Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts
for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion,
stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really
annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion _be_ reached,
it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and
swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in
the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult
the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of
the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the
conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough
and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake
crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so,
instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find
we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were
pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and
particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at
introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning
top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to
see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to _produce_ these
transitive states of consciousness, which is sure to be thrown by
doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as
unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them
to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the
falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous
a question an immediate reply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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