Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 415 
Description of desideratum. 
The asking of a question presupposes that my effort to fill the 
void in a prior defective judgment will not assume the form of 
personal investigation, but will begin with an attempt to obtain 
from you a void-filler. The ultimate filling of the void will 
naturally be done by me; but what I use, to fill it, you must first 
supply me. 
In the eases to' be examined, what you are to furnish—that, 
in other words, for which I come to you—is a single idea. But, 
in coming to you for this, I bring along the ideas which I al¬ 
ready have. For instance, if on “-killed Lincoln” I base 
a question, it will take the form of “Who killed Lincoln ?” That 
is, in begging material to complete “- killed Lincoln,” I 
bring with me “killed” and “Lincoln.” 
The superficial oddity of this may be emphasized by the fol¬ 
lowing illustration: Proposing to breakfast on ham, eggs and 
coffee, but having no eggs, I enact a quest for them, going to 
your market-stall, basket on arm, to get, them. But I do not put 
in the basket the ham and the coffee. For why should I bring 
you the already collected elements of my breakfast, when trying 
to get from; you an element wliich as yet I do not have ? 
On closer examination my illustration proves to be mislead¬ 
ing. As a seller of eggs, you will ordinarily learn that I want 
them, from a verbal exhibition of my wish, quite independent 
of eggs themselves, or coffee or ham. To make my objective il¬ 
lustration parallel to that exhibition of ideas only, to which we 
give the name of speech, I must make the former an exhibition 
of things only. Let then my effort, to get the eggs be a “dumb 
show.” Accordingly I present myself with my basket. Were 
X proposing to sell, I should be more likely to bring my wagon. 
From the smaller receptacle you may succeed in deducing the 
stronger probability, that I wish to obtain and not to deliver. 
If now, looking into the basket, you find the already purchased 
coffee, you may further infer that what I have in view is a 
breakfast. The sight of the ham will partly strengthen this in¬ 
ference, and partly further suggest the remaining element of the 
breakfast which I contemplate, namely, eggs. In short, from 
what I have you may infer what I wish to have. 
In coming to you for material to fill the void in a thought, my 
case is quite analogous. To illustrate: I have the elements 
“killed” and “Lincoln,” or say “- killed Lincoln.” The 
other required element I indicate for the present by a blank, for 
