THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 233 



speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an un- 

 modified feeling an impossibility ; for to every brain-modi- 

 fication, however small, must correspond a change of equal 

 amount in the feeling Avhich the brain subserves. 



All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure 

 and single and not combined into ' things.' Even then we 

 should have to confess that, however Ave might in ordinary 

 conversation speak of getting the same sensation again, we 

 never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so ; and that 

 whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elemen 

 tary feeling, it would certainly be true to sa}', like Heraclitus, 

 that we never descend twice into the same stream. 



But if the assumption of ' simple ideas of sensation ' 

 recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be 

 baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of 

 immutability in the larger masses of our thought ! 



For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of 

 mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have 

 of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a 

 resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same 

 fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it 

 in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat diff'erent angle, 

 apprehend it in different relations from those in which it 

 last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is 

 the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suft'used 

 with the consciousness of all that dim context. Often we 

 are ourselves struck at the strange difterences in our suc- 

 cessive views of the same thing. We Avonder how Ave ever 

 could have opined as Ave did last month about a certain 

 matter. We have outgroAvu the possibility of that state of 

 mind, Ave kuoAv not how. From one year to another Ave see 

 things in neAv lights. AVhat Avas unreal has grown real, 

 and Avhat was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to 

 care the Avorld for are shrunken to shadoAvs ; the Avomen, 

 once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the Avaters, hoAV 

 noAv so dull and common ! the young girls that brought an 

 aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable exist- 

 ences ; the pictures so emjity ; and as for the books, Avliat 

 ivas there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in 

 John Mill so full of Aveight? Instead of all this, more 



