THE STREAM OE THOUGHT. 255 



notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed 

 to our knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not. 

 But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. 

 What must be admitted is that the definite images of tra- 

 ditional j)sychology form but the very smallest part of our 

 minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology 

 talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing 

 but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other 

 moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots 

 all actually standing in the stream, still between them the 

 free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water 

 of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. 

 Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in 

 the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense 

 of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence 

 it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. 

 The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo 

 or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, — or rather that 

 is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone 

 and flesh of its flesh ; leaving it, it is true, an image of the 

 same thing it Avas before, but making it an image of that 

 thing newly taken and freshly understood. 



What is that shadowy scheme of the ' form ' of an 

 opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on 

 which we pass judgment when the actual thing is done ? 

 What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical system ? 

 Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes 

 of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal 

 images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process.* We 

 all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our 

 thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling 



* Mozart describes thus Lis manner of composing: First bits and crumbs 

 of the piece come and gradually join together in his mind ; then the soul 

 getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, " and I 

 spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my 

 head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a 

 single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome 

 human being ; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as 

 a succession — the way it must come later — but all at once, as it were. It 

 is a rare feast ! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beau- 

 tiful strong dream. But the best of all is the hearing of it all at once." 



