A.—–­First voice, or Mental Soprano,—­thought follows a woman talking.

B.—­Second voice, or Mental Barytone,—­my running accompaniment.

C.—­Third voice, or Mental Basso,—­low grumble of importunate self-repeating idea.

A.—­White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers—­

B.—­Deuse take her!  What a fool she is!  Hear her chatter! (Look out of window just here.—­Two pages and a half of description, if it were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)—­Go ahead, old lady! (Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There’s that infernal family nose!  Came over in the “Mayflower” on the first old fool’s face.  Why don’t they wear a ring in it?

C.—­You ’ll be late at lecture,—­late at lecture,—­late,—­late—­

I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt through the superincumbent strata, thus:—­The usual single or double currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,—­Oh, there!  I knew there was something troubling me,—­and the thought which had been working through comes up to the surface clear, definite, and articulates itself,—­a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or an unpleasant recollection.

The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in this, that they are both brimful.  There is no space between consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.  All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular polyhedra.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him.  So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses.  He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he cannot stop it.  So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.  He can only take his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of another.

—­What is the saddle of a thought?  Why, a word, of course.—­Twenty years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round all that time without a rider.

The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought upon that of another.