erating simultaneously inhibits them. James (Psychology, vol.
ii, p. 288) quotes with approval, though inaccurately, a passage from
Spinoza embodying this view:

"Let us conceive a boy imagining to himself a horse, and taking note of
nothing else. As this imagination involves the existence of the horse,
AND THE BOY HAS NO PERCEPTION WHICH ANNULS ITS EXISTENCE [James's
italics], he will necessarily contemplate the horse as present, nor will
he be able to doubt of its existence, however little certain of it he
may be. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines [percipit] affirms
nothing. For what is it to imagine a winged horse but to affirm that the
horse [that horse, namely] has wings? For if the mind had nothing before
it but the winged horse, it would contemplate the same as present, would
have no cause to doubt of its existence, nor any power of dissenting
from its existence, unless the imagination of the winged horse were
joined to an idea which contradicted [tollit] its existence" ("Ethics,"
vol. ii, p. 49, Scholium).

To this doctrine James entirely assents, adding in italics:

"ANY OBJECT WHICH REMAINS UNCONTRADICTED IS IPSO FACTO BELIEVED AND
POSITED AS ABSOLUTE REALITY."

If this view is correct, it follows (though James does not draw
the inference) that there is no need of any specific feeling called
"belief," and that the mere existence of images yields all that is
required. The state of mind in which we merely consider a proposition,
without believing or disbelieving it, will then appear as a
sophisticated product, the result of some rival force adding to the
image-proposition a positive feeling which may be called suspense or
non-belief--a feeling which may be compared to that of a man about to
run a race waiting for the signal. Such a man, though not moving, is in
a very different condition from that of a man quietly at rest And so the
man who is considering a proposition without believing it will be in
a state of tension, restraining the natural tendency to act upon the
proposition which he would display if nothing interfered. In this view
belief primarily consists merely in the existence of the appropriate
images without any counteracting forces.

There is a great deal to be said in favour of this view, and I have some
hesitation in regarding it as inadequate. It fits admirably with the
phenomena of dreams and hallucinatory images, and it is recommended by
the way in which it accords with mental dev