§ 64. =Mental Attitudes.=—If you look back over a course of thought, you will find verbal ideas, and you will perhaps find imaginal complexes of various kinds; but you will also find experiences of another sort, which have come to be known as =mental attitudes=. They are vague and elusive processes, which carry as if in a nutshell the entire meaning of a situation. _Some of them belong to the feeling-side of mind_: for feeling enters into the train of directed thought no less than into the freer play of association (p. 161): they are reported as ‘feelings’ of hesitation, vacillation, incapacity, expectancy, surprise, triviality, relevancy, and so on. _Others are more nearly related to ideas_; they are generally reported by a phrase beginning with ‘I knew that ...,’ ‘I was sure that ...,’ ‘I realised that ...,’ or some like expression. Suppose, for instance, that the observer is required to solve ‘in his head’ some mathematical problem, or to think out the answer to some difficult question that bears upon his special line of study. He may say, in the course of his report: “At that point it occurred to me _that_ I had lost the first partial product,” “It seemed to me _that_ the whole thing was taking too long a time,” “I suddenly realised _that_ I had never thought of that before,” “It flashed upon me _that_ the question was only another form of the old difficulty,” “I could not see the answer, but I knew _that_ I could work it out,” and so forth. All these _that_-clauses may stand for mental attitudes. It is clear that, so far as the verbal expressions go, the observer is reporting meanings and not processes. Our task is, then, _to discover what processes lie behind the meanings; and here the opinions of psychologists are sharply at variance_. One party believes that the mental attitudes are unique and simple, that they cannot be further analysed, and that they must therefore be given rank as mental elements alongside of sensation and feeling. Another party, to which the author belongs, believes that the attitudes are analysable, if only they are taken out of the thought-context and examined by themselves under more favourable conditions, and that their analysis yields nothing else than sensations and feelings. The whole matter is still under discussion, and you will do best to suspend judgement. Meantime we may look at a couple of instances.