The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
When we read such phrases as 'naught but,' 'either one or the other,'
'_a_ is _b_, but,' 'although it is, nevertheless,' 'it is an excluded
middle, there is no _tertium quid_,' and a host of other verbal
skeletons of logical relation, is it true that there is nothing more
in our minds than the words themselves as they pass? What then is
the meaning of the words which we think we understand as we read?
What makes that meaning different in one phrase from what it is in
the other? 'Who?' 'When?' 'Where?' Is the difference of felt meaning
in these interrogatives nothing more than their difference of sound?
And is it not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and
understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it, though
so impalpable to direct examination? Is not the same true of such
negatives as 'no,' 'never,' 'not yet'?
The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but _signs
of direction_ in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an
acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays
any part in it whatsoever. Sensorial images are stable psychic facts;
we can hold them still and look at them as long as we like. These bare
images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic transitions,
always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in
flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images to another.
As they pass, we feel both the waxing and the waning images in a way
altogether peculiar and a way quite different from the way of their
full presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direction, the
full presence comes and the feeling of direction is lost. The blank
verbal scheme of the logical movement gives us the fleeting sense of
the movement as we read it, quite as well as does a rational sentence
awakening definite imaginations by its words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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