Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 457 
by my failure to believe or disbelieve, with a very similar indefi¬ 
nite. Indeed, if “something” be allowed the verbal power, 
I may say “I something Brown to be honest.” It is true that 
the proper word would be “nothing.” Yet it would hardly 
stretch the power of symbolism to the breaking point, were I 
to insist that in this case “something” should cover “nothing,” 
just as the algebraic x includes all values, even that of zero.* 
Returning to my illustration, I propose accordingly to change 
“your believing-or-disbelieving the truth of Brown to be honest” 
into the form of a judgment, really yours, but linguistically 
feigned to be my own, or put as indifferently yours or mine. 
This judgment will appear, then, as mv (for your) believing- 
or-disbelieving, etc. To avoid confusion, I deal for a moment with 
only the former of the two alternatives, believing and disbeliev¬ 
ing. Accordingly, “my (for your) believing the truth of 
Brown to be honest” is to be so changed, as to have the meaning 
expressed by “Brown is honest.” ISTow, without puzzling over 
such a refinement of self-examination as contemplates belief (or 
its absence) in one’s own believing, it is perhaps enough to put 
it roughly that, in the expression “my for your believing, etc.,” 
I am merely talking about believing. On the other hand the 
expressions “Brown is honest” and “I believe Brown to be 
honest,” each of which stands for a judgment, represent me as 
■experiencing that believing which I talk about. I will accord¬ 
ingly make use of this experiencing, to effect the change of “my 
(for your) believing, etc.” into' the form of a judgment. That 
is, instead of “my (for your—or, say, my or your) believing- 
or-disbelieving the truth of Brown to< be honest,” I will sub¬ 
stitute “I (for you) experience believing-or-disbelieving the 
truth of Brown to be honest.” 
How this believing-or-disbelieving is not only what I (for you) 
experience, but also at the same time what I wish you to tell me. 
That is, it is a simultaneous factor of two judgments, which, 
by the very simultaneous presence of that factor in each one, 
* In fact I might develop the indefinite judgment into “I either or 
neither believe or disbelieve.” But this would be presumably going 
quite beyond what may be conceived as likely to happen in the lin¬ 
guistic thinking of minds at the stage of development marked by the 
creation of the judgment interrogative as to belief. 
