TEE STREAM OF THOUGHT 271 



two things and three things, when I say ' two and three equal five;' 

 there are simply familiar symbols having precise relations. . . . The 

 verbal symbol ' horse,' which stands for all our experiences of horses, 

 serves all the purposes of Thought, without recalling one of the images 

 clustered in the perception of horses, just as the sight of a horse's form 

 serves all the purposes cf recognition without recalling the sound of its 

 neighing. or its tramp, its qualities as an animal of draught, and so 

 forth.* 



It need only be added that as the Algebrist, though the 

 sequence of his terms is fixed by their relations rather than 

 by their several values, must give a real value to thejincd one 

 he reaches ; so the thinker in ^vords must let his conclud- 

 ing word or phrase be translated into its full sensible-image- 

 value, under penalty of the thought being left unrealized 

 and pale. 



This is all I have to say about the sensible continuity 

 and unity of our thought as contrasted with the apparent 

 discreteness of the words, images, and other means by 

 which it seems to be carried on. Between all their sub- 

 stantive elements there is ' transitive ' consciousness, and 

 the words and images are ' fringed,' and not as discrete as 

 to a careless view they seem. Let us advance now to the 

 next head in our description of Thought's stream. 



4. Human thought appears to deal icith objects independent 

 of itself ; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of 

 knoiving. 



For Absolute Idealism, the infinite Thought and its ob- 

 jects are one. The Objects are, through being thought ; 

 the eternal Mind is, through thinking them. "Were a 

 human thought alone in the world there would be no 

 reason for any other assumption regarding it. AVhatever 

 it might have before it would be its vision, would be there, 

 in its ' there,' or then, in its ' then ' ; and the question would 

 never arise whether an extra-mental duplicate of it existed or 

 not. The reason why we all believe that the objects of our 

 thoughts have a duplicate existence outside, is that there 

 are many human thoughts, each with the same objects, as 



* Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem iv, chapters. Com- 

 pare also Victor Egger : La Parole Interieure (Paris, 1881), chap. vi. 



