When we call these three preceding cases cases of comparing from
memory, we feel that their description is in a sense unsatisfactory, or
incomplete.
We are inclined to say that the description has left out the essential
feature of such a process & given us accessory features
only.
The essential feature it seems would be what one might call a specific
experience of comparing & of recognizing.
Now it is
clear || queer
that on
closely looking at cases of comparing, it is very easy to see a great
number of activities and states of mind, all more or less
characteristic
15.
of the act of
comparing.
This in fact is so, whether we speak of comparing from memory or of
comparing by means of a sample before our eyes.
We know a vast number of such processes, processes
similar to each other in a vast number of different ways.
We hold pieces whose colours we want to compare together or near each
other for a longer or shorter period, look at them alternately or
simultaneously, place them under different lights, say different things
while we do so, have memory images, feelings of tension &
relaxation, satisfaction & dissatisfaction, the various feelings
of strain in and around our eyes accompanying prolonged gazing at the
same object, & all possible combinations of these & many
other experiences.
The more such cases we observe & the closer we look at them,
the more doubtful we feel about finding one particular mental
experience characteristic of comparing.
In fact, if after you had scrutinized a number of
such closely, I admitted that there existed a peculiar mental
experience which you might call the experience of comparing, &
that if you insisted, I should be willing to adopt the word
“comparing” only for cases in which this peculiar
feeling had occurred, you would now feel that the assumption of such a
peculiar experience had lost its point, because this
experience was placed side by side with a vast number of other
experiences which after we have scrutinized the cases seems
to be that which really constitutes what connects all the cases of
comparing.
For the “specific
experience” we had been looking for was meant to have played the
role which has been assumed by the mass of experiences revealed to us by
our
16.
scrutiny:
We never wanted the specific experience to be just one among a
number of more or less characteristic experiences.
(One might say that there are two ways of looking at this
matter, one as it were, at close quarters, the other as though
from a distance and through the medium of a
particular || peculiar
atmosphere.)
In fact we have found that the use which we really make of the word
“comparing” is different from that which looking at
it from far away we were led to expect.
We find that what connects all the cases of comparing is a vast number
of overlapping similarities, and as soon as we see this, we feel no
longer compelled to say that there must be some one feature common to
them all.
What ties the ship to the wharf is a rope, and the rope consists of
fibres, but it does not get its strength from any fibre which runs
through it from one end to the other, but from the fact that there is a
vast number of fibres overlapping. |
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