ther that in principle every object can be
thought (meant) distinctly, without any help from sensuous presentation
(Anschauungshilfen). Every individual shade of blue colour on the
picture that hangs in my room I can think with complete distinctness
unsensuously (unanschaulich), provided it is possible that the object
should be given to me in another manner than by the help of sensations.
How that is possible we shall see later." What he calls a thought
(Gedanke) cannot be reduced, according to him, to other psychic
occurrences. He maintains that thoughts consist for the most part of
known rules (p. 342). It is clearly essential to the interest of this
theory that the thought or rule alluded to by Buhler should not need to
be expressed in words, for if it is expressed in words it is immediately
capable of being dealt with on the lines with which the behaviourists
have familiarized us. It is clear also that the supposed absence of
words rests solely upon the introspective testimony of the persons
experimented upon. I cannot think that there is sufficient certainty
of their reliability in this negative observation to make us accept a
difficult and revolutionary view of thought, merely because they have
failed to observe the presence of words or their equivalent in their
thinking. I think it far more likely, especially in view of the fact
that the persons concerned were highly educated, that we are concerned
with telescoped processes, in which habit has caused a great many
intermediate terms to be elided or to be passed over so quickly as to
escape observation.

* Titchener, op. cit., p. 79.

I am inclined to think that similar remarks apply to the general idea of
"imageless thinking," concerning which there has been much controversy.
The advocates of imageless thinking are not contending merely that there
can be thinking which is purely verbal; they are contending that there
can be thinking which proceeds neither in words nor in images. My own
feeling is that they have rashly assumed the presence of thinking in
cases where habit has rendered thinking unnecessary. When Thorndike
experimented with animals in cages, he found that the associations
established were between a sensory stimulus and a bodily movement (not
the idea of it), without the need of supposing any non-physiological
intermediary (op. cit., p. 100 ff.). The same thing, it seems to me,
applies to ourselves. A certain sensory situation produces in us a