178 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
Accordingly when the time arrives for undertaking to use a concep¬ 
tion as the would-be term of a judgment, mind is under the influence 
of a habit pre-established in the adaptation of the judgment to expres¬ 
sion—a habit of regarding the conception as a nucleary term attended 
by its fellow terms. 
The influence of such a habit may explain the grammarian’s common 
failure to recognize the adjunctive modification of total thought. To 
illustrate, in “I rarely lose (or mislay) my temper,” it is usually 
claimed that “rarely” is an adverb modifying “lose”, to the exclusion 
of the actual intention to pose my loss of temper—that is, the total 
announced phenomenon—as what is “rare”. That such indeed is the 
actual intention, I may claim with something more than knowledge of 
my individual cerebration. For presumably no one in such a case re¬ 
gards the isolated act of losing as of various species—rare, occasional 
and frequent—selecting for the case in hand the species best adapted. 
Rather what is rare is the whole phenomenon of which “I lose my 
temper” is the detailed exhibition. 
That grammarians, in the majority of cases are however right, I see 
no reason to disbelieve. But they have merely rightly sensed a 
linguistic operation which itself is strictly wrong—which has failed to 
carry out original intention. 
Linguistic thinking shirks the effort of handling thought col- 
iectively, regarding it even inaccurately as a nucleary factor 
attended by other associated factors. Indeed the action of the 
mind in such a case has some analogy with that of the hand, 
as may appear in the following illustration. Suppose you show 
me a row of three baseballs, the middle one attached by a cord 
to each of the others, saying “Take them into the other room,” 
To make my illustration adequate, I confine myself to a single 
transportation, as well as to the use of one hand only. Now I 
find it awkward, if not indeed impossible, to manage all the 
balls at once with a single hand. Accordingly X grasp and carry 
one hall only, relying on the cords to bring along the other balls. 
While then my activity transports the three balls as desired, 
it immediately operates on one ball only. 
To interpret my parable, every ball is an idea. The united 
trio of balls is a thought. The cord which joins one ball to 
another is the indispensableness of each associate element of 
thought to the nucleary element—for instance, in my illustra¬ 
tion, the indispensableness of “sun” and “moon” to “exceed”— 
there being no thought, but only a fragment, in the absence of 
either. The moving of the balls is the building of “the sun to 
