114 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
and a B. As indicated just above, I have a keener mental eye 
for a relation (caused by striking) to obtain between the A and 
B, which are material, than for relation to obtain between ma¬ 
terial A and striking which is immaterial, or between the im¬ 
material striking and material B. 
But perception of this natural relation was obscured by sev¬ 
eral influences. Of these perhaps the most effective—one which 
was presumably already operative in the active mode of think¬ 
ing—was that dual recognition of thought as subject and predi¬ 
cate, which I have elsewhere at some length antagonized.* Re¬ 
peating here in brief, I note that, while I certainly can sense 
an insect as consisting of a head and what follows, I can doubt¬ 
less sense it also as a tail and what precedes, or even as a body 
and what precedes in part and partly follows. Yet I luckily 
can sense it also as a head, a thorax (body) and an abdomen 
(tail). So also I am able to conceive my thought, not only as 
a subject and a predicate, but also as this and that and what 
they have to do with each other—as first term, last term and 
relation which subsists between them. But Grammar and even 
Logic, in their merely dual recognition—for to me the further 
recognition vaguely indicated by their “copula” is but the recol¬ 
lection of a unity inhering still in what they fancy they have 
severed (“analyzed”)—give the subject, or the starting point in 
thinking, an importance which to me is quite fictitious and un¬ 
natural, as if what I am talking of were on at least a par 
with all the rest of what I have to say. The scratch-line of 
a foot-race hardly equals in importance both the goal and inter¬ 
vening space combined; the where I get and how I get there, 
or what I encounter on the way, can hardly mean to me 10 
more than where I start—in running or in thinking. But the 
recognition of a thought, or sentence, as consisting of a subject 
and a predicate, has operated much as if its advocates had chosen 
to regard a thought as “a head and what is left,” the last term 
and particularly the relation (that subsists between the first 
and last term) largely losing in that “what is left” distinctness, 
individuality, importance. 
* “Interrogative Thought.” pp. 365-369. 
