Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 419 
less Completely, from having no particular actor in mind. In 
short, the incompleteness of a thought is not a bar to my believ¬ 
ing it to be true. The superficial implausibility of this doctrine 
is relieved by the sentence “Lincoln was killed.” In this I have, 
as before, no doer of the killing—strictly, then, no actor. Yet 
I declare my belief in the truth of my substantially no less 
defective thought, without a trace of embarrassment.* 
I have moreover a special motive for’ holding fast to my belief 
and revealing this belief to you. For it is, ordinarily, as im¬ 
plicated in an actual occurrence, that I wish you to conceive that 
actor of whom! I ami myself unable to think. What I wish to 
learn is not who might have killed Lincoln, but who as a matter 
of fact did kill Lincoln. But actual fact, as I have argued, can¬ 
not be expressed by words. The nearest linguistic approxima¬ 
tion is thought believed to be true. Wishing then to put before 
your mind the killing of Lincoln as a fact, the best that I can do 
is to express to you my mental correlative of this fact, or say my 
thought, and add to this thought my belief that it is true—in 
other words, that it is matched by fact. I conclude accordingly 
that my defining is assertive—that “killed,” beyond the naming 
of a particular act, expresses what I might express by the words 
“I believe to be true,” which would apply, of course, to the total 
thought expressed by “-to have killed Lincoln.” 
I do not, however, claim that, the defining element of a ques¬ 
tion is asserted always. Indeed, there are cases in which I see 
an excellent motive for non-assertion. To illustrate, I will util¬ 
ize a very neat distinction between assertion and non-assertion, 
which is revealed by French in the expression of the following 
tli oughts: 
(1) I seek a servant (e. g., one John Brown), whom I believe 
to be faithful. 
(2) I seek a servant (as yet an unknown quantity) whom I 
merely conceive as faithful. 
Of these the first is regularly expressed, by a sentence exactly 
*The fact that the current of my thought is, when I make my state¬ 
ment in the passive voice, reversed, involving the substitution of the 
reverse relation, seems to me in the present case to be without impor¬ 
tance, although this passive statement differs from my “-killed Lin¬ 
coln” in this respect, that while in either case I know not who killed 
Lincoln, in one case I do not care (or even perhaps consider) hut in the 
other I do. 
