TO
MY DEAR FRIEND
FRANÇOIS PILLON.
AS A TOKEN OF AFFECTION,
AND AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF WHAT I OWE
TO THE
CRITIQUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
The treatise which follows has in the main grown up inconnection with the author's class-room instruction inPsychology, although it is true that some of the chaptersare more 'metaphysical,' and others fuller of detail, thanis suitable for students who are going over the subject forthe first time. The consequence of this is that, in spite ofthe exclusion of the important subjects of pleasure andpain, and moral and æsthetic feelings and judgments, thework has grown to a length which no one can regret morethan the writer himself. The man must indeed be sanguinewho, in this crowded age, can hope to have many readersfor fourteen hundred continuous pages from his pen. Butwer Vieles bringt wird Manchem etwas bringen; and, by judiciouslyskipping according to their several needs, I am surethat many sorts of readers, even those who are just beginningthe study of the subject, will find my book of use.Since the beginners are most in need of guidance, I suggestfor their behoof that they omit altogether on a firstreading chapters 6, 7, 8, 10 (from page 330 to page 371),12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, and 28. The better to awaken theneophyte's interest, it is possible that the wise order wouldbe to pass directly from chapter 4 to chapters 23, 24, 25,and 26, and thence to return to the first volume again.Chapter 20, on Space-perception, is a terrible thing, which,unless written with all that detail, could not be fairlytreated at all. An abridgment of it, called 'The SpatialQuale,' which appeared in the Journal of SpeculativePhilosophy, vol. xiii, p. 64, may be found by some personsa useful substitute for the entire chapter.
I have kept close to the point of view of natural sciencethroughout the book. Every natural science assumes certain[Pg vi]data uncritically, and declines to challenge the elementsbetween which its own 'laws' obtain, and fromwhich its own deductions are carried on. Psychology, thescience of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1)thoughts and feelings, and (2)a physical world in time andspace with which they coexist and which (3)they know. Ofcourse these data themselves are discussable; but the discussionof them (as of other elements) is called metaphysicsand falls outside the province of this book. Thisbook, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and arevehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychologywhen she has ascertained the empirical correlation of thevarious sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditionsof the brain, can go no farther—can go no farther, that is,as a natural science. If she goes farther she becomesmetaphysical. All attempts toexplain our phenomenallygiven thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities(whether the latter be named 'Soul,' 'TranscendentalEgo,' 'Ideas,' or 'Elementary Units of Consciousness') aremetaphysical. This book consequently rejects both theassociationist and the spiritualist theories; and in thisstrictly positivistic point of view consists the only featureof it for which I feel tempted to claim originality. Ofcourse this point of view is anything but ultimate. Menmust keep thinking; and the data assumed by psychology,just like those assumed by physics and the other naturalsciences, must some time be overhauled. The effort tooverhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics;but metaphysics can only perform her task well when distinctlyconscious of its great extent. Metaphysics fragmentary,irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious thatshe is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she injectsherself into a natural science. And it seems to methat the theories both of a spiritual agent and of associated'ideas' are, as they figure in the psychology-books, just suchmetaphysics as this. Even if their results be true, itwould be as well to keep them,as thus presented, out ofpsychology as it is to keep the results of idealism out ofphysics.
I have therefore treated our passing thoughts as integers,[Pg vii]and regarded the mere laws of their coexistence withbrain-states as the ultimate laws for our science. Thereader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book.It is mainly a mass of descriptive details, running out intoqueries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight ofher task can hope successfully to deal with. That willperhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best markof health that a science can show is this unfinished-seemingfront.
The completion of the book has been so slow thatseveral chapters have been published successively in Mind,the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the Popular ScienceMonthly, and Scribner's Magazine. Acknowledgment ismade in the proper places.
The bibliography, I regret to say, is quite unsystematic.I have habitually given my authority for specialexperimental facts; but beyond that I have aimed mainlyto cite books that would probably be actually used bythe ordinary American college-student in his collateralreading. The bibliography in W. Volkmann von Volkmar'sLehrbuch der Psychologie (1875) is so complete, up to itsdate, that there is no need of an inferior duplicate. Andfor more recent references, Sully's Outlines, Dewey's Psychology,and Baldwin's Handbook of Psychology may beadvantageously used.
Finally, where one owes to so many, it seems absurd tosingle out particular creditors; yet I cannot resist thetemptation at the end of my first literary venture to recordmy gratitude for the inspiration I have got from the writingsof J. S. Mill, Lotze, Renouvier, Hodgson, and Wundt,and from the intellectual companionship (to name only fivenames) of Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce in oldtimes, and more recently of Stanley Hall, James Putnam,and Josiah Royce.
Harvard University, August 1890.
The Scope of Psychology,1
Mental Manifestations depend on Cerebral Conditions,1.Pursuit of ends and choice are the marks of Mind's presence,6.
The Functions of the Brain,12
Reflex, semi-reflex, and voluntary acts,12. The Frog's nerve-centres,14. General notion of the hemispheres,20. TheirEducation—the Meynert scheme,24. The phrenological contrastedwith the physiological conception,27. The localizationof function in the hemispheres,30. The motor zone,31. MotorAphasia,37. The sight-centre,41. Mental blindness,48. Thehearing-centre,52. Sensory Aphasia,54. Centres for smell andtaste,57. The touch-centre,58. Man's Consciousness limited tothe hemispheres,65. The restitution of function,67. Finalcorrection of the Meynert scheme,72. Conclusions,78.
On Some General Conditions of Brain-activity,81
The summation of Stimuli,82. Reaction-time,85. Cerebralblood-supply,97. Cerebral Thermometry,99. Phosphorus andThought,101.
Habit,104
Due to plasticity of neural matter,105. Produces ease ofaction,112. Diminishes attention,115. Concatenated performances,116. Ethical implications and pedagogic maxims,120.
The Automaton-theory,128
The theory described,128. Reasons for it,133. Reasonsagainst it,138.
The Mind-stuff Theory,145
Evolutionary Psychology demands a Mind-dust,146. Somealleged proofs that it exists,150. Refutation of these proofs,154.Self-compounding of mental facts is inadmissible,158. Canstates of mind be unconscious?162. Refutation of alleged proofsof unconscious thought,164. Difficulty of stating the connectionbetween mind and brain,176. 'The Soul' is logically the leastobjectionable hypothesis,180. Conclusion,182.
The Methods and Snares of Psychology,183
Psychology is a natural Science,183. Introspection,185.Experiment,192. Sources of error,194. The 'Psychologist'sfallacy,'196.
The Relations of Minds to other Things,199
Time relations: lapses of Consciousness—Lockev. Descartes,200. The 'unconsciousness' of hysterics not genuine,202.Minds may split into dissociated parts,206. Space-relations:the Seat of the Soul,214. Cognitive relations,216. The Psychologist'spoint of view,218. Two kinds of knowledge, acquaintanceand knowledge about,221.
The Stream of Thought,224
Consciousness tends to the personal form,225. It is in constantchange,229. It is sensibly continuous,237. 'Substantive'and 'transitive' parts of Consciousness,243. Feelings of relation,245. Feelings of tendency,249. The 'fringe' of theobject,258. The feeling of rational sequence,261. Thoughtpossible in any kind of mental material,265. Thought and language,267. Consciousness is cognitive,271. The word Object,275. Every cognition is due to one integral pulse of thought276. Diagrams of Thought's stream,279. Thought is alwaysselective,284.
The Consciousness of Self,291
The Empirical Self or Me,291. Its constituents,292. Thematerial self,292. The Social Self,293. The Spiritual Self,296.Difficulty of apprehending Thought as a purely spiritual activity,[Pg xi]299. Emotions of Self,305. Rivalry and conflict of one's differentselves,309. Their hierarchy,313. What Self we love in 'Self-love,'317. The Pure Ego,329. The verifiable ground of thesense of personal identity,332. The passing Thought is the onlyThinker which Psychology requires,338. Theories of Self-consciousness:1) The theory of the Soul,342. 2) The Associationisttheory,350. 3) The Transcendentalist theory,360. The mutationsof the Self,373. Insane delusions,375. Alternating selves,379. Mediumships or possessions,393. Summary,400.
Attention,402
Its neglect by English psychologists,402. Description of it,404. To how many things can we attend at once?405. Wundt'sexperiments on displacement of date of impressions simultaneouslyattended to,410. Personal equation,413. The varieties ofattention,416. Passive attention,418. Voluntary attention,420.Attention's effects on sensation,425;—on discrimination,426;—onrecollection,427;—on reaction-time,427. The neural processin attention: 1) Accommodation of sense-organ,434.2) Preperception,438. Is voluntary attention a resultant or aforce?447. The effort to attend can be conceived as aresultant,450. Conclusion,453. Acquired Inattention,455.
Conception,459
The sense of sameness,459. Conception defined,461. Conceptionsare unchangeable,464. Abstract ideas,468. Universals,473. The conception 'of the same' is not the 'same state' ofmind,480.
Discrimination and Comparison,483
Locke on discrimination,483. Martineauditto,484. Simultaneoussensations originally fuse into one object,488. Theprinciple of mediate comparison,489. Not all differences aredifferences of composition,490. The conditions of discrimination,494. The sensation of difference,495. The transcendentalisttheory of the perception of differences uncalled for,498. Theprocess of analysis,502. The process of abstraction,505. Theimprovement of discrimination by practice,508. Its two causes,510. Practical interests limit our discrimination,515. Reaction-timeafter discrimination,523. The perception of likeness,528.The magnitude of differences,530. The measurement of discriminative[Pg xii]sensibility: Weber's law,533. Fechner's interpretationof this as the psycho-physic law,537. Criticism thereof,545.
Association,550
The problem of the connection of our thoughts,550. Itdepends on mechanical conditions,553. Association is of objectsthought of, not of 'ideas,'554. The rapidity of association,557.The 'law of contiguity,'561. The elementary law of association,566. Impartial redintegration,569. Ordinary or mixed association,571. The law of interest,572. Association by similarity,578. Elementary expression of the difference between the threekinds of association,581. Association in voluntary thought,583.Similarity no elementary law,590. History of the doctrine ofassociation,594.
The Perception of Time,605
The sensible present,606. Its duration is the primitive time-perception,608. Accuracy of our estimate of short durations,611. We have no sense for empty time,619. Variations of ourtime-estimate,624. The feeling of past time is a present feeling,627. Its cerebral process,632.
