466 PSYCHOLOGY. 



group of sounds in tliat determinate way, and no one would 

 think of saying of any single note of the chord that it ' de- 

 veloped ' of itself into the other notes or into the feeling of 

 harmony. So of Conceptions. No one of them develops 

 into any other. But if two of them are thought at once, 

 their relation may come to consciousness, and form matter 

 for a third conception. 



Take ' thirteen ' for example, which is said to develop 

 into ' prime.' What really happens is that we compare the 

 utterly changeless conception of thirteen with various other 

 conceptions, those of the difterent multiples of two, three, 

 four, five, and six, and ascertain that it differs from them 

 all. Such difference is a freshly ascertained relation. It is 

 only for mere brevity's sake that we call it a property of the 

 original thirteen, the property of being prime. We shall see 

 in the next chapter that (if we count out aesthetic and moral 

 relations between things) the only important relations of 

 which the mere inspection of conceptions makes us aware are 

 relations of comparison, that is, of difference and no-differ- 

 ence, between them. The judgment 6 -[- 7 = 13 expresses 

 the relation of equality between two ideal objects, 13 on the 

 one hand and 6 + 7 on the other, sucessively conceived 

 and compared. The judgments 6 -f- 7 > 12, or 6 -|- 7 < 14, 

 express in like manner relations of inequality betAveen 

 ideal objects. But if it be unfair to say that the conception 

 of 6 -[- 7 generates that of 12 or of 14, surely it is as un- 

 fair to say that it generates that of 13. 



The conceptions of 12, 13, and 14 are each and all gen- 

 erated by individual acts of the mind, playing with its ma- 

 terials. When, comparing two ideal objects, we find them 

 equal, the conception of one of them may be that of a Avhole 

 and of the other that of all its parts. This particular case 

 is, it seems to me, the only case which makes the notion of 

 one conception evolving into another sound plausible. But 

 even in this case the conception, as such, of the whole does 

 not evolve into the conception, as such, of the parts. Let 

 the conception of some object as a whole be given first. 

 To begin with, it points to and identifies for future thought 

 a certain that. The ' whole ' in question might be one of 

 those mechanical puzzles of which the difiiculty is to un- 



