Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 425 
ITS STRUCTURE. 
The materials of the judgment (interrogative as to term or 
adjunct) being now collected or close at hand, it remains to bo 
determined how they are put together. 
Having, for instance, begun a judgment which, if completed, 
would have been expressed by ‘'Booth killed Lincoln,” I have 
accomplished only what may be expressed by “-killed Lin¬ 
coln.” Discontented with this result, I have experienced a 
desire that you furnish me what shall fill the void indicated by 
the blank. Being unable directly to express desire itself—able 
only to express an intellectual operation on desire—I have 
formed the judgment “I believe in the truth of miy desire that 
you furnish me what shall fill the void”—or, more briefly, “I 
desire you to tell me the void-filler.” 
As you, however, cannot know what idea is suitable to act as 
void-filler, except so far as I may aid you, I do the best I can, 
by giving you the void’s mental environment, which serves you 
as its boundaries and therefore also 1 as a quasi-description of the 
void-filler. 
How this description will operate upon your mind, I shall 
try to show in the next-succeeding section. Meantime I note 
that for reasons indicated on pp. 417-420 the description itself 
is formed as a judgment. 
I have then, as the materials of an interrogative judgment, two 
defective judgments (defective in so far as a term of each is 
ruinously indefinite) expressible by 
(1) “I desire you to tell me void-filler.” 
(2) “Void-filler killed Lincoln.” 
It is obvious that what I mean by “void-filler” in one of these 
expressions, I also mean in the other. Also, when you come to 
think my thoughts after me, if you are to do so exactly, you too 
must hold fast to precisely the same idea in each of the judg¬ 
ments which you form. 
How ideas are quite unstable. If, having led you to form one 
in your mind, I let it slip an instant from your mental field, I 
cannot rely upon' its reappearing exactly as it was at first. In 
the argument of Mr. Joseph Cook, that life continues after or¬ 
ganization ceases, he had in mind sometimes the life of constitu¬ 
ent cells, and sometimes the life of the constituted individual. 
