ion and implication; also a
disbelief-feeling.

It is not enough that the content and the belief-feeling should coexist:
it is necessary that there should be a specific relation between them,
of the sort expressed by saying that the content is what is believed.
If this were not obvious, it could be made plain by an argument. If
the mere co-existence of the content and the belief-feeling sufficed,
whenever we were having (say) a memory-feeling we should be remembering
any proposition which came into our minds at the same time. But this is
not the case, since we may simultaneously remember one proposition and
merely consider another.

We may sum up our analysis, in the case of bare assent to a proposition
not expressed in words, as follows: (a) We have a proposition,
consisting of interrelated images, and possibly partly of sensations;
(b) we have the feeling of assent, which is presumably a complex
sensation demanding analysis; (c) we have a relation, actually
subsisting, between the assent and the proposition, such as is expressed
by saying that the proposition in question is what is assented to. For
other forms of belief-feeling or of content, we have only to make the
necessary substitutions in this analysis.

If we are right in our analysis of belief, the use of words in
expressing beliefs is apt to be misleading. There is no way of
distinguishing, in words, between a memory and an assent to a
proposition about the past: "I ate my breakfast" and "Caesar conquered
Gaul" have the same verbal form, though (assuming that I remember my
breakfast) they express occurrences which are psychologically very
different. In the one case, what happens is that I remember the content
"eating my breakfast"; in the other case, I assent to the content
"Caesar's conquest of Gaul occurred." In the latter case, but not in the
former, the pastness is part of the content believed. Exactly similar
remarks apply to the difference between expectation, such as we have
when waiting for the thunder after a flash of lightning, and assent to a
proposition about the future, such as we have in all the usual cases of
inferential knowledge as to what will occur. I think this difficulty in
the verbal expression of the temporal aspects of beliefs is one among
the causes which have hampered philosophy in the consideration of time.

The view of belief which I have been advocating contains little that is
novel except the distinction of kinds of belief-fee