ibutes, while in its
thought-function it disowns them and attributes them elsewhere. There is
a self-contradiction here from which the radical dualism of thought and
thing is the only truth that can save us. Only if the thought is one
kind of being can the adjectives exist in it 'intentionally' (to use the
scholastic term); only if the thing is another kind, can they exist in
it constitutively and energetically. No simple subject can take the same
adjectives and at one time be qualified by it, and at another time be
merely 'of' it, as of something only meant or known."

The solution insisted on by this objector, like many other common-sense
solutions, grows the less satisfactory the more one turns it in one's
mind. To begin with, _are_ thought and thing as heterogeneous as is
commonly said?

No one denies that they have some categories in common. Their relations
to time are identical. Both, moreover, may have parts (for psychologists
in general treat thoughts as having them); and both may be complex or
simple. Both are of kinds, can be compared, added and subtracted and
arranged in serial orders. All sorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts
which appear incompatible with consciousness, being as such a bare
diaphaneity. For instance, they are natural and easy, or laborious. They
are beautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise, idiotic, focal,
marginal, insipid, confused, vague, precise, rational, casual, general,
particular, and many things besides. Moreover, the chapters on
'Perception' in the psychology-books are full of facts that make for the
essential homogeneity of thought with thing. How, if 'subject' and
'object' were separated 'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no
attributes in common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and
recognized material object, what part comes in through the sense-organs
and what part comes 'out of one's own head'? Sensations and
apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately that you can no more tell
where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning
circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real
foreground and the painted canvas join together.[20]

Descartes for the first time defined thought as the absolutely
unextended, and later philosophers have accepted the description as
correct. But what possible meaning has it to say that, when we think of
a foot-rule or a square yard, extension is not attributable to our
thought? Of ever