DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 501 



We may, then, conclude our examination of the manner 

 in which simple involuntary discrimination comes about, by 

 saying, 1) that its vehicle is a thought possessed of a knowl- 

 edge of both terms compared and of their difference ; 2) 

 that the necessary and sufficient condition (as the human 

 mind goes) for arousing this thoughc is that a thought or 

 feeling of one of the terms discriminated should, as imme- 

 diately as possible, precede that in which the other term is 

 known ; and 3) and that the thought which knows the second 

 term will then also know the difference (or in more difficult 

 cases will be continuously succeeded by one which does 

 know the difference) and both of the terms between which 

 it holds. 



This last thought need, lioAveA'er, not be these terms with 

 their difference, nor contain them. A man's thought can 

 know and mean all sorts of things without those things get- 

 ting bodily into it — the distant, for example, the future, and 

 the past.* The vanishing term in the case which occupies 

 us vanishes ; but because it is the specific term it is and 

 nothing else, it leaves a specific influence behind it when it 

 vanishes, the effect of which is to determine the succeeding 

 pulse of thought in a perfectly characteristic way. What- 

 ever consciousness comes next must know the vanished 

 term and call it different from the one now there. 



Here we are at the end of our tether about involuntary 

 discrimination of successively felt simple things ; and must 

 drop the subject, hopeless of seeing any deeper into it for 



neither the thing m nor the thing n, to know and compare both directly? 

 'Tis but a question of how to name the facts least artificially. The egoist 

 explains them, by naming them as an Ego ' combining ' or ' synthetizing ' 

 two ideas, no more than we do by naming them a pulse of thought know- 

 ing two facts. 



* 1 fear that few will be converted by my words, so obstinately do 

 thinkers of all schools refuse to admit the unmediated function of knowing 

 a thing, and so incorrigibly do they substitute being the thing for it. E.g., in 

 the latest utterance of the spiritualistic philosophy (Bowue's Introduction to 

 Psychological Theory, 1887, published only three days before this writing) 

 one of the first sentences which catch my eye is this : " What remembers ? 

 The spiritualist says, the soul remembers ; it abides acro.ss the years aod 

 the tlow of the body, and gathering up its past, carries it with it " (p. 28). 

 Why, for heaven's sake, O Bowue, cannot you say ' knows it '? If there i» 

 anything our soul does 7iot do to its past, it is to carry it with it. 



