Owenr—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 389 
enough, no doubt, to say that (1) “Orange exceeds lemon” ex¬ 
presses belief, and that (2) “Lemon not exceeds orange” ex¬ 
presses disbelief. But when I strive to differentiate expression 
(2) from (3) “Lemon not to exceed orange,” I find myself in 
trouble. For, though the thought expressed in (3) no doubt 
may be distinguished adequately from the thought expressed in 
(1) and (2) by calling it a conception, (3) should further be 
distinguished from (4) “Orange to exceed lemon” by calling 
the thought of (3)—I know not what—perhaps a ^conception. 
But the word is lacking; and the idea; which it indicates is un¬ 
familiar. Again, for disbelief I shall find no approximately 
synonymous acknowledge. I shall accordingly work to better 
advantage by confining myself, so far as possible', to conceptions 
attended now by truth and now by untruth, and to judgments 
containing belief in one or the other.* 
Its distinctive. 
To make this obvious, I write, the' one above the other, a 
sentence or expression of a judgment, and a suggestive phrase or 
expression of a conception—both of the essential type—both con¬ 
taining, that is, only the ideas needed to make them, one a con¬ 
ception, the other a judgment. Accordingly 
*In such expressions as “I doubt”, “I do not believe”, “I believe”, 
etc., the mental act of doubting or believing is itself conceived as true 
or untrue, and a secondary belief is brought to bear on this truth or 
untruth, as is clearly indicated by the comparison of such expressions 
with “me to doubt,” “me not to doubt”, etc. Such expressions may 
however be discarded, attention being confined to the briefer sentential 
forms in which belief, when part of what is meant, is left without any 
special word to express it, or is in other words incorporated in the 
meaning of the verb, as in “Orange exceeds lemon.” 
The presence, in every judgment, of the speaker’s belief may vin¬ 
dicate the sentence “Seeing that it rains, a walk will not be pleasant”. 
He who cannot tolerate the “seeing that” as a subconscious synonym 
of “since”—he who feels that something there must be, to which the 
adjunctive “seeing” may cling—will find this something in the incor¬ 
porated “I” of assertion; for every original assertion is first-personal, 
just as every (directly) quoted assertion is third-personal—or some¬ 
times second-personal. So, too, in “Seeing it rains, don’t go,” the 
purist may choose between “I, who am aware of the rain, wish you 
not to go.” and “I wish you, who are aware of the rain, not to go.”, or 
even associate the seeing with both “I” and “you.” 
