254 PSYCHOLOGY. 



aright, unless from tlie very first lie have a sense of at 

 least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is 

 fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modi- 

 fies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it 

 the proper accent as he utters it ? Emphasis of this kind 

 is almost altogether a matter of grammatical construction. 

 If we read ' no more ' we expect presently to come upon a 

 'than'; if we read ' however ' at the outset of a sentence 

 it is a ' yet,' a ' still,' or a ' nevertheless,' that we expect. 

 A noun in a certain position demands a verb in a certain 

 mood and number, in another position it expects a relative 

 pronoun. Adjectives call for nouns, verbs for adverbs, 

 etc., etc. And this foreboding of the coming grammatical 

 scheme combined with each successive uttered word is so 

 practicall}^ accurate that a reader incapable of understanding 

 four ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless 

 read it with the most delicately modulated expression of 

 intelligence. 



Some will interpret these facts by calling them all cases 

 in which certain images, by laws of association, awaken 

 others so very rapidly that we think afterwards we felt the 

 very tendencies of the nascent images to arise, before they were 

 actually there. For this school the only possible materials 

 of consciousness are images of a perfectly definite nature. 

 Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside psychol- 

 ogist rather than for the subject of the observation. The 

 tendency is thus a 'psychical zero ; only its results are felt. 



Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to 

 show, is that ' tendencies ' are not only descriptions from 

 without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, 

 which is thus aware of them from within, and must be 

 described as in very large measure constituted oi feelings of 

 tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them 

 at all. It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its 

 proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to 

 press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, 

 as we shall see in Chapter XVIII, made one step in advance 

 in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley 

 that we can have no images but of perfectl}^ definite things. 

 Another is made in the overthrow of the equally ridiculous 