Memory,643
Primary memory,643. Analysis of the phenomenon of memory,648. Retention and reproduction are both caused by pathsof association in the brain,653. The conditions of goodness inmemory,659. Native retentiveness is unchangeable,663. All improvementof memory consists in betterthinking,667. Other conditionsof good memory,669. Recognition, or the sense of familiarity,673. Exact measurements of memory,676. Forgetting,679. Pathological cases,681. Professor Ladd criticised,687.
Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of itsphenomena and of their conditions. The phenomena aresuch things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings,decisions, and the like; and, superficially considered,their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaoticimpression on the observer. The most natural and consequentlythe earliest way of unifying the material was,first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, toaffiliate the diverse mental modes thus found, upon asimple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are takento be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for instance,the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now ofReasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or itsAppetite. This is the orthodox 'spiritualistic' theory ofscholasticism and of common-sense. Another and a lessobvious way of unifying the chaos is to seek common elementsin the divers mental facts rather than a commonagent behind them, and to explain them constructively bythe various forms of arrangement of these elements, as oneexplains houses by stones and bricks. The 'associationist'schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hume theMills and Bain in Britain have thus constructed apsychologywithout a soul by taking discrete 'ideas,' faint or vivid,and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms[Pg 2]of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions,emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the otherfurnishings of an individual's mind may be engendered.The very Self orego of the individual comes in thisway to be viewed no longer as the pre-existing source ofthe representations, but rather as their last and most complicatedfruit.
Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomenain either of these ways, we soon become aware of inadequaciesin our method. Any particular cognition, for example,or recollection, is accounted for on the soul-theoryby being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognitionor of Memory. These faculties themselves are thoughtof as absolute properties of the soul; that is, to takethe case of memory, no reason is given why we shouldremember a fact as it happened, except that so to rememberit constitutes the essence of our RecollectivePower. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our memory'sfailures and blunders by secondary causes. Butitssuccesses can invoke no factors save the existence ofcertain objective things to be remembered on the onehand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When,for instance, I recall my graduation-day, and drag all itsincidents and emotions up from death's dateless night, nomechanical cause can explain this process, nor can anyanalysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seemother than an ultimatedatum, which, whether we rebel ornot at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for grantedif we are to psychologize at all. However the associationistmay represent the present ideas as thronging and arrangingthemselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end toadmit thatsomething, be it brain, be it 'ideas,' be it 'association,'knows past timeas past, and fills it out with thisor that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an'irreducible faculty,' he says no more than this admissionof the associationist already grants.
And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactorysimplification of the concrete facts. For why should thisabsolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the eventsof yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those[Pg 3]of an hour ago? Why, again, in old age should its graspof childhood's events seem firmest? Why should illnessand exhaustion enfeeble it? Why should repeating an experiencestrengthen our recollection of it? Why shoulddrugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate thingslong since forgotten? If we content ourselves with merelyaffirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly constitutedby nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seemlittle the better for having invoked it, for our explanationbecomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with whichwe started. Moreover there is something grotesque andirrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped withelementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort.Whyshould our memory cling more easily to the near thanthe remote? Why should it lose its grasp of proper soonerthan of abstract names? Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic;and might, for aught we can seea priori, be theprecise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then,thefaculty does not exist absolutely, but works under conditions;andthe quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist'smost interesting task.
However firmly he may hold to the soul and her rememberingfaculty, he must acknowledge that she neverexerts the latter without acue, and that something must alwaysprecede andremind us of whatever we are to recollect."Anidea," says the associationist, "an idea associated withthe remembered thing; and this explains also why thingsrepeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their associateson the various occasions furnish so many distinctavenues of recall." But this does not explain the effects offever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. Andin general, the pure associationist's account of our mentallife is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist.This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clingingtogether, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, likedominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in akaleidoscope,—whence do they get their fantastic laws ofclinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do?
For this the associationist must introduce the order ofexperience in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is[Pg 4]a copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order ofphenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phenomenahave absolutely no power to influence our ideasuntil they have first impressed our senses and our brain.The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our rememberingit. Unless we have seen it, or somehowundergoneit, we shall never know of its having been. The expediencesof the body are thus one of the conditions of thefaculty of memory being what it is. And a very smallamount of reflection on facts shows that one part of thebody, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences aredirectly concerned. If the nervous communication be cutoff between the brain and other parts, the experiences ofthose other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eyeis blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless.And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness isabolished or altered, even although every other organ inthe body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on thehead, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of anapoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst avery few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh,or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure tohave the second. The delirium of fever, the altered selfof insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulatingthrough the brain, or to pathological changes in thatorgan's substance. The fact that the brain is the oneimmediate bodily condition of the mental operations isindeed so universally admitted nowadays that I needspend no more time in illustrating it, but will simplypostulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of thebook will be more or less of a proof that the postulate wascorrect.
Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularlybrain-experiences, must take a place amongst those conditionsof the mental life of which Psychology need takeaccount.The spiritualist and the associationist must bothbe 'cerebralists', to the extent at least of admitting thatcertain peculiarities in the way of working of their ownfavorite principles are explicable only by the fact that thebrain laws are a codeterminant of the result.[Pg 5]Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount ofbrain-physiology must be presupposed or included inPsychology.[1]
In still another way the psychologist is forced to besomething of a nerve-physiologist. Mental phenomena arenot only conditioneda parte ante by bodily processes; butthey lead to thema parte post. That they lead toacts is ofcourse the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely meanacts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscularperformances. Mental states occasion also changes in thecalibre of blood-vessels, or alteration in the heart-beats, orprocesses more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If theseare taken into account, as well as acts which follow at someremote period because the mental state was once there, it willbe safe to lay down the general law thatno mental modificationever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodilychange. The ideas and feelings,e.g., which these presentprinted characters excite in the reader's mind not onlyoccasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements ofarticulation in him, but will some day make him speak, ortake sides in a discussion, or give advice, or choose a bookto read, differently from what would have been the case hadthey never impressed his retina. Our psychology must thereforetake account not only of the conditions antecedent tomental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.
But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligencemay grow so automatic by dint of habit as to beapparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking,buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, evensaying one's prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbedin other things. The performances of animalinstinct seem semi-automatic, and thereflex acts of self-preservationcertainly are so. Yet they resemble intelligentacts in bringing about thesame ends at which the animals'consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims.[Pg 6]Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts asthese be included in Psychology?
The boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague. Itis better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be asvague as its subject, and include such phenomena as theseif by so doing we can throw any light on the main businessin hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can;and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrowconception of our subject. At a certain stage in the developmentof every science a degree of vagueness is whatbest consists with fertility. On the whole, few recent formulashave done more real service of a rough sort in psychologythan the Spencerian one that the essence of mentallife and of bodily life are one, namely, 'the adjustment ofinner to outer relations.' Such a formula is vaguenessincarnate; but because it takes into account the fact thatminds inhabit environments which act on them and onwhich they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mindin the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immenselymore fertile than the old-fashioned 'rational psychology,'which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficientunto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature andproperties. I shall therefore feel free to make any salliesinto zoology or into pure nerve-physiology which mayseem instructive for our purposes, but otherwise shall leavethose sciences to the physiologists.
Can we state more distinctly still the manner in whichthe mental life seems to intervene between impressionsmade from without upon the body, and reactions of thebody upon the outer world again? Let us look at a fewfacts.
If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a magnetbrought near them, they will fly through the air for acertain distance and stick to its surface. A savage seeingthe phenomenon explains it as the result of an attractionor love between the magnet and the filings. Butlet a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filingswill press forever against its surface without its ever occurringto them to pass around its sides and thus come into[Pg 7]more direct contact with the object of their love. Blowbubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water,they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Theiraction may again be poetically interpreted as due to alonging to recombine with the mother-atmosphere abovethe surface. But if you invert a jar full of water over thepail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom,shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflectionfrom their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards therim of the jar when they found their upward course impeded,would easily have set them free.
If now we pass from such actions as these to those ofliving things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wantsJuliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstaclesintervene he moves towards her by as straight a line asthey. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built betweenthem, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces againstits opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with thecard. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling thewall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. Withthe filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the enddepends on accidents. With the lover it is the end whichis fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.
Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placedour bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water.The want of breath will soon make him also long to rejointhe mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest pathto his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jarfull of water be inverted over him, he will not, like thebubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyieldingroof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood untilby re-descending again he has discovered a path round itsbrim to the goal of his desires. Again the fixed end, thevarying means!
Such contrasts between living and inanimate performancesend by leading men to deny that in the physicalworld final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires areto-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air.No one supposes now that the end of any activity whichthey may display is an ideal purpose presiding over the[Pg 8]activity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it intobeing by a sort ofvis a fronte. The end, on the contrary, isdeemed a mere passive result, pushed into beinga tergo,having had, so to speak, no voice in its own production.Alter the pre-existing conditions, and with inorganic materialsyou bring forth each time a different apparent end.But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changesthe activity displayed, but not the end reached; for herethe idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the conditionsto determine what the activities shall be.
The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means fortheir attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presenceof mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminatebetween an intelligent and a mechanical performance.We impute no mentality to sticks and stones,because they never seem to move forthe sake of anything,but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with nosign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.
Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of allphilosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression ofintelligence rational in its inward nature, or a bruteexternal fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in contemplatingit, unable to banish the impression that it is arealm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of something,we place intelligence at the heart of it and have areligion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediableflux, we can think of the present only as so much meremechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with noreference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.
In the lengthy discussions which psychologists havecarried on about the amount of intelligence displayed bylower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved inthe functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same testhas always been applied: Is the character of the actionssuch that we must believe them to be performedfor the sakeof their result? The result in question, as we shall hereafterabundantly see, is as a rule a useful one,—the animalis, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringingit forth. So far the action has a teleological character;[Pg 9]but such mere outward teleology as this might still be theblind result ofvis a tergo. The growth and movements ofplants, the processes of development, digestion, secretion,etc., in animals, supply innumerable instances of performancesuseful to the individual which may neverthelessbe, and by most of us are supposed to be, produced byautomatic mechanism. The physiologist does not confidentlyassert conscious intelligence in the frog's spinalcord until he has shown that the useful result which thenervous machinery brings forth under a given irritationremains the same when the machinery is altered. If, to takethe stock instance, the right knee of a headless frog be irritatedwith acid, the right foot will wipe it off. When, however,this foot is amputated, the animal will often raise theleft foot to the spot and wipe the offending material away.
