certain bodily movement. Sometimes this movement consists in uttering
words. Prejudice leads us to suppose that between the sensory
stimulus and the utterance of the words a process of thought must have
intervened, but there seems no good reason for such a supposition. Any
habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may be performed on the
appropriate occasion, without any need of thought, and the same seems
to be true of a painfully large proportion of our talk. What applies to
uttered speech applies of course equally to the internal speech which is
not uttered. I remain, therefore, entirely unconvinced that there is
any such phenomenon as thinking which consists neither of images nor of
words, or that "ideas" have to be added to sensations and images as part
of the material out of which mental phenomena are built.

The question of the nature of our consciousness of the universal is
much affected by our view as to the general nature of the relation of
consciousness to its object. If we adopt the view of Brentano, according
to which all mental content has essential reference to an object, it
is then natural to suppose that there is some peculiar kind of mental
content of which the object is a universal, as oppose to a particular.
According to this view, a particular cat can be PERceived or imagined,
while the universal "cat" is CONceived. But this whole manner of viewing
our dealings with universals has to be abandoned when the relation of
a mental occurrence to its "object" is regarded as merely indirect and
causal, which is the view that we have adopted. The mental content is,
of course, always particular, and the question as to what it "means"
(in case it means anything) is one which cannot be settled by merely
examining the intrinsic character of the mental content, but only by
knowing its causal connections in the case of the person concerned. To
say that a certain thought "means" a universal as opposed to either a
vague or a particular, is to say something exceedingly complex. A horse
will behave in a certain manner whenever he smells a bear, even if
the smell is derived from a bearskin. That is to say, any environment
containing an instance of the universal "smell of a bear" produces
closely similar behaviour in the horse, but we do not say that the horse
is conscious of this universal. There is equally little reason to
regard a man as conscious of the same universal, because under the same
circumstances he can r