482 PSYCHOLOGY. 



compare, count, and judge it. There is nothing involved in 

 all this which we did not postulate at the very outset of our 

 introspective work : realities, namely, extra rnentem, thoughts, 

 and possible relations of cognition between the two. The 

 result of the thoughts' operating on the data given to 

 sense is to transform the order in which experience comes 

 into an entirely different order, that of the conceived world. 

 There is no spot of light, for example, which I pick out and 

 proceed to define as a pebble, which is not thereby torn 

 from its mere time- and space-neighbors, and thought in 

 conjunction with things ]ihysically parted from it by the 

 width of nature. Com]3are the form in which facts appear 

 in a text-book of physics, as logically subordinated laws, 

 with that in which we naturally make their acquaintance. 

 The conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try to 

 gather up the world's contents. Most facts and relations 

 fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insig- 

 nificant to be fixed in any concejotion. But whenever a 

 physical reality is caught and identified as the same with 

 something already conceived, it remains on the sieve, and 

 all the j)redicates and relations of the conception with 

 which it is identified become its predicates and relations 

 too ; it is subjected to the sieve's network, in other words. 

 Thus comes to pass what Mr. Hodgson calls the translation 

 of the perce23tual into the conceptual order of the world.* 

 In Chapter XXII we shall see how this translation 

 always takes place for the sake of some subjective interest, 

 and how the conception with which we handle a bit of sen- 

 sible experience is really nothing but a teleological instru- 

 ment. This ivhole function of conceiving, of fixing, a7id hold- 

 ing fast to meanings, has no significance apart from, the fact 

 that the conceiver is a creature ivith partial purposes and 'pri- 

 vate ends. There remains, therefore, much more to be said 

 about conception, but for the present this will suffice. 



* Philosophy of Reflection, i. 273-308. 



