240 PSYCHOLOGY. 



or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensibly 

 felt as such, which cuts the conscious stream across at the 

 moment at which it appears ? Do not such interruptions 

 smite us every hour of our lives, and have we the right, in 

 their presence, still to call our consciousness a continuous 

 stream ? 



This objection is based partly on a confusion and partly 

 on a superficial introspective view. 



The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, taken. 

 as subjective facts, and the things of which they are aware. 

 It is natural to make this confusion, but easy to avoid it 

 when once put on one's guard. The things are discrete 

 and discontinuous ; they do pass before us in a train or 

 chain, making often explosive ajDpearances and rending 

 each other in twain. But their comings and goings and 

 contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks 

 them than they break the time and the space in which they 

 lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we 

 may be so stunned and confused for a moment by the shock 

 as to give no instan^. account to ourselves of what has hap- 

 pened. But that ver}^ confusion is a mental state, and a 

 state that passes us straight over from the silence to the 

 sound. The transition between the thought of one object 

 and the thought of another is no more a break in the tliouglit 

 than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the woodo It is a 

 part ol the consciotisness as much as the joint is a jDart of tho 

 bamhoo. 



The superficial introspective view is +he overlooking, 

 even when the things are contrasted with each other moat 

 violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still re- 

 main between the thoughts by whose means they are 

 cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the 

 awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues ; for 

 what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder 

 pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting- 

 with-it.* Our feeling of the same objective thunder, com- 

 ing in this way, is quite different from what it would be 



* Cf. Brentano ; Psychologie, vol. i. pp. 219-20. Altogether this 

 chapter of Brentano's on the Unity of Consciousness is as good as anything 

 with which I am acquainted. 



