CONCEPTION. 463 



To speak in teclinical language, a subject may be conceived 

 by its denotation, with no connotation, or a very minimum of 

 connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should 

 be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about ; and 

 no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when 

 it is a fully representable thing. 



In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual 

 scale may have concejjtion. All that is required is that 

 they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp 

 would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of ' Hollo ! thing- 

 umbob again ! ' ever flitted through its mind. 



Most of the objects of our thought, however, are to 

 some degree represented as well as merely j)oirited out. 

 Either they are things and events perceived or imagined, 

 or they are qualities apprehended iu a positive way. Even 

 where we have no intuitive acquaintance with the nature of 

 a thing, if we know any of the relations of it at all, anything 

 ohout it, that is enough to individualize and distinguish it 

 from all the other things w^hich we might mean. Many of 

 our topics of discourse are thus problematical, or defined by 

 their relations only. We think of a thing about which cer- 

 tain facts must obtain, but we do not yet know how the 

 thing will look when it is realized. Thus we conceive of a 

 perpetual -motion machine. It is a qucesitum of a perfectly 

 definite kind, — we can always tell whether the actual 

 machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean 

 by it. The natural possibility or impossibility of the thing 

 does not touch the question of its conceivability in this 

 problematic way. ' Round square,' ' black-white-thing,' are 

 absolutely definite conceptions ; it is a mere accident, as far 

 as conception goes, that they happen to stand for things 

 which nature never lets us sensibly perceive.* 



* Black round things, square white things, per contra, Nature gives us 

 freely enough. But the combinations which she refuses to realize may exist 

 as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may exist 

 in the shape of positive images, in our mind. As a matter of fact, she may 

 realize a warm cold thing whenever two points of the skin, so near together 

 as not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, the 

 other with a cold, piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then often 

 felt as if in the same objective place. Under similar conditions two objects, 

 one sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp blunt thing. The 



