242 PSYCHOLOGY. 



tliiuk ; and as we tliiuk we feel our bodily selves as the seat 

 of the thiukiug. If the thiuking be our thinking, it must 

 be suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmth 

 and intimacy that make it come as ours. Whether the 

 warmth and intimacy be anything more than the feeling of 

 the same old body always there, is a matter for the next 

 chapter to decide. Wliatever the content of the ego may be, 

 it is habitually felt luith everything else by us humans, 

 and mast form a liaison between all the things of which we 

 become successively aware. * 



On this gradualness in the changes of our mental con- 

 tent the principles of nerve-action can throw some more 

 light. When studying, in Chapter III, the summation of 

 nervous activities, we saw that no state of the brain can be 

 supposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, the 

 inertia of the old state will still be there and modify the 

 result accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our igno- 

 rance, what in each instance the modifications ought to be. 

 The commonest modifications in sense-perception are 

 known as the phenomena of contrast. In aesthetics they 

 are the feelings of delight or displeasure which certain 

 particular orders in a series of impressions give. In 

 thought, strictly and narrowly so called, they are unques- 

 tionably that consciousness of the whence and the ivMther 

 that always accompanies its flows. If recently the brain- 

 tract a was vividly excited, and then h, and now vividly c, 

 the total present consciousness is not produced simply by 

 c's excitement, but also by the dying vibrations of a and h 

 as well. If we want to represent the brain-process we 

 must write it thus ; tC — three different processes coexist- 



a 

 ing, and correlated with them a thought which is no one 

 of the three thoughts which they would have jjroduced had 

 each of them occurred alone. But whatever this fourth 

 thought may exactly be, it seems impossible that it should 

 not be something like each of the three other thoughts 

 whose tracts are concerned in its production, though in a 

 fast-waning phase. 



* Compare the cbarming passage in Taine on Intelligence (N. Y. ed.), 

 I. 83-4. 



