Owen—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 461 
that, when I reduce “I believe the truth -of Brown to he honest” 
to “Brown is honest,” the ordinary “is” elects the place of “to 
he.” Giving for the moment the like position to the indefinite 
“is,” I make the diagram 
Brown 
Tell me is 
honest. 
In this I intend the “is” as member of the perpendicular 
sentence, to stand for the four meanings of “I,” “helieve-or-dis- 
believe,” “the truth of” and “to-be;” hut in its membership of 
the horizontal sentence'—that is, as the object of “Tell” in 
“Tell me”—I heed exclusively that one of the four expressed 
by ‘‘believe-or-disbeli eve. 77 
For this diagram I wish to substitute a presentation, of the 
usual linguistic type—a change which must be made with some 
precaution. For language, be it written or spoken, will be 
confined to, so to speak, a single line. I am to pass, accordingly, 
from presentation in two dimensions, to presentation in one 
dimension only. In doing so, I wish, if possible, to retain for 
any new expression the advantages afforded by the old. How the 
particular advantage of the old was this, that each of its two 
sentences, in even their most highly complex form, appeared as 
a continuous', unbroken whole. I do not therefore wish to sub¬ 
stitute, for. instance, “Tell me Brown is honest;” for, in such 
an expression, I break the horizontal “Tell me is” of my dia¬ 
gram, by interpolating “Brown, 77 a part of the perpendicular 
“Brown is honest. 77 To maintain the continuity of both the 
horizontal and the perpendicular, as they range themselves upon 
a single line, I must make their simultaneous factor, at the same 
time, the end of one and the beginning of the other. 
In doing so, I merely repeat the arrangement of ideas employed 
with an interrogative thought expressed by the aid of a recog- 
nizedly interrogative word, for instance, “Who? 77 —a thought, 
that is, in which the desideratum is an essential element of a 
mere conception (Cbnf. p. 411). In expressing such a thought, 
I framed the sentence “Tell me some one (=him [who] =who) 
killed Lincoln. 77 In the sentence thus arranged, the “some 
one, 77 viewed as desideratum—that is, as object of “Tell (me) 77 — 
was put in its natural position after “Tell me. 77 At the same 