Pflüger and Lewes reason from such facts in the followingway: If the first reaction were the result of mere machinery,they say; if that irritated portion of the skin dischargedthe right leg as a trigger discharges its own barrel of a shot-gun;then amputating the right foot would indeed frustratethe wiping, but would not make theleft leg move. It wouldsimply result in the right stump moving through the emptyair (which is in fact the phenomenon sometimes observed).The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barrelif the right one be unloaded; nor does an electrical machineever get restless because it can only emit sparks,and not hem pillow-cases like a sewing-machine.
If, on the contrary, the right leg originally moved for thepurpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more naturalthan that, when the easiest means of effecting that purposeprove fruitless, other means should be tried. Every failuremust keep the animal in a state of disappointment whichwill lead to all sorts of new trials and devices; and tranquillitywill not ensue till one of these, by a happy stroke,achieves the wished-for end.
In a similar way Goltz ascribes intelligence to thefrog's optic lobes and cerebellum. We alluded above to themanner in which a sound frog imprisoned in water will discoveran outlet to the atmosphere. Goltz found that frogsdeprived of their cerebral hemispheres would often exhibit[Pg 10]a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising from the bottomand finding his farther upward progress checked by theglass bell which has been inverted over him, will not persistin butting his nose against the obstacle until dead ofsuffocation, but will often re-descend and emerge from underits rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards,but rather a conscious desire to reach the air by hook orcrook were the main-spring of his activity. Goltz concludedfrom this that the hemispheres are not the sole sealof intellect in frogs. He made the same inference fromobserving that a brainless frog will turn over from his backto his belly when one of his legs is sewed up, although themovements required are then very different from thoseexcited under normal circumstances by the same annoyingposition. They seem determined, consequently, not merelyby the antecedent irritant, but by the final end,—though theirritant of course is what makes the end desired.
Another brilliant German author, Liebmann,[2] arguesagainst the brain's mechanism accounting for mental action,by very similar considerations. A machine as such, hesays, will bring forth right results when it is in good order,and wrong results if out of repair. But both kinds of resultflow with equally fatal necessity from their conditions. Wecannot suppose the clock-work whose structure fatallydetermines it to a certain rate of speed, noticing that thisspeed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it.Its conscience, if it have any, should be as good as that ofthe best chronometer, for both alike obey equally well thesame eternal mechanical laws—laws from behind. But ifthebrain be out of order and the man says "Twice four aretwo," instead of "Twice four are eight," or else "I must goto the coal to buy the wharf," instead of "I must go to thewharf to buy the coal," instantly there arises a consciousnessof error. The wrong performance, though it obey thesame mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless condemned,—condemnedas contradicting the inner law—thelaw from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brainshould act, whether it do so or not.
We need not discuss here whether these writers in drawingtheir conclusion have done justice to all the premises Iinvolved in the cases they treat of. We quote their argumentsonly to show how they appeal to the principle thatno actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice ofmeans, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind.
I shall then adopt this as the criterion by which to circumscribethe subject-matter of this work so far as actionenters into it. Many nervous performances will thereforebe unmentioned, as being purely physiological. Nor will theanatomy of the nervous system and organs of sense bedescribed anew. The reader will find in H. N. Martin's'Human Body,' in G. T. Ladd's 'Physiological Psychology,'and in all the other standard Anatomies and Physiologies,a mass of information which we must regard as preliminaryand take for granted in the present work.[3] Ofthe functions of the cerebral hemispheres, however, sincethey directly subserve consciousness, it will be well togive some little account.
[1]Cf. Geo. T. Ladd: Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), pt.iii, chap. iii, §§ 9, 12.
[2] Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, p. 489.
[3] Nothing is easier than to familiarize one's self with the mammalianbrain. Get a sheep's head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (allthree can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unravel itsparts either by the aid of a human dissecting book, such as Holden's 'Manualof Anatomy,' or by the specific directionsad hoc given in such books asFoster and Langley's 'Practical Physiology' (Macmillan) or Morrell's'Comparative Anatomy and Dissection of Mammalia' (Longmans).
If I begin chopping the foot of a tree, its branches areunmoved by my act, and its leaves murmur as peacefully asever in the wind. If, on the contrary, I do violence to thefoot of a fellow-man, the rest of his body instantly respondsto the aggression by movements of alarm or defence. Thereason of this difference is that the man has a nervous systemwhilst the tree has none; and the function of the nervoussystem is to bring each part into harmonious co-operationwith every other. The afferent nerves, when excited bysome physical irritant, be this as gross in its mode of operationas a chopping axe or as subtle as the waves of light,conveys the excitement to the nervous centres. The commotionset up in the centres does not stop there, but dischargesitself, if at all strong, through the efferent nervesinto muscles and glands, exciting movements of the limbsand viscera, or acts of secretion, which vary with the animal,and with the irritant applied. These acts of response haveusually the common character of being of service. Theyward off the noxious stimulus and support the beneficialone; whilst if, in itself indifferent, the stimulus be a sign ofsome distant circumstance of practical importance, theanimal's acts are addressed to this circumstance so as toavoid its perils or secure its benefits, as the case may be.To take a common example, if I hear the conductor calling'All aboard!' as I enter the depot, my heart first stops,then palpitates, and my legs respond to the air-wavesfalling on my tympanum by quickening their movements.If I stumble as I run, the sensation of falling provokes amovement of the hands towards the direction of the fall,the effect of which is to shield the body from too sudden ashock. If a cinder enter my eye, its lids close forciblyand a copious flow of tears tends to wash it out.
These three responses to a sensational stimulus differ,however, in many respects. The closure of the eye and thelachrymation are quite involuntary, and so is the disturbanceof the heart. Such involuntary responses we know as'reflex' acts. The motion of the arms to break the shockof falling may also be called reflex, since it occurs tooquickly to be deliberately intended. Whether it be instinctiveor whether it result from the pedestrian education ofchildhood may be doubtful; it is, at any rate, less automaticthan the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effortlearn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it altogether.Actions of this kind, into which instinct and volitionenter upon equal terms, have been called 'semi-reflex.' Theact of running towards the train, on the other hand, has noinstinctive element about it. It is purely the result of education,and is preceded by a consciousness of the purpose tobe attained and a distinct mandate of the will. It is a 'voluntaryact.' Thus the animal's reflex and voluntary performancesshade into each other gradually, being connectedby acts which may often occur automatically, but may alsobe modified by conscious intelligence.
An outside observer, unable to perceive the accompanyingconsciousness, might be wholly at a loss to discriminatebetween the automatic acts and those which volition escorted.But if the criterion of mind's existence be thechoice of the proper means for the attainment of a supposedend, all the acts seem to be inspired by intelligence, forappropriateness characterizes them all alike. This fact, now,has led to two quite opposite theories about the relation toconsciousness of the nervous functions. Some authors,finding that the higher voluntary ones seem to require theguidance of feeling, conclude that over the lowest reflexessome such feeling also presides, though it may be a feelingof whichwe remain unconscious. Others, finding that reflexand semi-automatic acts may, notwithstanding their appropriateness,take place with an unconsciousness apparentlycomplete, fly to the opposite extreme and maintain that theappropriateness even of voluntary actions owes nothing tothe fact that consciousness attends them. They are, accordingto these writers, results of physiological mechanism pure[Pg 14]and simple. In a near chapter we shall return to thiscontroversy again. Let us now look a little more closelyat the brain and at the ways in which its states may be supposedto condition those of the mind.
Both the minute anatomy and the detailed physiologyof the brain are achievements of the present generation, orrather we may say (beginning with Meynert) of the pasttwenty years. Many points are still obscure and subjectto controversy; but a general way of conceiving the organhas been reached on all hands which in its main featureseems not unlikely to stand, and which even gives a mostplausible scheme of the way in which cerebral and mentaloperations go hand in hand.
The best way to enter the subject will be to take a lowercreature, like a frog, and study by the vivisectional methodthe functions of his different nerve-centres. The frog'snerve-centres are figured in the accompanyingdiagram, which needs no further explanation.I will first proceed to statewhat happens when various amounts ofthe anterior parts are removed, in differentfrogs, in the way in which an ordinarystudent removes them; that is, with no extremeprecautions as to the purity of theoperation. We shall in this way reach avery simple conception of the functions ofthe various centres, involving the strongestpossible contrast between the cerebralhemispheres and the lower lobes. Thissharp conception will have didactic advantages,for it is often very instructiveto start with too simple a formula andcorrect it later on. Our first formula, as we shall latersee, will have to be softened down somewhat by the resultsof more careful experimentation both on frogs and birds,and by those of the most recent observations on dogs,[Pg 15]monkeys, and man. But it will put us, from the outset, inclear possession of some fundamental notions and distinctionswhich we could otherwise not gain so well, and noneof which the later more completed view will overturn.
If, then, we reduce the frog's nervous system to thespinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base ofthe skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata,thereby cutting off the brain from all connection withthe rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, butwith a very peculiarly modified activity. It ceases to breatheor swallow; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like anormal frog, sit up on its fore paws, though its hind legs arekept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately resumethis position if drawn out. If thrown on its back, itlies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog.Locomotion and voice seem entirely abolished. If we suspendit by the nose, and irritate different portions of itsskin by acid, it performs a set of remarkable 'defensive'movements calculated to wipe away the irritant. Thus, ifthe breast be touched, both fore paws will rub it vigorously;if we touch the outer side of the elbow, the hind foot of thesame side will rise directly to the spot and wipe it. Theback of the foot will rub the knee if that be attacked, whilstif the foot be cut away, the stump will make ineffectualmovements, and then, in many frogs, a pause will come, asif for deliberation, succeeded by a rapid passage of theopposite unmutilated foot to the acidulated spot.
The most striking character of all these movements,after their teleological appropriateness, is their precision.They vary, in sensitive frogs and with a proper amount ofirritation, so little as almost to resemble in their machine-likeregularity the performances of a jumping-jack, whoselegs must twitch whenever you pull the string. The spinalcord of the frog thus contains arrangements of cells andfibres fitted to convert skin irritations into movements ofdefence. We may call it thecentre for defensive movementsin this animal. We may indeed go farther than this, andby cutting the spinal cord in various places find that itsseparate segments are independent mechanisms, for appropriateactivities of the head and of the arms and legs respectively.[Pg 16]The segment governing the arms is especiallyactive, in male frogs, in the breeding season; and these membersalone with the breast and back appertaining to them,everything else being cut away, will then actively grasp afinger placed between them and remain hanging to it for aconsiderable time.
