228 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
this case operated independently of any conscious recognition 
on my part. Almost I may say that, in using this expression 
to the exclusion of another, I have not done anything, but rather 
that, in either sense of the phrase, I have been done for; choice 
has failed to be exerted; the case may be excluded from the 
field to be examined. 
It appears accordingly that choice in many cases, even in 
the presence of existing opportunity, is not exerted. To this 
concession, however, little importance needs to be attached. It 
merely admits that, so to speak, the hundredth sheep has gone 
over the stile, under the influence of the ninety-ninth, or that 
of the preceding ninety-nine, or the transmitted influence of 
the leader. It does not apply to the act of sheep number one— 
in every way the most important member of the band—the one 
which most would be investigated by a rational student of 
sheep-procedure. 
Quite analogously, complete investigation of the choices 
made between the several verbal forms, would pass beyond the 
conscious or unconscious imitator, and over preceding imita¬ 
tors, to the original chooser; and in examining him we should 
certainly raise the questions wdien and where and how the forms 
originated, between which choice could be made, as well as pre¬ 
cisely what thought-elements and thought-architecture the sev¬ 
eral forms originally indicated, and how these elements of 
thought and this thought-architecture came to be developed. 
A search for the answers to all these questions would involve 
some danger of being lost in the linguistic wilderness. There 
is abundant opportunity for safer investigation, in the causes 
which now determine the permitted and actually effected choice 
between today accepted verbal modes of expression. Of these 
causes I put first in order and importance the 
INFLUENCE OF THOUGHT-CONTENT. 
By the content of thought—or what„ in other words, I think 
—I mean the materials or constituent ideas of thought, as dis¬ 
tinguished from its architecture and also from the indication 
of that architecture. 
