'nevertheless,' that we expect. And this foreboding of the coming verbal
and grammatical scheme is so practically accurate that a reader
incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud
can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression
of intelligence.
It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and
inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so
anxious to press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as
we shall see in the chapter on Imagination, made one step in advance in
exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no
images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow
the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities
are revealed to our knowledge in 'states of consciousness,' relations
are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough.
What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional
psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually
live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river
consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful,
and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all
actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would
continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that
psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is
steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the
sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it
came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The
significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra
that surrounds and escorts it,--or rather that is fused into one with it
and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it
is true, an image of the same _thing_ it was before, but making it an
image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
_Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the
image by the name of 'psychic overtone' or 'fringe.'_
=Cerebral Conditions of the 'Fringe.'=--Nothing is easier than to
symbolize these facts in terms of brain-action. Just as the echo of the
_whence_, the sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably
due to the dying excitement of processes but a moment since vividly
aroused; so the sense of the whither, the foretaste of the terminus,
must be due to the waxing excitement of tracts or processes whose
psychical correlative will a moment hence be the vividly present feature
of our thought. Represented by a curve, the neurosis underlying
consciousness must at any moment be like this:
[Illustration: FIG. 52.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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