I think, then, of the mind of my friend. His mental situation, whatever I may think it to be, rises up before me, – his dominant thoughts, his controlling desires, his prevailing emotional tone. I fancy him, perhaps, as he is at the moment. In that case the particular ideas with which I conceive him to be occupied come before me, or the objects which I suppose he sees, together with the background of feeling which I attribute to him. These, so far, are presentations in my mind. If my attitude is what is called belief, then these presentations form, for the time, the whole mental content of the words 'my friend's mind as it now is.' My friend's mind, so far as it figures in my knowledge, so far as it comes within my sight, so far as it means anything to me, is for the moment this group of presentations. It is sufficiently described as a mental picture.
To this I know many will promptly demur. The ideas, they will say, which enter into my belief about another mind purport to be representative. They purport in some sort to image or portray external things. There is the picture, and besides the picture there is the thought that it corresponds to an external object.
I suspect that this view owes its plausibility to a confusion – a confusion between a simple belief and subsequent critical reflection upon the belief. The later reflective moment and the sense in which the representative element appears in it I shall presently consider. In the first self-unconscious moment of thought about another mind I contend that my description is exhaustive. There is a picture et praeterea nihil. It is a picture with which we are satisfied (belief) or with which we play (imagination), but in any case a picture.
Indeed, the supposition that the mental appearance purports in the first instance to be representative, is essentially unmeaning. There is, we are told, the picture, and there is also the thought that it portrays an outer reality. But what is this superadded thought, this reference to the outer object? Obviously, to refer to the outer object this additional thought must be, or contain, an idea of the outer object. That idea, again, can be nothing but a mental vision, a picture, as I have called
