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
queer
clear
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 charac-
15.
teristic 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 fa[s|c]t, 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 i[y|t]s 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 thise “specific experience” we had been looking for was meant to have played the rôle 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
peculiar
particular
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.