264 PSYCUOLOO 7. 



There are every year works published whose contents 

 show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the 

 book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to 

 end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what 

 sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may 

 have appeared to the author's mind. The border line 

 between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw ; 

 that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible. 

 Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense — 

 even the wdldest words in a dream — if one only does not 

 doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer pas- 

 sages in Hegel : it is a fair question whether the rationality 

 included in them be anything more than the fact that the 

 words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung 

 together on a scheme of predication and lelation, — imme- 

 diacy, self -relation, and w^hat not, — which has habitually 

 recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the 

 subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was 

 strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some 

 readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves. 



To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain 

 grammatical expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part of 

 our impression that a sentence has a meaning and is 

 dominated by the Unity of one Thought. Nonsense in 

 grammatical form sounds half rational ; sense with gram- 

 matical sequence upset sounds nonsensical ; e.g., " Elba the 

 Napoleon English faith had banished broken to he Saint 

 because Helena at." Finally, there is about each word the 

 psychic ' overtone ' of feeling that it brings us nearer to a 

 forefelt conclusion. Suffuse all the words of a sentence, 

 as they pass, with these three fringes or haloes of relation, 

 let the conclusion seem worth arriving at, and all wall 

 admit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughly 

 continuous, unified, and rational thought.* 



* We thiuk it odd that young children should listen -with such rapt 

 nttention to the reading of stories expressed In words half of which they 

 do not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. But 

 tlieii thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both of us 

 make flying leaps over large portions of the sentences uttered and we give 



