Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 405 
thirsty.” “Since I can’t eat cake, haven’t you any bread?” 
“Where is your pencil, if you can’t find a pen?” With all of 
these I feel obliged to find, in the meaning of the question, some¬ 
thing more than at first appears. Of what this something is, I 
hope to find an indication in the next succeeding sections. 
Its occasion. 
This I take to be the conscious insufficiency of a previous 
conception. In a later section I shall try to show that what 
creates the insufficiency of a conception is at times the absence or 
offensive indefiniteness of a conception-element—e. g. (1) 
“Booth to have killed . . . . ” or “Booth to have killed 
some one,” as compared with “Booth to have killed Lincoln”— 
and at other times the lack of that belief which, if experienced, 
would change the conception into a judgment—e. g. (2) “Booth 
to have killed Lincoln” as compared with “Booth killed Lin¬ 
coln.” Strictly speaking, the mental total assembled (before 
the asking of a question) in case (1) is hardly an actual concep¬ 
tion at all, but rather a would-be conception, or a make-shift 
for a conception ; and in case (2) the mental total is insuffi¬ 
cient, only when appraised as if it were a judgment—which in¬ 
deed the thinker may have wished it to be, but which it is not. 
The fact of immediate importance is however that in either case 
the mental total, as compared with what the speaker is assumed 
to wish it were, is distinctly insufficient. Accordingly, as I am 
planning to present that, only, for the moment, which is common 
to the two varieties of insufficient thought—common to their 
natures, and common to their augmentations into interrogative 
judgments^—I venture to use for both that single name (i. e. 
insufficient conception) which most will help me to maintain them 
both in mind together—help me also clearly to distinguish them, 
as wfill appear, from other forms of thought already examined. 
Meantime I do not wish to be understood as implying that the 
less one knows about a matter, the more he will strive to know. 
For while it is generally true that what I know I shall not ask, 
it seems to be universally true that I shall ask nothing in re¬ 
gard to that of which I know nothing. Thus, in the matter of 
Catiline’s banishment, if I have never heard of Catiline, of 
Rome, or of banishment, I am certain not to ask a question as 
to either one, or any combination of them ; and even if I had 
heard of Catiline, but nothing further, I should be more apt, to 