The spinal cord in other animals has analogous powers.Even in man it makes movements of defence. Paraplegicsdraw up their legs when tickled; and Robin, on ticklingthe breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw thearm and hand move towards the spot. Of the lower functionsof the mammalian cord, studied so ably by Goltz andothers, this is not the place to speak.
If, in a second animal, the cut be made just behind theoptic lobes so that the cerebellum and medulla oblongataremain attached to the cord, then swallowing, breathing,crawling, and a rather enfeebled jumping and swimmingare added to the movements previously observed.[4] Thereare other reflexes too. The animal, thrown on his back,immediately turns over to his belly. Placed in a shallowbowl, which is floated on water and made to rotate, he respondsto the rotation by first turning his head and thenwaltzing around with his entire body, in the opposite directionto the whirling of the bowl. If his support be tilted sothat his head points downwards, he points it up; he pointsit down if it be pointed upwards, to the right if it bepointed to the left, etc. But his reactions do not gofarther than these movements of the head. He will not,like frogs whose thalami are preserved, climb up a boardif the latter be tilted, but will slide off it to the ground.
If the cut be made on another frog between the thalamiand the optic lobes, the locomotion both on landand water becomes quite normal, and, in addition to thereflexes already shown by the lower centres, he croaksregularly whenever he is pinched under the arms. Hecompensates rotations, etc., by movements of the head, andturns over from his back; but still drops off his tilted[Pg 17]board. As his optic nerves are destroyed by the usualoperation, it is impossible to say whether he will avoidobstacles placed in his path.
When, finally, a frog's cerebral hemispheres alone are cutoff by a section between them and the thalami which preservesthe latter, an unpractised observer would not at firstsuspect anything abnormal about the animal. Not only ishe capable, on proper instigation, of all the acts alreadydescribed, but he guides himself by sight, so that if anobstacle be set up between him and the light, and he beforced to move forward, he either jumps over it or swervesto one side. He manifests sexual passion at the properseason, and, unlike an altogether brainless frog, which embracesanything placed between his arms, postpones thisreflex act until a female of his own species is provided.Thus far, as aforesaid, a person unfamiliar with frogsmight not suspect a mutilation; but even such a personwould soon remark the almost entire absence of spontaneousmotion—that is, motion unprovoked by anypresent incitationof sense. The continued movements of swimming,performed by the creature in the water, seem to be thefatal result of the contact of that fluid with its skin. Theycease when a stick, for example, touches his hands. Thisis a sensible irritant towards which the feet are automaticallydrawn by reflex action, and on which the animal remainssitting. He manifests no hunger, and will suffer afly to crawl over his nose unsnapped at. Fear, too, seemsto have deserted him. In a word, he is an extremely complexmachine whose actions, so far as they go, tend toself-preservation; but still amachine, in this sense—that itseems to contain no incalculable element. By applyingthe right sensory stimulus to him we are almost as certainof getting a fixed response as an organist is of hearing acertain tone when he pulls out a certain stop.
But now if to the lower centres we add the cerebralhemispheres, or if, in other words, we make an intact animalthe subject of our observations, all this is changed. Inaddition to the previous responses to present incitementsof sense, our frog now goes through long and complex actsof locomotionspontaneously, or as if moved by what in ourselves[Pg 18]we should call an idea. His reactions to outwardstimuli vary their form, too. Instead of making simpledefensive movements with his hind legs like a headlessfrog if touched, or of giving one or two leaps and then sittingstill like a hemisphereless one, he makes persistentand varied efforts at escape, as if, not the mere contact ofthe physiologist's hand, but the notion of danger suggestedby it were now his spur. Led by the feeling of hunger,too, he goes in search of insects, fish, or smaller frogs, andvaries his procedure with each species of victim. Thephysiologist cannot by manipulating him elicit croaking,crawling up a board, swimming or stopping, at will. Hisconduct has become incalculable. We can no longer foretellit exactly. Effort to escape is his dominant reaction, buthemay do anything else, even swell up and become perfectlypassive in our hands.
Such are the phenomena commonly observed, and suchthe impressions which one naturally receives. Certaingeneral conclusions follow irresistibly. First of all thefollowing:
The acts of all the centres involve the use of the samemuscles. When a headless frog's hind leg wipes the acid, hecalls into play all the leg-muscles which a frog with hisfull medulla oblongata and cerebellum uses when he turnsfrom his back to his belly. Their contractions are, however,combined differently in the two cases, so that the resultsvary widely. We must consequently conclude thatspecific arrangements of cells and fibres exist in thecord for wiping, in the medulla for turning over, etc.Similarly they exist in the thalami for jumping overseen obstacles and for balancing the moved body; in theoptic lobes for creeping backwards, or what not. But inthe hemispheres, since the presence of these organsbringsno new elementary form of movement with it, but onlydeterminesdifferently the occasions on which the movements shalloccur, making the usual stimuli less fatal and machine-like;we need suppose no such machinerydirectly co-ordinativeof muscular contractions to exist. We may rather assume,when the mandate for a wiping-movement is sent forth by[Pg 19]the hemispheres, that a current goes straight to the wiping-arrangementin the spinal cord, exciting this arrangementas a whole. Similarly, if an intact frog wishes to jumpover a stone which he sees, all he need do is to excite fromthe hemispheres the jumping-centre in the thalami orwherever it may be, and the latter will provide for the detailsof the execution. It is like a general ordering acolonel to make a certain movement, but not telling himhow it shall be done.[5]
The same muscle, then, is repeatedly represented at differentheights; and at each it enters into a different combinationwith other muscles to co-operate in some special form ofconcerted movement.At each height the movement is dischargedby some particular form of sensorial stimulus. Thusin the cord, the skin alone occasions movements; in theupper part of the optic lobes, the eyes are added; in thethalami, the semi-circular canals would seem to play a part;whilst the stimuli which discharge the hemispheres wouldseem not so much to be elementary sorts of sensation, asgroups of sensations forming determinateobjects orthings.Prey is not pursued nor areenemies shunned by ordinaryhemisphereless frogs. Those reactions upon complex circumstanceswhich we call instinctive rather than reflex, arealready in this animal dependent on the brain's highestlobes, and still more is this the case with animals higherin the zoological scale.
The results are just the same if, instead of a frog, wetake a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are ordinarilycut out for a lecture-room demonstration. There isnot a movement natural to him which this brainless birdcannot perform if expressly excited thereto; only the innerpromptings seem deficient, and when left to himself hespends most of his time crouched on the ground with hishead sunk between his shoulders as if asleep.
All these facts lead us, when we think about them, tosome such explanatory conception as this:The lower centresact from present sensational stimuli alone; the hemispheres actfrom perceptions and considerations, the sensations which theymay receive serving only as suggesters of these. But whatare perceptions but sensations grouped together? and whatare considerations but expectations, in the fancy, of sensationswhich will be felt one way or another according asaction takes this course or that? If I step aside on seeinga rattlesnake, from considering how dangerous an animalhe is, the mental materials which constitute my prudentialreflection are images more or less vivid of the movementof his head, of a sudden pain in my leg, of a state of terror,a swelling of the limb, a chill, delirium, unconsciousness,etc., etc., and the ruin of my hopes. But all these imagesare constructed out of my past experiences. They arereproductionsof what I have felt or witnessed. They are, inshort,remote sensations; and thedifference between the hemispherelessanimal and the whole one may be concisely expressedby saying that theone obeys absent, the other onlypresent, objects.
The hemispheres would then seem to bethe seat of memory.Vestiges of past experience must in some way bestored up in them, and must, when aroused by presentstimuli, first appear as representations of distant goodsand evils; and then must discharge into the appropriatemotor channels for warding off the evil and securing thebenefits of the good. If we liken the nervous currents toelectric currents, we can compare the nervous system,C,below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from sense-organto muscle along the lineS ... C ... M of Fig. 2.The hemisphere,H, adds the long circuit or loop-linethrough which the current may pass when for any reasonthe direct line is not used.
Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on[Pg 21]the damp earth beneath a maple-tree. The sensations ofdelicious rest and coolness pouringthemselves through the directline would naturally discharge intothe muscles of complete extension:he would abandon himselfto the dangerous repose. But theloop-line being open, part of thecurrent is drafted along it, andawakens rheumatic or catarrhalreminiscences, which prevail overthe instigations of sense, and makethe man arise and pursue his way to where he may enjoy hisrest more safely. Presently we shall examine the mannerin which the hemispheric loop-line may be supposed toserve as a reservoir for such reminiscences as these. MeanwhileI will ask the reader to notice some corollaries of itsbeing such a reservoir.
First, no animal without it can deliberate, pause, postpone,nicely weigh one motive against another, or compare.Prudence, in a word, is for such a creature an impossiblevirtue. Accordingly we see that nature removes those functionsin the exercise of which prudence is a virtue from thelower centres and hands them over to the cerebrum. Wherevera creature has to deal with complex features of the environment,prudence is a virtue. The higher animals have soto deal; and the more complex the features, the higher wecall the animals. The fewer of his acts, then, cansuch ananimal perform without the help of the organs in question.In the frog many acts devolve wholly on the lower centres;in the bird fewer; in the rodent fewer still; in the dog veryfew indeed; and in apes and men hardly any at all.
The advantages of this are obvious. Take the prehensionof food as an example and suppose it to be a reflexperformance of the lower centres. The animal will be condemnedfatally and irresistibly to snap at it wheneverpresented, no matter what the circumstances may be;he can no more disobey this prompting than water canrefuse to boil when a fire is kindled under the pot. Hislife will again and again pay the forfeit of his gluttony.[Pg 22]Exposure to retaliation, to other enemies, to traps, topoisons, to the dangers of repletion, must be regularparts of his existence. His lack of all thought by which toweigh the danger against the attractiveness of the bait, andof all volition to remain hungry a little while longer,is the direct measure of his lowness in the mental scale.And those fishes which, like our cunners and sculpins,are no sooner thrown back from the hook into the water,than they automatically seize the hook again, would soonexpiate the degradation of their intelligence by the extinctionof their type, did not their exaggerated fecundity atonefor their imprudence. Appetite and the acts it promptshave consequently become in all higher vertebrates functionsof the cerebrum. They disappear when the physiologist'sknife has left the subordinate centres alone in place.The brainless pigeon will starve though left on a corn-heap.
