326 PSTCHOLOOT. 



quality figures in the procession, it arrests our attention 

 but for a moment, and fades into something else ; and is 

 never very abstract. Thus, in thinking of the sun-myths, we 

 may have a gleam of admiration at the gracefulness of the 

 primitive human mind, or a moment of disgust at the nar- 

 rowness of modern interpreters. But, in the main, we 

 think less of qualities than of whole things, real or possi- 

 ble, just as we may experience them. 



The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some 

 practical duty : we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we 

 take down the lexicon and study our Greek lesson. Our 

 thought is rational, and leads to a rational act, but it can 

 hardly be called reasoning in a strict sense of the term. 



There are other shorter flights of thought, single coup- 

 lings of terms which suggest one another by association, 

 which approach more to what would commonly be classed 

 as acts of reasoning proper. Those are where a present sign 

 suggests an unseen, distant, or future reality. Where the 

 sign and what it suggests are both concretes which have 

 been coupled together on previous occasions, the inference 

 is common to both brutes and men, being really nothing 

 more than association by contiguity. A and B, dinner-bell 

 and dinner, have been experienced in immediate succes- 

 sion. Hence A no sooner falls ujDon the sense than B is 

 anticipated, and steps are taken to meet it. The whole 

 education of our domestic beasts, all the cunning added by 

 age and experience to wild ones, and the greater part of 

 our human knowingness consists in the ability to make a 

 mass of inferences of this simplest sort. Our 'perceptions,' 

 or recognitions of what objects are before us, are inferences 

 of this kind. We feel a patch of color, and we say ' a dis- 

 tant house,' a whiff of odor crosses us, and we say ' a 

 skunk,' a faint sound is heard, and we call it ' a railroad 

 train.' Examples are needless ; for such inferences of sen- 

 sations not presented form the staple and tissue of our 

 perceptive life, and our Chapter XIX was full of them, 

 illusory or veracious. They have been called unconscioiis 

 inferences. Certainly we are commonly unconscious that 

 we are inferring at all. The sign and the signified melt 

 into what seems to us the object of a single pulse of 



