On some 

 Omissions of Introspective Psychology ' which appeared in ' Mind ' for 

 January 1884. 



224 



