THE STREAM OF TE0U6RT. 281 



object or meaning) from the consciousness of the words, 

 calling the former a very feeble state, and contrasting it 

 with the liveliness of the words, even when these are only 

 silently rehearsed. " The feeling," he says, " of the words 

 makes ten or twenty times more noise in our consciousness 

 than the sense of the phrase, which for consciousness is a 

 very slight matter." ^ And having distinguished these two 

 things, he goes on to separate them in time, saying that the 

 idea may either precede or follow the words, but that it is 

 a 'pure illusion ' to suppose them simultaneous. f Now I 

 believe that in all cases where the words are understood, the 

 total idea may be and usually is present not only before 

 and after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst each 

 separate word is uttered.:}: It is the overtone, halo, or fringe 

 of the word, as spoken in that sentence. It is never absent ; 

 no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousness 

 as a mere noise. We feel its meaning as it passes ; and 

 although our object differs from one moment to another as 

 to its verbal kernel or nucleus, yet it is similar throughout 

 the entire segment of the stream. The same object is 

 known everywhere, now from the point of view, if we may 

 so call it, of this word, now from the point of view of that. 

 And in our feeling of each word there chimes an echo or 

 foretaste of every other. The consciousness of the ' Idea ' 



* Page 301. 



f Page 218. To prove this point, ^I. Egger appeals to the fact that we 

 often hear some one speak whilst our miud is preoccupied, but do uot under- 

 stand him until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly ' realize ' 

 •what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning of a sentence in an 

 unfamiliar tongue, where the words are present to us long before the idea 

 is taken in. In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea. 

 The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to express 

 ourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual field of intel- 

 lectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M. 

 Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class 

 there is some sort of a verbal suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea, 

 when it is grasped — we hear the echo of the words as we catch their mean- 

 ing. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the 

 idea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. In 

 normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there. 



X A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly 

 articulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds that 

 the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sen,- 

 tences are finished. 



