16 WILLIAM JAMES. scheme combined with each successive uttered word 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. Some will interpret these facts by calling them all cases in which certain images, by laws of association/ awaken others so very rapidly that we think afterwards we felt the very tendencies of the nascent images to arise before they were actually there. For this school the only possible materials of consciousness are images of a perfectly definite nature. Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside psycho- logist rather than for the subject of the observation. The tendency is thus a, psychical zero ; only its results are felt. Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that "tendencies" are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all. It is in short the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the reader's attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have 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. Mr. Spencer has made another in overthrowing the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our know- ledge in feelings, relations are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psycho- logy 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, spoons- ful, 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 con- sciousness 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
