THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. L^39 



have a knoioledcje, and a correct one too, of what Paul's 

 last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleejD, but it 

 is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he 

 has ot his own last states. He remembers his own states, 

 whilst he only conceives Paul's. Remembrance is like direct 

 feeling ; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy 

 to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This 

 quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what 

 Peter's present thought also possesses for itself. So sure 

 as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything 

 else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and 

 immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called 

 warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be 

 matter for future consideration. But whatever past feel- 

 ings appear with those qualities must be admitted to re- 

 ceive the greeting of the present mental stn,te, to be owned 

 by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a com- 

 mon self. This community of self is what the time-gap 

 cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, al- 

 though not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself 

 as continuous witii certain chosen portions of the past. 



Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped 

 up in bits. Such words as ' chain ' or ' train ' do not de- 

 scribe it fitly a:; it presents itself in the first instance. It 

 is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are 

 the metaphors ^:y which it is most naturally described. In 

 talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of 

 consciousness, or of subjective life. 



But now there appears, even within the limits of the 

 same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have 

 this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing and 

 separateness among the parts, of which this statement 

 seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are 

 produced by sudden contrasts in the quality of the successive 

 segments of the stream of thought. If the words 'chain' 

 and 'train' had no natural fitness in them, how came such 

 words to be used at all? Does not a loud explosion rend 

 the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain? 

 Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new object, 



