hinted,[1] was the almost necessary result of his employment of the word 'Thought' to denote the series of existing processes—or, perhaps one might say, of his failure to distinguish between 'existence' and 'significance.'
That it is the logical unity of thought which Professor James often has in mind, is obvious from many passages of the chapter on "The Stream of Thought." His very figure of a stream is apt to be misleading. Consciousness is represented as a stream with substantive parts between (and therefore uniting) which there extend transitive portions or flights or feelings of relation. Now this may be a convenient form under which to describe the continuous nature of the mental processes; but these so-called 'feelings of relation' only differ from other 'feelings' by their temporal quality. It must not therefore be supposed that merely as psychological existences they already bind the whole process into a unity. The term 'unity' cannot be used in any intelligible sense of the mental process as existing. But it will be still more evident that it is the functional unity of judgment of which Professor James is thinking, if we turn to the pages on which he specifically contends for the one individual state of consciousness.[2] Taking such examples as, "The pack of cards is on the table," "I am the same that I was yesterday," he shows, as modern logicians have shown, that in the thought we have not a combination of several ideas, but that judgment as such is one throughout. But in these remarks—which are excellent from a logical point of view—Professor James has completely lost sight of the existing processes which are usually, at least, supposed to be the data of psychology.
But, it may be urged, are not our logical ideas—our ideas as significant—themselves facts of consciousness, and do they not therefore as such form part of the data of psychology?
I can here only assert that ideas, as elements of knowledge, are not existences at all, not phenomena in any sense of the word. The grounds for this assertion are perhaps most cogently given in the introductory chapters of Bradley's Logic. These universals of knowledge have always indeed a psychological substrate, i.e., they are ideated or imaged in some particular way in the series of mental existences. There are, indeed, many points regarding the mutual relations of these two aspects about which we need to be informed; but the distinction itself must never be lost sight of. If psychology
