THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 



279 



thought of the j)ack per se. What a thought is, and what it 

 may be cleveloj)ecl into, or explained to stand for, and be 

 equivalent to, are two things, not one.* 



An analysis of what passes through the mind as we utter 

 the phrase the pack of cards is on the table will, I hope, make 

 this clear, and may at the same time condense into a con- 

 crete example a good deal of what has gone before. 



O J- 2 3 



The pack of cards is on the table 



Fig. 29.— The Stream of Consciousness. 



It takes time to utter the phrase. Let the horizontal 

 line in Fig. 29 represent time. Every part of it will then 

 stand for a fraction, every point for an instant, of the time. 

 Of course the thought has time-parts. The part 2-3 of it, 

 though continuous with 1-2, is yet a different part from 1-2. 

 Now I say of these time-parts that we cannot take any one 

 of them so short that it will not after some fashion or other 

 be a thought of the whole object ' the pack of cards is on 

 the table.' They melt into each other like dissolving views, 

 and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels 

 the total object in a unitary undivided way. This is what 

 I mean by denying that in the thought any parts can be 

 found corresponding to the object's parts. Time-parts are 

 not such parts. 



* I know there are readers whom nothing can convince that the thought 

 of a comple.x object has not as many parts as are discriminated in the ob- 

 ject itself. Well, then, let the word parts pass. Only observe that these 

 parts are not the separate 'ideas' of traditional psychology. No one of 

 them can live out of that particular thought, any more than my head can 

 live off of my particular shoulders. In a sense a soap-bubble has parts; it is 

 a sum of juxtapo.sed spherical triangles. But these triangles are not sepa- 

 rate realities; neither are the 'parts' of the thought separate realities. 

 Touch the bubble and the triangles are no more. Dismiss the thought 

 and out go its parts. You can no more make a new thought out of ' ideas' 

 that have once served than you can make a new bubble out of old triangles, 

 Each bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity, sui generis. 



