Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 365 
The ca,se of linguistic thinking is analogous. Forced by the 
limitations! of existing linguistic methods, I regard each member 
of my thought with special attention; hut I do not thereby break 
its union with other members. Indeed I do not see how I could 
do so, except by dropping such other members out of mind; and 
this would mean the destruction of my thought; for my thought 
is no longer my thought, if deprived of even one of its members. 
Your attitude I take to be like my own. Since people talk 
for the purpose of expressing: thoughts, you assume, asl soon as I 
begin to speak, that what I intend to express, is a thought—that 
is, a whole. You do not therefore feel that you are receiving 
fragments, which you are to join together. 
I regard the sentence., therefore, not as the presenter of 
thoughbfragments which need to be joined, but as a successive 
revealer of thought-members, never conceived by speaker or 
hearer as other than a. whole. The fact, that each thought-mem¬ 
ber is a member, I regard as always present in the mind, though 
never prominent—that is, as taken for granted. 
The “life-history” of a thought expressed in words I accord¬ 
ingly take to be as follows: In the first, of its stages it is recog¬ 
nized in the speaker’s mind as a unit. In the second stage it is 
recognized as consisting of members, each of which is commonly 
presented by a single word. In a third stage, the (^presentation 
of these words as a sentential unit is matched in the speaker’s 
mind by a synthesis or recognition that thought-members, though 
individually noted, still continue to constitute a whole. To the 
hearer the words of the sentence—coming, as they must, one 
after another—present, in a. fourth stage, an analyzed thought; 
and this., in its final stage, the hearer synthesizes. 
DIFFERENT ANALYSES OF THOUGHT. 
It is obvious that all analyses of thought, if carried out com¬ 
pletely, will specially recognize each member of whatever 
thought be analyzed; and so far all will be alike 1 . But. they may 
differ, even with thought of the smallest possible membership, in 
the perspective or relative prominence in which they put the 
individual thought-members. 
Usual analysis reveals tivo elements and copula. 
It is obviously possible to regard even the trio of ideas, which 
appears in every thought, as consisting of two members, one of 
