§ 65. =The Pattern of Thought.=—There is a broad general _resemblance between the pattern of thought and that of constructive imagination_; it has indeed been said, though with exaggeration, that thought is an imagining in words, and imagination a thinking in images. The thinker, like the artist, sets out with a plan or design, and aims at a goal; and thought, like imagination, is a more or less steady flow, in a single direction, from the fountain-head of nervous disposition. ‘Happy thoughts’ occur in thinking, as they occur in imagination; there is a like movement between the poles of feeling; and the empathic experiences of the artist are paralleled by the mental attitudes of the thinker. In all these respects, the pattern of thought repeats what has been said on pp. 198 ff. of the pattern of constructive imagination. _Thought, however, has its distinctive features_; for it is subject to two of the great directive tendencies that we mentioned on p. 205: the tendency to objectify, to find ‘real things’ in the world about us, and the tendency to dual division. The =tendency to objectify= underlies perception as well as thought; the earliest ‘real things’ were, we must suppose, external and material things; but with the growth of ideas the tendency bears also upon the things of mind, upon concepts and abstract ideas; these are taken _as_ real in every case of thinking. The =tendency to dual division= is characteristic of thought; thinking is essentially divisive, even if the goal of thought is constructive. Here, then, is the main difference between thought and constructive imagination: that imagination proceeds to the exhibition of a single something, a statue or a picture or a poem; whereas thought proceeds to the exhibition of two somethings in relation, and ends with what the logicians call a =judgement=. The tendency to dual division is so natural to us, and is impressed so deeply in our nervous make-up, that we can hardly hope to go behind it. We can hardly even describe a situation which calls for thought without presupposing the very tendency which is characteristic of thought. For what are the situations? They are _situations which ask a question_; and we cannot ask a question without putting it in the form of a judgement. Primitive man, wandering from place to place, comes back to a scene that he knew under other circumstances; the tree which was leafy is now bare, the river-bed which was full of water is now dry. If there is no feeling of familiarity, and therefore no recognition, the situation may still _ask_ him: ‘Same?’ and his reply ‘Same scene; different features’ is the reply of thought. He has tried to understand things; his secondary attention has played upon the scene perceived and the scene remembered; he has in the upshot divided the permanent from the changing, the ‘thing’ from the ‘properties’ of the thing; he has reached a conclusion, or formed a judgement.