Take again the sexual function. In birds this devolvesexclusively upon the hemispheres. When these are shornaway the pigeon pays no attention to the billings and cooingsof its mate. And Goltz found that a bitch in heatwould excite no emotion in male dogs who had sufferedlarge loss of cerebral tissue. Those who have read Darwin's'Descent of Man' know what immense importance inthe amelioration of the breed in birds this author ascribesto the mere fact of sexual selection. The sexual act is notperformed until every condition of circumstance and sentimentis fulfilled, until time, place, and partner all are fit.But in frogs and toads this passion devolves on the lowercentres. They show consequently a machine-like obedienceto the present incitement of sense, and an almosttotal exclusion of the power of choice. Copulation occursper fas aut nefas, occasionally between males, often withdead females, in puddles exposed on the highway, andthe male may be cut in two without letting go his hold.Every spring an immense sacrifice of batrachian life takesplace from these causes alone.
No one need be told how dependent all human socialelevation is upon the prevalence of chastity. Hardly anyfactor measures more than this the difference between civilisation[Pg 23]and barbarism. Physiologically interpreted, chastitymeans nothing more than the fact that present solicitationsof sense are overpowered by suggestions of æsthetic andmoral fitness which the circumstances awaken in thecerebrum; and that upon the inhibitory or permissive influenceof these alone action directly depends.
Within the psychic life due to the cerebrum itself thesame general distinction obtains, between considerations ofthe more immediate and considerations of the more remote.In all ages the man whose determinations are swayed byreference to the most distant ends has been held to possessthe highest intelligence. The tramp who lives from hourto hour; the bohemian whose engagements are from dayto day; the bachelor who builds but for a single life;the father who acts for another generation; the patriotwho thinks of a whole community and many generations;and finally, the philosopher and saint whose cares are forhumanity and for eternity,—these range themselves in anunbroken hierarchy, wherein each successive grade resultsfrom an increased manifestation of the special form ofaction by which the cerebral centres are distinguishedfrom all below them.
In the 'loop-line' along which the memories and ideasof the distant are supposed to lie, the action, so far as it isa physical process, must be interpreted after the type of theaction in the lower centres. If regarded here as a reflexprocess, it must be reflex there as well. The current inboth places runs out into the muscles only after it has firstrun in; but whilst the path by which it runs out is determinedin the lower centres by reflections few and fixedamongst the cell-arrangements, in the hemispheres thereflections are many and instable. This, it will be seen, isonly a difference of degree and not of kind, and does notchange the reflex type. The conception ofall action asconforming to this type is the fundamental conception ofmodern nerve-physiology. So much for our general preliminaryconception of the nerve-centres! Let us define itmore distinctly before we see how well physiological observationwill bear it out in detail.
Nerve-currents run in through sense-organs, and whilstprovoking reflex acts in the lower centres, they arouse ideasin the hemispheres, which either permit the reflexes inquestion, check them, or substitute others for them. Allideas being in the last resort reminiscences, the question toanswer is:How can processes become organized in the hemisphereswhich correspond to reminiscences in the mind?[6]
Nothing is easier than to conceive apossible way inwhich this might be done, provided four assumptions begranted. These assumptions (which after all are inevitablein any event) are:
1) The same cerebral process which, when arousedfrom without by a sense-organ, gives the perception of anobject, will give anidea of the same object when arousedby other cerebral processes from within.
2) If processes 1, 2, 3, 4 have once been aroused togetheror in immediate succession, any subsequent arousalof any one of them (whether from without or within) willtend to arouse the others in the original order. [This is theso-called law of association.]
3) Every sensorial excitement propagated to a lowercentre tends to spread upwards and arouse an idea.
4) Every idea tends ultimately either to produce amovement or to check one which otherwise would be produced.
Suppose now (these assumptions being granted) that wehave a baby before us who sees a candle-flame for the first[Pg 25]time, and, by virtue of a reflex tendency common in babiesof a certain age, extends hishand to grasp it, so that hisfingers get burned. So far wehave two reflex currents inplay: first, from the eye to theextension movement, along theline 1—1—1—1 of Fig. 3; andsecond, from the finger to themovement of drawing back thehand, along the line 2—2—2—2.If this were the baby's wholenervous system, and if the reflexeswere once for all organic,we should have no alteration in his behavior, no matterhow often the experience recurred. The retinal image ofthe flame would always make the arm shoot forward, theburning of the finger would always send it back. But weknow that 'the burnt child dreads the fire,' and that oneexperience usually protects the fingers forever. The pointis to see how the hemispheres may bring this result to pass.
We must complicate our diagram (see Fig. 4). Letthe current 1—1, from the eye, discharge upward as well asdownward when it reaches the lower centre for vision, andarouse the perceptional processs1 in the hemispheres; letthe feeling of the arm's extensionalso send up a currentwhich leaves a trace of itself,m1; let the burnt finger leavean analogous trace,s2; andlet the movement of retractionleavem2. These fourprocesses will now, by virtueof assumption 2), be associatedtogether by the paths1—m1—s2—m2, running fromthe first to the last, so that ifanything touches offs1, ideasof the extension, of the burntfinger, and of the retraction will pass in rapid succession[Pg 26]through the mind. The effect on the child's conduct whenthe candle-flame is next presented is easy to imagine. Ofcourse the sight of it arouses the grasping reflex; but itarouses simultaneously the idea thereof, together with thatof the consequent pain, and of the final retraction of thehand; and if these cerebral processes prevail in strengthover the immediate sensation in the centres below, the lastidea will be the cue by which the final action is discharged.The grasping will be arrested in mid-career, the handdrawn back, and the child's fingers saved.
In all this we assume that the hemispheres do notnatively couple any particular sense-impression with anyspecial motor discharge. They only register, and preservetraces of, such couplings as are already organized in thereflex centres below. But this brings it inevitably aboutthat, when a chain of experiences has been already registeredand the first link is impressed once again from without,the last link will often be awakened inidea long before itcan exist infact. And if this last link were previouslycoupled with a motion, that motion may now come from themere ideal suggestion without waiting for the actual impressionto arise. Thus an animal with hemispheres acts inanticipationof future things; or, to use our previous formula, heacts from considerations of distant good and ill. If we givethe name ofpartners to the original couplings of impressionswith motions in a reflex way, then we may say that the functionof the hemispheres is simply to bring aboutexchangesamong the partners. Movementmn, which natively is sensationsn's partner, becomes through the hemispheres thepartner of sensations1, s2, ors3. It is like the great commutatingswitch-board at a central telephone station. Nonew elementary process is involved; no impression nor anymotion peculiar to the hemispheres; but any number ofcombinations impossible to the lower machinery takenalone, and an endless consequent increase in the possibilitiesof behavior on the creature's part.
All this, as a mere scheme,[7] is so clear and so concordant[Pg 27]with the general look of the facts as almost to impose itselfon our belief; but it is anything but clear in detail. Thebrain-physiology of late years has with great effort soughtto work out the paths by which these couplings of sensationswith movements take place, both in the hemispheresand in the centres below.
So we must next test our scheme by the facts discoveredm this direction. We shall conclude, I think, after takingthem all into account, that the scheme probably makesthe lower centres too machine-like and the hemispheresnot quite machine-like enough, and must consequently besoftened down a little. So much I may say in advance.Meanwhile, before plunging into the details which await us,it will somewhat clear our ideas if we contrast the modernway of looking at the matter with thephrenological conceptionwhich but lately preceded it.
In a certain sense Gall was the first to seek to explainin detail how the brain could subserve our mental operations.His way of proceeding was only too simple. He tookthe faculty-psychology as his ultimatum on the mental side,and he made no farther psychological analysis. Whereverhe found an individual with some strongly-marked traitof character he examined his head; and if he found thelatter prominent in a certain region, he said without moreado that that region was the 'organ' of the trait orfaculty in question. The traits were of very diverse constitution,some being simple sensibilities like 'weight'or 'color;' some being instinctive tendencies like 'alimentiveness'or 'amativeness;' and others, again, being complexresultants like 'conscientiousness,' 'individuality.'Phrenology fell promptly into disrepute among scientificmen because observation seemed to show that large faculties[Pg 28]and large 'bumps' might fail to coexist; because thescheme of Gall was so vast as hardly to admit of accuratedetermination at all—who of us can say even of his ownbrothers whether their perceptions ofweight and oftime arewell developed or not?—because the followers of Gall andSpurzheim were unable to reform these errors in any appreciabledegree; and, finally, because the whole analysis offaculties was vague and erroneous from a psychologic pointof view. Popular professors of the lore have neverthelesscontinued to command the admiration of popular audiences;and there seems no doubt that Phrenology, however littleit satisfy our scientific curiosity about the functions of differentportions of the brain, may still be, in the hands ofintelligent practitioners, a useful help in the art of readingcharacter. A hooked nose and a firm jaw are usually signsof practical energy; soft, delicate hands are signs of refinedsensibility. Even so may a prominent eye be a sign ofpower over language, and a bull-neck a sign of sensuality.But the brain behind the eye and neck need no more betheorgan of the signified faculty than the jaw is theorgan of the will or the hand the organ of refinement.These correlations between mind and body are, however, sofrequent that the 'characters' given by phrenologists areoften remarkable for knowingness and insight.
Phrenology hardly does more than restate the problem.To answer the question, "Why do I like children?" bysaying, "Because you have a large organ of philoprogenitiveness,"but renames the phenomenon to be explained.Whatis my philoprogenitiveness? Of what mental elementsdoes it consist? And howcan a part of the brainbe its organ? A science of the mind must reduce suchcomplex manifestations as 'philoprogenitiveness' to theirelements. A science of the brain must point out the functionsofits elements. A science of the relations of mindand brain must show how the elementary ingredients of theformer correspond to the elementary functions of the latter.But phrenology, except by occasional coincidence, takes noaccount of elements at all. Its 'faculties,' as a rule, arefully equipped persons in a particular mental attitude.Take, for example, the 'faculty' of language. It involves[Pg 29]in reality a host of distinct powers. We must first haveimages of concrete things and ideas of abstract qualitiesand relations; we must next have the memory of wordsand then the capacity so to associate each idea or imagewith a particular word that, when the word is heard, theidea shall forthwith enter our mind. We must conversely,as soon as the idea arises in our mind, associate with it amental image of the word, and by means of this image wemust innervate our articulatory apparatus so as to reproducethe word as physical sound. To read or to write alanguage other elements still must be introduced. But itis plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is socomplicated as to call into play almost all the elementarypowers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination,association, judgment, and volition. A portion of the braincompetent to be the adequate seat of such a faculty wouldneeds be an entire brain in miniature,—just as the facultyitself is really a specification of the entire man, a sort ofhomunculus.
