THE STREAM OF THOVOHT. 241 



were the tliuuder a continuatiou of previous thunder. The 

 thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence ; 

 but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence 

 as just gone ; and it would be difficult to find in the actual 

 concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the 

 present as not to have an inkling of anything that went be- 

 fore. Here, again, language works against our perception 

 of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its 

 thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. 

 What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, 

 with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to 

 be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them 

 are always things known a moment ago more clearly ; others 

 are things to be known more clearly a moment hence.* Our 

 own bodil}^ position, attitude, condition, is one of the things 

 of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably 

 accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know. We 



* Honor to whom honor is due ! The most explicit acknowledgment I 

 have anywhere found of all this is in a buried and forgotten paper by the 

 Rev. .Jas Wills, on 'Accidental Association,' in the Transactions of the 

 Royal Irish Academy, vol xxi. part i (1846). ]\[r. Wills writes : 



"At every instant of .conscious thought there is a certain sum of per- 

 ceptions, or reflections, or both together, present, and together constituting 

 one whole state of apprehension. Of this some definite portion may be far 

 more distinct than all the rest ; and the rest be iu consequence propor- 

 tionably vague, even to the limit of obliteration. But still, within this 

 limit, the most dim shade of perception enters into, and in some infinites- 

 imal degree modifies, the whole existing state. This state will thus be in 

 some way modified b}'^ any sensation or emotion, or act of distinct attention, 

 that may give prominence to any part of it ; so that the actual result is 

 capable of the utmost variation, according to the person or the occasion. 

 ... To any portion of the entire scope here described there may be a 

 special direction of the attention, and this special direction is recognized 

 as strictly what is recognized as the idea present to the mind. This idea is 

 evidently not commensurate with the entire state of apprehension, and 

 much perplexity has arisen from not observing this fact. However deeply 

 we may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, anj^ consider- 

 able alteration of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; the 

 most abstruse demonstration in this room would not prevent a listener, 

 however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights. Our 

 mental states have always an essential unity, such that each state of appre- 

 hension, however variously compounded, is a single whole, of which every 

 component is, therefore, strictly apprehended (so far as it is apprehended) 

 as a part. Such is the elementary basis from which all our intellectuaJ 

 operations commence." 



