t of a person. Meinong's "act" is the
ghost of the subject, or what once was the full-blooded soul. It is
supposed that thoughts cannot just come and go, but need a person to
think them. Now, of course it is true that thoughts can be collected
into bundles, so that one bundle is my thoughts, another is your
thoughts, and a third is the thoughts of Mr. Jones. But I think
the person is not an ingredient in the single thought: he is rather
constituted by relations of the thoughts to each other and to the body.
This is a large question, which need not, in its entirety, concern us
at present. All that I am concerned with for the moment is that the
grammatical forms "I think," "you think," and "Mr. Jones thinks," are
misleading if regarded as indicating an analysis of a single thought.
It would be better to say "it thinks in me," like "it rains here"; or
better still, "there is a thought in me." This is simply on the
ground that what Meinong calls the act in thinking is not empirically
discoverable, or logically deducible from what we can observe.

The next point of criticism concerns the relation of content and object.
The reference of thoughts to objects is not, I believe, the simple
direct essential thing that Brentano and Meinong represent it as being.
It seems to me to be derivative, and to consist largely in BELIEFS:
beliefs that what constitutes the thought is connected with various
other elements which together make up the object. You have, say, an
image of St. Paul's, or merely the word "St. Paul's" in your head. You
believe, however vaguely and dimly, that this is connected with what
you would see if you went to St. Paul's, or what you would feel if you
touched its walls; it is further connected with what other people see
and feel, with services and the Dean and Chapter and Sir Christopher
Wren. These things are not mere thoughts of yours, but your thought
stands in a relation to them of which you are more or less aware. The
awareness of this relation is a further thought, and constitutes
your feeling that the original thought had an "object." But in pure
imagination you can get very similar thoughts without these accompanying
beliefs; and in this case your thoughts do not have objects or seem to
have them. Thus in such instances you have content without object. On
the other hand, in seeing or hearing it would be less misleading to
say that you have object without content, since what you see or hear is
actually part