Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/16

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WILLIAM JAMES.

psychologists, whether of England, Germany, or France, record under the name of images, Vorstellungen, or ideas, only such representations as have objects that can be brought to the distinct focus of attention and there stably held in view. Hume's fantastical assertion that we can form no idea of a thing with either quality or quantity without representing its exact degrees of each, has remained an un-disputed dogma in nominalistic minds, until Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley, or perhaps M. Taine, first called it in question. Strange that so patent an inward fact as the existence of "blended" images could be overlooked ! Strange that the assertion could virtually be made that we cannot imagine a printed page without at the same time imagining every letter on it and made too by a school that prided itself particularly on its powers of observation! However, of such blunders is the history of psychology composed.

But if blurred and indistinct substantive states could be systematically denied, a fortiori was it easy to deny that transitive states, considered as segments of the stream of sentiency, have any existence at all. The principal effort of the Humian school has been to abrogate relations, not only from the sphere of reality, but from the sphere of consciousness; most of them being explained as words, to which no definite meanings, inner or outer, attach. The principal effort of the Platonising schools has been to prove that, since relations are unquestionably perceived to obtain between realities, but as unquestionably cannot be perceived through any modifications of the stream of subjective sentiency comparable in nature with those through which the substantive qualities of things are perceived, they must needs be perceived by the immediate agency of a super-sensible Reason, the omission to do homage to which is for the Platonists the vital defect in the psychological performances of the opposite school.

The second great fallacy of introspection, then, is the ignoring of the fact that a peculiar modification of our subjective feeling corresponds to our awareness of each objective relation, and is the condition of its being known. To Mr. Spencer belongs the honour of having exploded this fallacy, in a few pages that seem to have made but small impression on his contemporaries, but which I cannot help regarding as by far the most important portion of his Principles of Psychology. In § 65 of that work it is distinctly laid down that, subjectively considered, "a relation proves to be itself a kind of feeling, the momentary feeling accompanying the transition from one conspicuous feeling to another con-