122 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
reach the more special conclusion that, of thoughts in whose ex¬ 
pression verbal hybrids operate—thoughts, that is, in which oc¬ 
curs the double factorship of an element expressed by a verbal 
hybrid—one thought will be a judgment and the other a con¬ 
ception. 
In examining these, I wish to differentiate them by their 
respective degrees of mental prominence, having now in mind 
what I particularly specify as linguistic thinking , in distinction 
from thinking unadjusted to the needs of linguistic expression . 
A little embarrassment is however offered by the variation of 
such prominence, with the frequent shifting of the momentary 
mental point of view. Thus, during the utterance of an intri¬ 
cate sentence, the difficulty of exposition (and the difficulty of 
comprehension, which latter perforce assimilates the speaker’s 
thinking to that enforced upon the hearer by expressional limi¬ 
tations) may require an attention to every detail so complete— 
a nearness of the mind so close—that all the details may be 
said to have, each one in turn, the maximum of prominence. 
On the other hand, no doubt there are moments in which the 
mind stands back and takes a perspective view. 16 
In such a view there is presumably what, in a measure, 
corresponds to the artist’s foreground, background, and middle 
distance. Conceivably also there are corresponding differences 
in perpendicular nearness, as well as lateral differentiations. 
Taking from the last a hint to guide the choice of terminology, 
I propose to call what dominates in thought-perspective, central 
—and that which does not do so, lateral. Of these two words, 
moreover, I wish the latter to be understood with a scope suf¬ 
ficient to cover divergence from the center in any direction, thus 
in taking this view, I eliminate the tricks of rhetoric, by which the 
bona fide respective mental primacy of thought-constituents may be re¬ 
versed. To illustrate, “The rays of the setting sun were gilding the 
higher tree-tops, etc., etc., when out of the forest dashed a steel-clad 
horseman.” 
In the mental operation recorded by this expression, I think it 
evident that the action of the horseman, indicated by a vigorous word 
and attended by the “tense” suggestion of all-at-once and once-for-all 
achievement, is rather the first-born of my mental fatherhood, than is 
that unobtrusive every-day awareness of solar business, which—to 
change my figure of speech—is really but the very legato accompani¬ 
ment of a decidedly staccato theme. 
