Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression . 423 
of the moment being to determine whether desire be or be not 
asserted in the question, suppose we paraphrase the question by 
two different expressions, one assertive of desire and the other 
not, and ask ourselves which one thei better shows our meaning. 
Accordingly, given the question “Who killed Lincoln ?,”I para¬ 
phrase by 
(1) “I desire you to tell me who killed Lincoln,” and 
(2) “Me to desire you to tell me who killed Lincoln.” 
For myself, I am as sure as I can be, that I mean the former. 
I wish you to think of my desire not merely as imagined on my 
part, but as actually occurring in my mind. Appreciating the 
difference between merely entertaining a thought of desire, and 
actually experiencing desire, I wish you to understand that the 
latter is my present status. Being, however, confined by lan¬ 
guage to the expression of the former (Conf. pp. 360 and 380), 
I can virtually transform it for you into’ the latter, only by 
putting it as matched by the latter, and adding my belief in its 
being so- matched. In short I think, in full, what I express by 
“I believe it to be true that I desire, etc,”—or, more briefly, 
“I desire, etc.” When then I ask you “Who killed Lin¬ 
coln I shall surely be dissatisfied, unless in some way 
you understand from my question, not only what it is that 
I desire, but also- my mental state of desiring—a state not merely 
imagined on my part, but actually experienced, or, by linguistic 
transformation, believed by me to be true. I must therefore 
conclude that in a question I assert desire. 
Indeed I cannot think that, in a formula doubtless adopted 
for the very purpose of ultimately gratifying a desire to know, 
the actuality of that desire could be put with less distinctness 
than the actuality of ordinary statement—that is, the revelation 
of what I know already—the announcement largely, so to speak, 
of desire already gratified. I might almost as well expect my 
dog to show his satisfaction with the recollected bone I gave 
him yesterday, more eagerly than his longing for the one he 
expects me to- give him, as I go to the cupboard now. 
