244 PSYCHOLOGY. 



in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows 

 them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought 

 across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he 

 will see how difficult the introspective observation of the 

 transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong 

 that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before 

 we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and 

 we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snow- 

 flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal 

 but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation 

 moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive 

 thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically 

 taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular 

 meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. Tho attempt 

 at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seiz- 

 ing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up 

 the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. 

 And the challenge to prochice these psychoses, which is 

 sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at aiiyone 

 who contends foi their existence, is as unfair as Zeno's 

 treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them 

 to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he 

 argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to 

 make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply. 



The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. 

 If to hold fast and observe the transitive j^arts of thought's 

 stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all 

 schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and 

 the undue emphasizing of the more substantive jDarts of the 

 stream. Were we not ourselves a moment since in danger 

 of ignoring any feeling transitive between the silence and 

 the thunder, and of treating their boundary as a sort of 

 break in the mind ? Now such ignoring as this has histor- 

 ically worked in two ways. One set of thinkers have been 

 led by it to Sensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on any 

 coarse feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations 

 and forms of connection between the facts of the world, 

 finding no named subjective modifications mirroring such 

 relations, they have for the most part denied that feelings 

 of relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone 



