Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
127 
Case (6) I dismiss on the ground that what is neither lateral 
nor central is not in mind and, therefore, not a part of any 
thought. 
Case (2) I shall not argue, as it grants my contention; for 
what is lateral only cannot he a part of that of which it has 
been stipulated that it is exclusively central. 
Case (4) would imply in optics the ability to look directly 
at an object while also seeing it “out. of the corner of the eye,” 
or, in painting, a landscape of which a part both is and is not 
in the foreground. Of mind, this case requires a simul¬ 
taneous centralization and decentralization in thought-perspec¬ 
tive, implying mental conditions quasi-analogous to strabismus 
(which, permitting double visual action, persupposes the exist¬ 
ence of two eyes)—accordingly, the supposition of a self, at 
least for the moment, double—a supposition which I abandon 
to the jurisdiction of Psychology, being in the meantime per¬ 
sonally unable to make use of it in general linguistic study or 
in the now examined field. 
Case (1). Suppose the second thought, as well as the first, 
be central. For instance, given a first and central thought ex¬ 
pressed by “I wrote my wife,” let “My wife is in New York” 
express a second and also central thought. 
I shall not strain imagination with the effort to locate these 
two centers in mental space, but merely assume that some¬ 
how, of a pair of mental pictures, each is in the central field of 
thought-perspective. It still remains to be determined whether 
the latter thought can operate as a constituent element of the 
former. 
To facilitate such operation, let their common element be 
thought once only. Accordingly, “I wrote my wife (who) is 
in New York”—an expression of mental activity in which there 
is no interruption; that is, the mental act in the present illus¬ 
tration is continuous—a status which justifies the statement 
that, in a sense, thought now is one. 
This sense, however, is unavailable in the present case. To 
use a more objective illustration, let the music of “Dixie” and 
“Old Hundred” be so played that the final note of one is the 
initial note of the other, the playing of the two becoming a 
