elements involved in the thought of an object. These three he
calls the act, the content and the object. The act is the same in
any two cases of the same kind of consciousness; for instance, if
I think of Smith or think of Brown, the act of thinking, in
itself, is exactly similar on both occasions. But the content of
my thought, the particular event that is happening in my mind, is
different when I think of Smith and when I think of Brown. The
content, Meinong argues, must not be confounded with the object,
since the content must exist in my mind at the moment when I have
the thought, whereas the object need not do so. The object may be
something past or future; it may be physical, not mental; it may
be something abstract, like equality for example; it may be
something imaginary, like a golden mountain; or it may even be
something self-contradictory, like a round square. But in all
these cases, so he contends, the content exists when the thought
exists, and is what distinguishes it, as an occurrence, from
other thoughts.

* See, e.g. his article: "Ueber Gegenstande hoherer Ordnung und
deren Verhaltniss zur inneren Wahrnehmung," "Zeitschrift fur
Psychologie and Physiologie der Sinnesorgane," vol. xxi, pp.
182-272 (1899), especially pp. 185-8.


To make this theory concrete, let us suppose that you are
thinking of St. Paul's. Then, according to Meinong, we have to
distinguish three elements which are necessarily combined in
constituting the one thought. First, there is the act of
thinking, which would be just the same whatever you were thinking
about. Then there is what makes the character of the thought as