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of the distinction between the experience I control and the experience that is uncontrollable,—my inner ideas and the ideas that force themselves upon me from without. But soon I come to learn that these shifts of feeling that are beyond direct control can nevertheless be indirectly controlled, that I can call up by an effort an idea of the shift I desire to have forced upon my experience and then by another exertion can operate so that upon a third exertion the desired experience shall be forced upon me. And by a complication of this same process I can imagine that it takes place, or that it would take place if I made the proper exertion, or that it may be so brought under control, or that if something were to be capable of forcing itself upon my experience such a shift could be brought under control. Thought consists in such sequences of imaginary experience; it is an experience in which the uncontrollable
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shift becomes controlled. It is not an instantaneous photograph. It is a sense of an action [that] could be performed, while we experience in performing the action in imagination, an experience which takes time to accomplish itself.
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visual sensation determinate in respect to hardness, in respect to beauty, in respect to value in dollars and cents? The instantaneous feeling is probably normally determinate in respect to all the qualities that properly belong to such a feeling (though not in respect to vividness) in the sense that analysis will give determinate values to the proportion of each element; but as it is in itself, one perfectly simple feeling sui generis, it is not determinate in any respect except in being such as it is. But a sensation, that is to say, the experience of a shift in feeling not due to an effort of the person who experiences this shift, is a very different thing from an instantaneous feeling, being neither instantaneous nor a feeling.
