Is an incomplete 'thought about' that reality, that reality is its
'topic,' etc. experience, if the terminal feeling be a sensation; by
the way of logical or habitual suggestion, if it be only an image in
the mind.

Let an illustration make this plainer. I open the first book I take
up, and read the first sentence that meets my eye: 'Newton saw
the handiwork of God in the heavens as plainly as Paley in the
animal kingdom.' I immediately look back and try to analyze the
subjective state in which I rapidly apprehended this sentence as I
read it. In the first place there was an obvious feeling that the
sentence was intelligible and rational and related to the world of
realities. There was also a sense of agreement or harmony between
'Newton,' 'Paley,' and 'God.' There was no apparent image connected
with the words 'heavens,' or 'handiwork,' or 'God'; they were
words merely. With 'animal kingdom' I think there was the faintest
consciousness (it may possibly have been an image of the steps) of
the Museum of Zoology in the town of Cambridge where I write. With
'Paley' there was an equally faint consciousness of a small
dark leather book; and with 'Newton' a pretty distinct vision of the
right-hand lower corner of curling periwig. This is all the mind-
stuff I can discover in my first consciousness of the meaning of
this sentence, and I am afraid that even not all of this would have
been present had I come upon the sentence in a genuine reading of
the book, and not picked it out for an experiment. And yet my
consciousness was truly cognitive. The sentence is 'about realities'
which my psychological critic--for we must not forget him--
acknowledges to be such, even as he acknowledges my distinct feeling
that they ARE realities, and my acquiescence in the general
rightness of what I read of them, to be true knowledge on my part.