368 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
element of thought, and also the related elements, essential—and 
to call their total an essential thought. 
Comparative merits of different analyses. 
On these I do not insist. I argue only for the right to choose 
the analysis adapted to my needs—a right belonging to every 
type of thought-investigator. In the analysis which exhibits a 
subject, copula and predicate, the copula is after all the mid¬ 
term, merely reduced to a constant meaning—an obvious con¬ 
venience in operations involving a pair of thoughts, or more. 
The first and last terms of thought are moreover in Logic some¬ 
times so made over that each may be put in the place of the 
other. “A equals B” is invested with the meaning expressed 
by “A—is—equal to B”; and this meaning is further modified 
into that expressed by “A-—is—a B equaller”. By such manip¬ 
ulation the sentence is made to present a thought whose first and 
last terms may, with proper caution, be: interchanged—a great 
convenience in forming deductions, since what is said of one 
term may be said of the other. For instance, given “John eats 
turnips” and “A person who eats turnips presumably is hungry”, 
if I change my thoughts to the forms expressed by “John—is—a 
turnip-eating person” and “A turnip-eating person—is—a pre¬ 
sumably hungry person”, the way is made easy for “John—is—a 
presumably hungry person,” or “John is presumably hungry.” 
Shich modifications of thought are also at times a valuable 
safeguard. For instance, given “John—is—'walking” and 
“Walking—is—good exercise,” if the first thought expressed be 
modified to suit the expression “John—is—a walking person,” 
the temptation to false deduction is removed. 
Such modifications seem to me, in the interest of deduction, to 
be not only justifiable, but also very much to be desired. Indeed 
it is Logic’s business to make them. But in making them, I do 
not understand that Logic claims the) resultant thoughtrforms to 
be what we have in mind in the ordinary use of speech. This 
last, however, is exactly what it is the language-student’s business 
to discover. With what might be in mind, and even with what 
had better be in mind, when I use a given sentence, he has noth¬ 
ing to do. His business is to find out what I actually have in 
mind; and if he supposes that I have in mind what should not 
be there, it is his even more imperative duty to verify his sup¬ 
position—not to argue for the presence in my mind of that which 
isn’t there. He is the searcher for what is—not the imaginer of 
