Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression . 395 
is the belief in C’s excess over S—a belief incorporated in the 
meaning of “exceeds.” This possibility however we plainly do 
not utilize. 
There seems then to be no further available expedient except 
(renouncing the modification of belief itself) to modify that on 
which belief is operative—either the thought conceived as true 
(or untrue) or the truth (or untruth) conceived of that thought. 
Of the former expedient language does not, to my knowledge, 
avail itself. To illustrate, believing incompletely that “C ex¬ 
ceeds S : ,” I do not say “(I believe it to be true that) an incom¬ 
plete C exceeds S,” “C exceeds an incomplete S,” or “C exceeds 
incompletely S.” That is, I do not make the incompleteness the 
adjunct of any individual thought-element. Also I do not say 
“(I believe it to be true that) incompletely C exceeds S.” That 
is, I do not make the incompleteness the adjunct of the total 
thought. 
There remains the expedient of regarding the truth itself as 
incomplete or partial. To this. it. will be objected that truth 
cannot be partial—that, there is no intermediate between truth 
and untruth. To> this, objection, founded on unquestionable 
fact, I answer that the impossibility of an intermediate is no bar 
to its conception by the mind.* Truth itself and untruth, and 
even reality, do not., as I take it, occur outside of mind. The 
mind creates them. The creation of partial truth would seem 
as feasible as the creation of truth complete (or untruth). 
Partial truth, is variously and ambiguously expressed by 
probability, possibility, likelihood, etc. These words I am 
using now without attendant idea of futurity. By what is prob¬ 
able I do not mean what I expect to happen in the future, nor 
what I expect to be shown to have happened now or in the past. 
I mean that which, regarded as of the present only, I really 
approximate: to believing—that which, figuratively speaking, I 
believe h> be approximately or partially true. That is, I regard 
the probable:, not as completely true or untrue, but as lying some¬ 
where in a. quite imaginary region between the two. In saying 
“0 probably exceeds S” I am, without question, really in some 
phase of partial belief. But in using the linguistic mechanism, 
I remodel my mental status into a. belief in the partial truth of 
♦Students of French Grammar have accomplished the equally diffi¬ 
cult feat of conceiving “ne—pas” as two semi-negatives, forming to¬ 
gether one complete negative. 
