462 PSYCHOLOGY. 



we do not know wlietlier a certain object proposed to us 

 is the same with one of our meanings or not ; so that the 

 conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the 

 thought should not only say ' I mean this,' but also say ' I 

 don't mean that.' * 



Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and 

 never can become another. The mind may change its 

 states, and its meanings, at different times ; may drop one 

 conception and take up another, but the dropped concep- 

 tion can in no intelligible sense be said to change into its 

 successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now see 

 to have been scorched black. But my conception * white ^ 

 does not change into my conception ' black.' On the con- 

 trary-, it stays alongside of the objective blackness, as a 

 different meaning in my mind, and by so doing lets me 

 judge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless it 

 stayed, I should simply say ' blackness' and know no more. 

 Thus, amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, the 

 world of conceptions, or things intended to be thought 

 about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's Realm of 

 Ideas, t 



Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of 

 qualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be 

 conceived sufRcieutly for purposes of identification, if only 

 it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from 

 other things. Simply calling it 'this ' or 'that' will suffice. 



" make the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in all circum- 

 stances." He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions of 

 number abstracted from " subjective occurrences succeeding each other in 

 time" because these also are acts "of construction, dependent on the 

 power ■we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective con- 

 sciousness." " The content of passive sensation,"' on the other hand, " may 

 indefinitely var}' beyond any control of ours." What if it do vary, so long 

 as we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from i We 

 can ' make ' ideal objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive 

 experience quite as perfectly as out of easily repeaiable active experiences. 

 And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we do 

 not make, but find, their relations. 



* Cf. Hodgson, Time and Space, § 46. Lotze, Logic, § 11. 



f "For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste, 

 •which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in 

 that man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall." (Locke'9 

 Essay., bk. ii. chap. xi. § 3. Read the whole section !) 



