You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If a thought without a thinker comes along, it may be what is a ‘stray thought’, or it could be a thought with the owner's name and address upon it, or it could be a ‘wild thought’. The problem, should such a thought come along, is what to do with it. Of course, if it is wild, you might try to domesticate it. I shall consider later how you might try to do that. If its owner's name and address is attached, it could be restored to its owner, or the owner could be told that you had it and he could collect it any time he felt inclined. Or, of course, you could purloin it and hope either that the owner would forget it, or that he would not notice the theft and you could keep the idea all to yourself. If the owner is prepared to allow you to have it, or if it was understood that you were quite entitled to keep it, then you might try to train it in the way it should go and in a manner that would make it more amenable to the habits of your own resident thoughts and to the thoughts of the community of which you were a member, in such a way that it would gradually become assimilated and part and parcel of the totality of the group or person in whom the thought is to continue its existence.
What I am concerned with at the moment is the wild thoughts that turn up and for which there is no possibility of being able to trace immediately any kind of ownership, or even any sort of way of being aware of the genealogy of that particular thought.
First of all, it seems to me to be simplest to try to tackle the problem by considering what this strange thought is. We might get a clue to it by wondering in what frame of mind or in what conditions this wild thought turned up and became enmeshed in our method of thinking. It could be that it seemed to occur to us when we were asleep. I am using this expression, ‘when we were asleep’, because it
is a state of mind with which most people think they are familiar, so we can start with this somewhat familiar idea.
I want to consider the peculia