THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 263 



positive tiling, being the mere absence of shock, or sense 

 of discord, between the terms of thought. 



So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the 

 mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned together 

 that the slightest misreading, such as ' casualty ' for 

 ' causality,' or ' perpetual ' for * perceptual,' will be cor- 

 rected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he 

 gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all. 



Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, 

 and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with 

 absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and 

 pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, re- 

 shuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole 

 genus of penny-a-liue-isms and newspaper-reporter's 

 flourishes give illustrations of this. " The birds filled the 

 tree-tojis with their morning song, making the air moist, 

 cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once 

 in a report of same athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It 

 was probably written unconsciously by the hurried re- 

 porter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire 

 vohirae of 784 pages latel}^ published in Boston* is com- 

 posed of stuff like this passage picked out at random : 



"The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their out- 

 lets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the 

 nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage 

 up to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmos- 

 phered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes,— those 

 sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, — they 

 descend, and become assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organ- 

 ism." t 



* Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, by ' Jean Story' (1879). 



fM. G. Tarda, quoting (in Delboeuf, Le Sommeil et les Rgves (1885), p. 

 226) some nonseuse-verses from a dream, says they show how prosodic 

 forms may subsist in a mind from which logical rules are effaced . . . 

 I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of finding two words which 

 rhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first presented 

 itself with other words which, added, gave the right number of syllables, 

 and yet I was ignorant of the sense of the words. . . . Thus we have the 

 extraordinary fact that the words called each other up, without calling up 

 their sense. . . . Even when awake, it is more difficult to ascend to the 

 meaning of a word than to pass from one word to another ; or to put it 

 otherwise, it is harder to he a thinker than to be a rhetorician, and on tlie 

 whole nothing is commoner than trains of words not understood." 