Yet just such homunculi are for the most part thephrenological organs. As Lange says:
"We have a parliament of little men together, each one of whom,as happens also in a real parliament, possesses but a single ideawhich he ceaselessly strives to make prevail"—benevolence, firmness,hope, and the rest. "Instead of one soul, phrenology gives us forty,each alone as enigmatic as the full aggregate psychic life can be. Insteadof dividing the latter into effective elements, she divides it intopersonal beings of peculiar character.... 'Herr Pastor, sure therebe a horse inside,' called out the peasants to X after their spiritualshepherd had spent hours in explaining to them the construction of thelocomotive. With a horse inside truly everything becomes clear, eventhough it be a queer enough sort of horse—the horse itself calls for noexplanation! Phrenology takes a start to get beyond the point of viewof the ghost-like soul entity, but she ends by populating the whole skullwith ghosts of the same order."[8]
Modern Science conceives of the matter in a very differentway.Brain and mind alike consist of simple elements,sensory and motor. "All nervous centres," says Dr. HughlingsJackson,[9] "from the lowest to the very highest (the[Pg 30]substrata of consciousness), are made up of nothing elsethan nervous arrangements, representing impressions andmovements.... I do not see of what other materialsthe braincan be made." Meynert represents the mattersimilarly when he calls the cortex of the hemispheres thesurface of projection for every muscle and every sensitivepoint of the body. The muscles and the sensitive pointsarerepresented each by a cortical point, and the brain isnothing but the sum of all these cortical points, to which,on the mental side, as manyideas correspond.Ideas ofsensation, ideas of motion are, on the other hand,the elementaryfactors out of which the mind is built up by theassociationists in psychology. There is a complete parallelismbetween the two analyses, the same diagram of littledots, circles, or triangles joined by lines symbolizes equallywell the cerebral and mental processes: the dots stand forcells or ideas, the lines for fibres or associations. We shallhave later to criticise this analysis so far as it relates tothe mind; but there is no doubt that it is a most convenient,and has been a most useful, hypothesis, formulating thefacts in an extremely natural way.
If, then, we grant that motor and sensory ideas variouslyassociated are the materials of the mind, all we need do to geta complete diagram of the mind's and the brain's relationsshould be to ascertain which sensory idea corresponds towhich sensational surface of projection, and which motoridea to which muscular surface of projection. The associationswould then correspond to the fibrous connections betweenthe various surfaces. This distinctcerebral localizationof the various elementary sorts of idea has been treated asa 'postulate' by many physiologists (e.g. Munk); and themost stirring controversy in nerve-physiology which thepresent generation has seen has been thelocalization-question.
Up to 1870, the opinion which prevailed was that whichthe experiments of Flourens on pigeons' brains had madeplausible, namely, that the different functions of the hemispheres[Pg 31]were not locally separated, but carried on each bythe aid of the whole organ. Hitzig in 1870 showed, however,that in a dog's brain highly specialized movementscould be produced by electric irritation of determinateregions of the cortex; and Ferrier and Munk, half a dozenyears later, seemed to prove, either by irritations or excisionsor both, that there were equally determinate regionsconnected with the senses of sight, touch, hearing, andsmell. Munk's special sensorial localizations, however,disagreed with Ferrier's; and Goltz, from his extirpation-experiments,came to a conclusion adverse to strict localizationof any kind. The controversy is not yet over. Iwill not pretend to say anything more of it historically, butgive a brief account of the condition in which matters atpresent stand.
The one thing which isperfectly well established is this,that the 'central' convolutions, on either side of the fissure ofRolando, and (at least in the monkey) the calloso-marginalconvolution (which is continuous with them on the mesialsurface where one hemisphere is applied against the other),form the region by which all the motor incitations whichleave the cortex pass out, on their way to those executivecentres in the region of the pons, medulla, and spinal cordfrom which the muscular contractions are discharged inthe last resort. The existence of this so-called 'motorzone' is established by the lines of evidence successivelygiven below:
(1)Cortical Irritations. Electrical currents of smallintensity applied to the surface of the said convolutions indogs, monkeys, and other animals, produce well-definedmovements in face, fore-limb, hind-limb, tail, or trunk,according as one point or another of the surface is irritated.These movements affect almost invariably the side oppositeto the brain irritations: If the left hemisphere be excited, themovement is of the right leg, side of face, etc. All the objectionsat first raised against the validity of these experimentshave been overcome. The movements are certainly not dueto irritations of the base of the brain by the downward spreadof the current, for:a) mechanical irritations will producethem, though less easily than electrical;b) shifting the[Pg 32]electrodes to a point close by on the surface changes themovement in ways quite inexplicable by changed physicalconduction of the current;c) if the cortical 'centre' for acertain movement be cut under with a sharp knife but leftin situ, although the electric conductivity is physicallyunaltered by the operation, the physiological conductivityis gone and currents of the same strength no longer producethe movements which they did;d) the time-intervalbetween the application of the electric stimulus to the cortexand the resultant movement is what it would be if thecortex acted physiologically and not merely physically intransmitting the irritation. It is namely a well-known factthat when a nerve-current has to pass through the spinalcord to excite a muscle by reflex action, the time is longerthan if it passes directly down the motor nerve: the cellsof the cord take a certain time to discharge. Similarly,when a stimulus is applied directly to the cortex the musclecontracts two or three hundredths of a second later than itdoes when the place on the cortex is cut away and the electrodesare applied to the white fibres below.[10]
(2)Cortical Ablations. When the cortical spot which isfound to produce a movement of the fore-leg, in a dog,is excised (see spot 5 in Fig. 5), the leg in question becomespeculiarly affected. At first it seems paralyzed. Soon, however,it is used with the other legs, but badly. The animaldoes not bear his weight on it, allows it to rest on its dorsalsurface, stands with it crossing the other leg, does not removeit if it hangs over the edge of a table, can no longer 'give thepaw' at word of command if able to do so before the operation,does not use it for scratching the ground, or holding abone as formerly, lets it slip out when running on a smooth[Pg 33]surface or when shaking himself, etc., etc. Sensibility ofall kinds seems diminished as well as motility, but of this Ishall speak later on. Moreover the dog tends in voluntarymovements to swerve towards the side of the brain-lesion insteadof going straight forward. All these symptoms graduallydecrease, so that even with a very severe brain-lesionthe dog may be outwardly indistinguishable from a well dogafter eight or ten weeks. Still, a slight chloroformizationwill reproduce the disturbances, even then. There is a certainappearance of ataxic in-coordination in the movements—thedog lifts his fore-feet high and brings them down withmore strength than usual, and yet the trouble is not ordinarylack of co-ordination. Neither is there paralysis.The strength of whatever movements are made is as greatas ever—dogs with extensive destruction of the motor zonecan jump as high and bite as hard as ever they did, butthey seemless easily moved to doanything with the affectedparts. Dr. Loeb, who has studied the motor disturbancesof dogs more carefully than any one, conceives of themenmasse as effects of an increased inertia in all the processesof innervation towards the side opposed to the lesion. Allsuch movements require an unwonted effort for their execution;and when only the normally usual effort is madethey fall behind in effectiveness.[11]
Even when the entire motor zone of a dog is removed,there is no permanent paralysis of any part, but only thiscurious sort of relative inertia when the two sides of thebody are compared; and this itself becomes hardly noticeableafter a number of weeks have elapsed. Prof. Goltzhas described a dog whose entire left hemisphere was destroyed,and who retained only a slight motor inertia on theright half of the body. In particular he could use his rightpaw for holding a bone whilst gnawing it, or for reachingafter a piece of meat. Had he been taught to give his pawBefore the operations, it would have been curious to seewhether that faculty also came back. His tactile sensibilitywas permanently diminished on the right side.[12] Inmonkeys a genuine paralysis follows upon ablations of thecortex in the motor region. This paralysis affects parts ofthe body which vary with the brain-parts removed. Themonkey's opposite arm or leg hangs flaccid, or at most takes asmall part in associated movements. When the entire regionis removed there is a genuine and permanent hemiplegiain which the arm is more affected than the leg; and this is[Pg 35]followed months later by contracture of the muscles, as inman after inveterate hemiplegia.[13] According to Schaeferand Horsley, the trunk-muscles also become paralyzed afterdestruction of themarginal convolution onboth sides (seeFig. 7). These differences between dogs and monkeys showthe danger of drawing general conclusions from experimentsdone on any one sort of animal. I subjoin the figures givenby the last-named authors of the motor regions in themonkey's brain.[14]
In man we are necessarily reduced to the observationpost-mortem of cortical ablations produced by accident ordisease (tumor, hemorrhage, softening, etc.). What resultsduring life from such conditions is either localized spasm,or palsy of certain muscles of the opposite side. The corticalregions which invariably produce these results arehomologous with those which we have just been studyingin the dog, cat, ape, etc. Figs. 8 and 9 show the result of[Pg 36]169 cases carefully studied by Exner. The parts shadedare regions where lesions producedno motor disturbance.Those left white were, on the contrary, never injured withoutmotor disturbances of some sort. Where the injury tothe cortical substance is profound in man, the paralysis ispermanent and is succeeded by muscular rigidity in theparalyzed parts, just as it may be in the monkey.
(3)Descending degenerations show the intimate connectionof the rolandic regions of the cortex with the motortracts of the cord. When, either in man or in the lower animals,these regions are destroyed, a peculiar degenerativechange known as secondary sclerosis is found to extenddownwards through the white fibrous substance of thebrain in a perfectly definite manner, affecting certain distinctstrands which pass through the inner capsule, crura,and pons, into the anterior pyramids of the medulla oblongata,and from thence (partly crossing to the other side)downwards into the anterior (direct) and lateral (crossed)columns of the spinal cord.
(4)Anatomical proof of the continuity of the rolandicregions with these motor columns of the cord is also clearlygiven. Flechsig's 'Pyramidenbahn' forms an uninterruptedstrand (distinctly traceable in human embryos,before its fibres have acquired their white 'medullarysheath') passing upwards from the pyramids of the medulla,and traversing the internal capsule and corona radiatato the convolutions in question (Fig. 10). None of theinferior gray matter of the brain seems to have any connectionwith this important fibrous strand. It passes directlyfrom the cortex to the motor arrangements in the cord, dependingfor its proper nutrition (as the facts of degenerationshow) on the influence of the cortical cells, just as motornerves depend for their nutrition on that of the cells of thespinal cord. Electrical stimulation of this motor strand inany accessible part of its course has been shown in dogs toproduce movements analogous to those which excitementof the cortical surface calls forth.
