472 PSYCHOLOGY. 



individuals completely determinate iu all regards. Chap- 

 ter XYIII will have something to say on that point, and we 

 can ignore it here. For even if it were true that our images 

 were always of concrete individuals, it would not in the 

 least follow that our meanings were of the same. 



The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar ele- 

 ment of the thought. It is one of those evanescent and 

 * transitive ' facts of mind which introspection cannot turn 

 round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as an 

 entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the 

 (somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it pertains to 

 the ' fringe ' of the subjective state, and is a ' feeling of ten- 

 dency,' whose neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of 

 dawning and dying processes too faint and complex to be 

 traced. The geometer, with his one definite figure before 

 him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless 

 other figures as well, and that although he sees lines of a 

 certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., he means not 

 one of these details. When I use the word 7nan in two dif- 

 ferent sentences, I may have both times exactly the same 

 sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental 

 eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of utter- 

 ing the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean, 

 two entirely different things. Thus when I say : " What a 

 wonderful man Jones is ! " lam j)erfectly aware that I mean 

 by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But 

 when I say : " What a wonderful thing Man is ! " I am 

 equally well aware that I mean to include not only Jones, 

 but Napoleon and Smith as well. This added conscious- 

 ness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming 

 what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into some- 

 thing understood; and determining the sequel of my think- 

 ing, the later words and images, in a perfect!}' definite way. 

 We saw in Chapter IX that the image per se, the nucleus, 

 is functionally the least important part of the thought. Our 

 doctrine, therefore, of the fringe ' leads to a perfectly satisfac- 

 tory decisioyi of the nominalistic and conceptualistic controversy, 

 so far as it touches psychology. We must decide in favor oj 

 the, concept ualists, and affirm that the power to think things, 

 qualities, relations, or whatever other elements there may 



