588 PSYCHOLOGY. 



we seek a forgotten name, we must suppose tlie name's 

 centre to be in a state of active tension from the very out- 

 set, because of that jJeculiar feeling of recognition which we 

 get at the moment of recall. The plenitude of the thought 

 seems here but a maximum degree of something which our 

 mind divined in advance. It instantaneously fills a socket 

 completely moulded to its shape ; and it seems most natural 

 to ascribe the identity of quality in our feeling of the gaping 

 socket and our feeling of what comes to fill it, to the 

 sameness of a nerve-tract excited in different degrees. In 

 the solving of a problem, on the contrary, the recognition 

 that we have found the means is much less immediate. 

 Here, what we are aware of in advance seems to be its 

 relations with the items we already know. It must bear a 

 causal relation, or it must be an effect, or it must contain 

 an attribute common to two items, or it must be a uniform 

 concomitant, or what not. We know, in short, a lot about 

 it, whilst as yet we have no knowledge of acquaintance with 

 it (see p. 221), or in Mr. Hodgson's language, " we know 

 what we want to find beforehand, in a certain sense, in its 

 second intention, and do not know it, in another sense, in 

 its first intention." * Our intuition that one of the ideas 

 which turn up is, at last, our qiccesitum, is due to our recog- 

 nition that its relations are identical with those we had 

 in mind, and this may be a rather slow act of judgment. 

 In fact, every one knows that an object may be for some 

 time present to his mind before its relations to other mat- 

 ters are perceived. To quote Hodgson again : 



" The mode of operation is common to voluntary memory and 

 reason. . . . But reasoning adds to memory the function of comparing 

 or judging the images which arise. . . . Memory aims at filling the gap 

 with an image which has at some particular time filled it before, rea- 

 soning with one which bears certain time- and space-relations to the 

 images before and after" — 



or, to use perhaps clearer language, one which stands in 

 determinate logical relations to those data round about the 

 gap which filled our mind at the start. This feeling of the 

 blank form of relationship before we get the material quality 



* Theory of Prartire, vol. t p 394. 



