fHE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 269 



heard * a thunder-clap I was frightened, and looked up at the sky, fear- 

 ing he was speaking a threatening word." t 



Here we maj pause. The reader sees by this time that 

 it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind-stuff, in 

 what quality of imagery, his thinking goes on. The only 

 images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the 

 substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. 

 Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of rela- 

 tion are everything, and the terms related almost naught. 

 These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos, 

 suffusions, or fringes about the terms, ma}^ be the same 

 in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help 

 to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where 

 the end is the same. Let A be some experience from 

 which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical 

 conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to the 

 conclusion by one line, another by another ; one follows a 

 course of English, another of 

 German, verbal imagery. 

 With one, visual images pre- 

 dominate ; with another, tac- 

 tile. Some trains are tinged 

 with emotions, others not ; 

 some are very abridged, syn- 

 thetic and rapid, others, liesi- fig. 28. 

 tating and broken into many steps. But when the penul- 

 timate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se, 

 finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say and rightly 

 say, that all the thinkers have had siibstantially the same 

 thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond 



* Not literally heard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceive 

 shocks ixnd jars that can be felt, even when so slight as to be unnoticed by 

 those who can hear. 



f Quoted by Samuel Porter: 'Is Thought possible ■without Language?' 

 in Princeton Review, 57th year, pp 108-12 (Jan. 1881 ?). Cf. also W. W 

 Ireland : The Blot upon the Brain (1886), Paper X, part ii ; G. J. Romanes : 

 Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 81-83, and references therein made. Prof. 

 Max Miiller givesa very complete histor}^ of this controversy in pp. 30-64 of 

 his ' Science of Thought ' (1887). His own view is that Thought and Speech 

 are inseparable ; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of sym- 

 bolism or even mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the word 

 less summary glimpses which we have of systems of relnlion and direct ion. 