One of the most instructive proofs of motor localizationin the cortex is that furnished by the disease now calledaphemia, ormotor Aphasia. Motor aphasia is neither lossof voice nor paralysis of the tongue or lips. The patient'svoice is as strong as ever, and all the innervations of hishypoglossal and facial nerves, except those necessary forspeaking, may go on perfectly well. He can laugh and cry,and even sing; but he either is unable to utter any words atall; or a few meaningless stock phrases form his only speech;or else he speaks incoherently and confusedly, mispronouncing,[Pg 38]misplacing, and misusing his words in various degrees.Sometimes his speech is a mere broth of unintelligible syllables.In cases of pure motor aphasia the patient recognizeshis mistakes and suffers acutely from them. Nowwhenever a patient dies in such a condition as this, andan examination of his brain is permitted, it is found that[Pg 39]the lowest frontal gyrus (see Fig. 11) is the seat of injury.Broca first noticed this fact in 1861, and since then thegyrus has gone by the name of Broca's convolution. Theinjury in right-handed people is found on the left hemisphere,and in left-handed people on the right hemisphere.Most people, in fact, are left-brained, that is, all theirdelicate and specialized movements are handed over tothe charge of the left hemisphere. The ordinary right-handednessfor such movements is only a consequence ofthat fact, a consequence which shows outwardly on accountof that extensive decussation of the fibres whereby most ofthose from the left hemisphere pass to the right half of thebody only. But the left-brainedness might exist in equalmeasure and not show outwardly. This would happenwherever organs onboth sides of the body could be governedby the left hemisphere; and just such a case seemsoffered by the vocal organs, in that highly delicate andspecial motor service which we call speech. Either hemispherecan innervate them bilaterally, just as either seemsable to innervate bilaterally the muscles of the trunk, ribs,and diaphragm. Of the special movements of speech, however,[Pg 40]it would appear (from the facts of aphasia) that theleft hemisphere in most persons habitually takes exclusivecharge. With that hemisphere thrown out of gear, speech isundone; even though the opposite hemisphere still be therefor the performance of less specialized acts, such as thevarious movements required in eating.
It will be noticed that Broca's region is homologouswith the parts ascertained to produce movements of thelips, tongue, and larynx when excited by electric currentsin apes (cf. Fig. 6). The evidence is therefore as completeas it well can be that the motor incitations to theseorgans leave the brain by the lower frontal region.
Victims of motor aphasia generally have other disorders.One which interests us in this connection has been calledagraphia: they have lost the power towrite. They canread writing and understand it; but either cannot use thepen at all or make egregious mistakes with it. The seatof the lesion here is less well determined, owing to an insufficientnumber of good cases to conclude from.[15] Thereis no doubt, however, that it is (in right-handed people) onthe left side, and little doubt that it consists of elementsof the hand-and-arm region specialized for that service,The symptom may exist when there is little or no disabilityin the hand for other uses. If it does not get well, thepatient usually educates his right hemisphere, i.e. learnsto write with his left hand. In other cases of which weshall say more a few pages later on, the patient can writeboth spontaneously and at dictation, but cannotread evenwhat he has himself written! All these phenomena arenow quite clearly explained by separate brain-centres forthe various feelings and movements and tracts for associatingthese together. But their minute discussion belongs tomedicine rather than to general psychology, and I can onlyuse them here to illustrate the principles of motor localization.[16]Under the heads of sight and hearing I shallhave a little more to say.
The different lines of proof which I have taken upestablish conclusively the proposition thatall the motorimpulses which leave the cortex pass out, in healthy animals,from the convolutions about the fissure of Rolando.
When, however, it comes to defining precisely what isinvolved in a motor impulse leaving the cortex, things growmore obscure. Does the impulse start independently fromthe convolutions in question, or does it start elsewhere andmerely flow through? And to what particular phase ofpsychic activity does the activity of these centres correspond?Opinions and authorities here divide; but it willbe better, before entering into these deeper aspects of theproblem, to cast a glance at the facts which have beenmade out concerning the relations of the cortex to sight,hearing, and smell.
Ferrier was the first in the field here. He found, whentheangular convolution (that lying between the 'intraparietal' and 'external occipital' fissures, and bendinground the top of the fissure of Sylvius, in Fig. 6) was excitedin the monkey, that movements of the eyes and headas if for vision occurred; and that when it was extirpated,what he supposed to be total and permanent blindnessof the opposite eye followed. Munk almost immediatelydeclared total and permanent blindness to follow from destructionof theoccipital lobe in monkeys as well as dogs, andsaid that the angular gyrus had nothing to do with sight,but was only the centre for tactile sensibility of the eyeball.Hunk's absolute tone about his observations and his theoreticarrogance have led to his ruin as an authority. But hedid two things of permanent value. He was the first todistinguish in these vivisections between sensorial andpsychic blindness, and to describe the phenomenon ofrestitutionof the visual function after its first impairment byan operation; and the first to notice thehemiopic characterof the visual disturbances which result when only onehemisphere is injured. Sensorial blindness is absoluteinsensibility to light; psychic blindness is inability to recognizethemeaning of the optical impressions, as when we[Pg 42]see a page of Chinese print but it suggests nothing to us.A hemiopic disturbance of vision is one in which neitherretina is affected in its totality, but in which, for example,the left portion ofeach retina is blind, so that the animalsees nothing situated in space towards its right. Laterobservations have corroborated this hemiopic character ofall the disturbances of sight from injury to a single hemispherein the higher animals; and the question whetheran animal's apparent blindness is sensorial or only psychichas, since Munk's first publications, been the most urgentone to answer, in all observations relative to the function ofsight.
Goltz almost simultaneously with Ferrier and Munkreported experiments which led him to deny that thevisual function was essentially bound up with any onelocalized portion of the hemispheres. Other divergentresults soon came in from many quarters, so that, withoutgoing into the history of the matter any more, I may reportthe existing state of the case as follows:[17]
Infishes, frogs, andlizards vision persists when thehemispheres are entirely removed. This is admitted forfrogs and fishes even by Munk, who denies it for birds.
All of Munk'sbirds seemed totally blind (blind sensorially)after removal of the hemispheres by his operation.The following of a candle by the head and winking at athreatened blow, which are ordinarily held to prove theretention of crude optical sensations by the lower centresin supposed hemisphereless pigeons, are by Munk ascribedto vestiges of the visual sphere of the cortex left behindby the imperfection of the operation. But Schrader, whooperated after Munk and with every apparent guarantee ofcompleteness, found that all his pigeons saw after twoor three weeks had elapsed, and the inhibitions resultingfrom the wound had passed away. They invariably avoidedeven the slightest obstacles, flew very regularly towardscertain perches, etc., differingtoto cœlo in these respectswith certain simplyblinded pigeons who were kept with[Pg 43]them for comparison. They did not pick up food strewnon the ground, however. Schrader found that they woulddo this if even a small part of the frontal region of thehemispheres was left, and ascribes their non-self-feedingwhen deprived of their occipital cerebrum not to a visual,but to a motor, defect, a sort of alimentary aphasia.[18]
In presence of such discord as that between Munk andhis opponents one must carefully note how differently significantisloss, frompreservation, of a function after an operationon the brain. Theloss of the function does not necessarilyshow that itis dependent on the part cut out; but itspreservation does show that it isnot dependent: and this istrue though the loss should be observed ninety-nine timesand the preservation only once in a hundred similar excisions.That birds and mammalscan be blinded by cortical ablationis undoubted; the only question is,must they be so?Only then can the cortex be certainly called the 'seat ofsight.' The blindness may always be due to one of thoseremote effects of the wound on distant parts, inhibitions,extensions of inflammation,—interferences, in a word,—uponwhich Brown-Séquard and Goltz have rightly insisted,and the importance of which becomes more manifest everyday. Such effects are transient; whereas thesymptoms ofdeprivation (Ausfallserscheinungen, as Goltz calls them) whichcome from the actual loss of the cut-out region must fromthe nature of the case be permanent. Blindness in thepigeons,so far as it passes away, cannot possibly be chargedto their seat of vision being lost, but only to some influencewhich temporarily depresses the activity of that seat.The same is truemutatis mutandis of all the other effects ofoperations, and as we pass to mammals we shall see stillmore the importance of the remark.
In rabbits loss of the entire cortex seems compatiblewith the preservation of enough sight to guide the pooranimals' movements, and enable them to avoid obstacles.Christiani's observations and discussions seem conclusively[Pg 44]to have established this, although Munk found that allhisanimals were made totally blind.[19]
In dogs also Munk found absolute stone-blindness afterablation of the occipital lobes. He went farther andmapped out determinate portions of the cortex thereupon,which he considered correlated with definite segments of thetwo retinæ, so that destruction of given portions of the cortexproduces blindness of the retinal centre, top, bottom,or right or left side, of the same or opposite eye. Thereseems little doubt that this definite correlation is mythological.Other observers, Hitzig, Goltz, Luciani, Loeb, Exner,etc., find, whatever part of the cortex may be ablated onone side, that there usually results ahemiopic disturbanceofboth eyes, slight and transient when the anterior lobesare the parts attacked, grave when an occipital lobe is theseat of injury, and lasting in proportion to the latter'sextent. According to Loeb, the defect is a dimness of vision('hemiamblyopia') in which (however severe) the centresremain the best seeing portions of the retina, just as theyare in normal dogs. The lateral or temporal part of eachretina seems to be in exclusive connection with the cortexof its own side. The centre and nasal part of each seems,on the contrary, to be connected with the cortex of theopposite hemispheres. Loeb, who takes broader viewsthan any one, conceives the hemiamblyopia as he conceivesthe motor disturbances, namely, as the expressionof an increased inertia in the whole optical machinery, ofwhich the result is to make the animal respond with greatereffort to impressions coming from the half of space opposedto the side of the lesion. If a dog has right hemiamblyopia,say, and two pieces of meat are hung before him at once,he invariably turns first to the one on his left. But if thelesion be a slight one,shaking slightly the piece of meaton his right (this makes of it a stronger stimulus) makes himseize upon it first. If only one piece of meat be offered, hetakes it, on whichever side it be.
