478 PSYCHOLOGY. 



Truly in comparison "vvitli the fact that every conception, 

 whatever it be of, is one of the mind's immutable posses- 



at the same time, agreeing with the uomiualists that all mental facts are 

 nioditications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a 

 'feeling'? Man uxeant ior mankind {?, in short a different feeling from 

 man as a mere noise, or from man meant for that man, to wit, John Smith 

 alone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when 

 taken universally, the word has one of Mr. Galton's ' blended ' images of 

 man associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that these 

 blended or, as Prof. Huxley calls them, 'generic ' images are equivalent 

 to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as 

 a sharp thng ; and the generic character of either sharp image or 

 blurred image depends on its being felt with its representative function. 

 This function is the mysterious plus, the understood meaning. But it is 

 nothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting 

 a supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as 

 continuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is 

 just that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of 

 other imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we 

 have so abundantly set forth [in Chapter IX]. 



" If the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing, 

 or event ; if it come fringed, it may reveal something expressly taken uni- 

 versally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought and 

 feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence 

 or absence of ' fringe.' And this in turn reduces itself, with much proba- 

 bility, in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub- 

 excitements in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges 

 underlie the more deiinite nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of the 

 thought, — in this iu.stance, the word or image it may happen to arouse. 



"The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between 

 certain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others called 

 acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind peri.shing things, 

 knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combine 

 the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep. The con- 

 trast is really between two aspects, in which all mental facts without excep- 

 tion may be taken ; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their 

 functional aspect, as being cognitions. In the former aspect, the highest 

 as well as the lowest is a feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream. 

 Thistingeing is its sensitive body, the wie ihm zu Muihe ist, the way it feels 

 whilst passing. In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as the 

 highest may grasp .some bit of truth as its content, even though that truth 

 ■were as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalized and undated quality of 

 pain. From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts are intellections. 

 From the subjective point of view all are feeling.s. Once admit that the 

 passing and evanescent are as real parts of the stream as the distinct 

 and comparatively abiding; once allow that fringes and halos, inarticulate 

 perceptions, whereof the objects are as yet unnamed, mere nascencies of 

 cognition, premonitions, awarenesses of direction, ar* thoughts sui generis. 