When both occipital lobes are extensively destroyedtotal blindness may result. Munk maps out his 'Sehsphäre'[Pg 45]definitely, and says that blindnessmust resultwhen the entire shaded part, markedA, A, in Figs. 12and 13, is involved in the lesion. Discrepant reportsof other observations he explains as due to incompleteablation. Luciani, Goltz, and Lannegrace, however, contendthat they have made complete bilateral extirpationsof Munk's Sehsphäre more than once, and found a sortof crude indiscriminating sight of objects to return in afew weeks.[20] The question whether a dog is blind or notis harder to solve than would at first appear; for simplyblinded dogs, in places to which they are accustomed, showlittle of their loss and avoid all obstacles; whilst dogswhose occipital lobes are gone may run against things frequentlyand yet see notwithstanding. The best proof thatthey may see is that which Goltz's dogs furnished: theycarefully avoided, as it seemed, strips of sunshine or paperon the floor, as if they were solid obstacles. This no reallyblind dog would do. Luciani tested his dogs when hungry(a condition which sharpens their attention) by strewing[Pg 46]pieces of meat and pieces of cork before them. If theywent straight at them, theysaw; and if they chose the meatand left the cork, theysaw discriminatingly. The quarrelis very acrimonious; indeed the subject of localization offunctions in the brain seems to have a peculiar effect on thetemper of those who cultivate it experimentally. Theamount of preserved vision which Goltz and Luciani reportseems hardly to be worth considering, on the one hand;and on the other, Munk admits in his penultimate paperthat out of 85 dogs he only 'succeeded' 4 times in his operationof producing complete blindness by complete extirpationof his 'Sehsphäre.'[21] The safe conclusion forus is thatLuciani's diagram, Fig. 14, represents something like thetruth. The occipital lobes are far more important forvision than any other part of the cortex, so that their completedestruction makes the animal almost blind. As forthe crude sensibility to light whichmay then remain, nothingexact is known either about its nature or its seat.
In the monkey, doctors also disagree. The truth seems,however, to be that theoccipital lobes in this animal also arethe part connected most intimately with the visual function.The function would seem to go on when very small portionsof them are left, for Ferrier found no 'appreciable impairment'of it after almost complete destruction of them on bothsides. On the other hand, he found complete and permanentblindness to ensue when they and theangular gyri inaddition were destroyed on both sides. Munk, as well as[Pg 47]Brown and Schaefer, found no disturbance of sight fromdestroying theangular gyri alone, although Ferrier foundblindness to ensue. This blindness was probably due toinhibitions exertedin distans, or to cutting of the whiteoptical fibres passing under the angular gyri on their wayto the occipital lobes. Brown and Schaefer got completeand permanent blindness in one monkey from total destructionof both occipital lobes. Luciani and Seppili, performingthis operation on two monkeys, found that the animalswere only mentally, not sensorially, blind. After someweeks they saw their food, but could not distinguish bysight between figs and pieces of cork. Luciani and Seppiliseem, however, not to have extirpated the entire lobes.When one lobe only is injured the affection of sight ishemiopic in monkeys: in this all observers agree. Onthe whole, then, Munk's original location of vision in theoccipital lobes is confirmed by the later evidence.[22]
In man we have more exact results, since we are notdriven to interpret the vision from the outward conduct.On the other hand, however, we cannot vivisect, but mustwait for pathological lesions to turn up. The pathologistswho have discussed these (the literature is tediousad libitum)conclude that the occipital lobes are the indispensablepart for vision in man. Hemiopic disturbance in both eyescomes from lesion of either one of them, and total blindness,sensorial as well as psychic, from destruction of both.
Hemiopia may also result from lesion in other parts,especially the neighboring angular and supra-marginal gyri,and it may accompany extensive injury in the motor regionof the cortex. In these cases it seems probable that it isdue to anactio in distans, probably to the interruption of[Pg 48]fibres proceeding from the occipital lobe. There seem tobe a few cases on record where there was injury to theoccipital lobes without visual defect. Ferrier has collectedas many as possible to prove his localization in the angulargyrus.[23] A strict application of logical principles would makeone of these cases outweigh one hundred contrary ones. Andyet, remembering how imperfect observations may be, andhow individual brains may vary, it would certainly be rash fortheir sake to throw away the enormous amount of positiveevidence for the occipital lobes. Individual variability isalways apossible explanation of an anomalous case. Thereis no more prominent anatomical fact than that of the 'decussationof the pyramids,' nor any more usual pathologicalfact than its consequence, that left-handed hemorrhagesinto the motor region produce right-handed paralyses.And yet the decussation is variable in amount, and seemssometimes to be absent altogether.[24] If, in such a case asthis last, the left brain were to become the seat of apoplexy,the left and not the right half of the body would be theone to suffer paralysis.
Theschema below [Fig. 15], copied from Dr.Seguin, expresses, on the whole, the probable truth about theregions concerned in vision. Not the entire occipital lobes,but the so-called cunei, and the first convolutions, are thecortical parts most intimately concerned. Nothnagel agreeswith Seguin in this limitation of the essential tracts.[25]
A most interesting effect of cortical disorder ismentalblindness. This consists not so much in insensibility tooptical impressions, as ininability to understand them.Psychologically it is interpretable asloss of associations betweenoptical sensations and what they signify; and anyinterruption of the paths between the optic centres and thecentres for other ideas ought to bring it about. Thus,[Pg 49]printed letters of the alphabet, or words, signify certainsounds and certain articulatory movements. If the connectionbetween the articulating or auditory centres, on theone hand, and the visual centres on the other, be rupturedwe oughta priori to expect that the sight of words wouldfail to awaken the idea of their sound, or the movement forpronouncing them. We ought, in short, to havealexia, orinability to read: and this is just what we do have in many[Pg 50]cases of extensive injury about the fronto-temporal regions,as a complication ofaphasic disease. Nothnagel suggeststhat whilst thecuneus is the seat of opticalsensations, theother parts of the occipital lobe may be the field of opticalmemories and ideas, from the loss of which mental blindnessshould ensue. In fact, all the medical authors speakof mental blindness as if it must consist in the loss of visualimages from the memory. It seems to me, however, thatthis is a psychological misapprehension. A man whosepower of visual imagination has decayed (no unusual phenomenonin its lighter grades) is not mentally blind inthe least, for he recognizes perfectly all that he sees. Onthe other hand, hemay be mentally blind, with his opticalimagination well preserved; as in the interesting case publishedby Wilbrand in 1887.[26] In the still more interestingcase of mental blindness recently published by Lissauer,[27]though the patient made the most ludicrous mistakes, callingfor instance a clothes-brush a pair of spectacles, an umbrellaa plant with flowers, an apple a portrait of a lady, etc.etc., he seemed, according to the reporter, to have his mentalimages fairly well preserved. It is in fact the momentaryloss of ournon-optical images which makes us mentallyblind, just as it is that of ournon-auditory images whichmakes us mentally deaf. I am mentally deaf if,hearing abell, I can't recall how itlooks; and mentally blind if,seeingit, I can't recall itssound or its name. As a matter offact, I should have to be not merely mentally blind, butstone-blind, if all my visual images were lost. For althoughI am blind to the right half of the field of view if myleft occipital region is injured, and to the left half if myright region is injured, such hemianopsia does not depriveme of visualimages, experience seeming to show thatthe unaffected hemisphere is always sufficient for productionof these. To abolish them entirely I should haveto be deprived of both occipital lobes, and that would depriveme not only of my inward images of sight, but of my[Pg 51]sight altogether.[28] Recent pathological annals seem to offera few such cases.[29] Meanwhile there are a number of casesof mental blindness, especially for written language, coupledwith hemianopsia, usually of the rightward field of view.These are all explicable by the breaking down, throughdisease, of theconnecting tracts between the occipital lobesand other parts of the brain, especially those which go tothe centres for speech in the frontal and temporal regions ofthe left hemisphere. They are to be classed among disturbancesofconduction or ofassociation; and nowhere can I findany fact which should force us to believe that optical imagesneed[30] be lost in mental blindness, or that the cerebralcentres for such images are locally distinct from those fordirect sensations from the eyes.[31]
Where an object fails to be recognized by sight, it oftenhappens that the patient will recognize and name it as soonas he touches it with his hand. This shows in an interesting[Pg 52]way how numerous the associative paths are which allend by running out of the brain through the channel ofspeech. The hand-path is open, though the eye-path beclosed. When mental blindness is most complete, neithersight, touch, nor sound avails to steer the patient, and a sortof dementia which has been calledasymbolia orapraxia isthe result. The commonest articles are not understood.The patient will put his breeches on one shoulder and hishat upon the other, will bite into the soap and lay his shoeson the table, or take his food into his hand and throw itdown again, not knowing what to do with it, etc. Such disordercan only come from extensive brain-injury.[32]
Themethod of degeneration corroborates the other evidencelocalizing the tracts of vision. In young animals onegets secondary degeneration of the occipital regions fromdestroying an eyeball, and,vice versâ, degeneration of theoptic nerves from destroying the occipital regions. Thecorpora geniculata, thalami, and subcortical fibres leadingto the occipital lobes are also found atrophied in thesecases. The phenomena are not uniform, but are indisputable;[33]so that, taking all lines of evidence together, thespecial connection of vision with the occipital lobes is perfectlymade out. It should be added, that the occipitallobes have frequently been found shrunken in cases of inveterateblindness in man.
Hearing is hardly as definitely localized as sight.In thedog, Luciani's diagram will show the regions which directly orindirectly affect it for the worse when injured. As with sight,one-sided lesions produce symptoms on both sides. Themixture of black dots and gray dots in the diagram is meantto represent this mixture of 'crossed' and 'uncrossed' connections,though of course no topographical exactitude isaimed at. Of all the region, the temporal lobe is the mostimportant part; yet permanent absolute deafness did not[Pg 53]result in a dog of Luciani's, even from bilateral destructionof both temporal lobes in their entirety.[34]
In the monkey, Ferrier and Yeo once found permanentdeafness to follow destruction of the upper temporal convolution(the one just below the fissure of Sylvius in Fig.6) on both sides. Brown and Schaefer found, on the contrary,that in several monkeys this operation failed to noticeablyaffect the hearing. In one animal, indeed, both entiretemporal lobes were destroyed. After a week or two ofdepression of the mental faculties this beast recovered andbecame one of the brightest monkeys possible, domineeringover all his mates, and admitted by all who saw him tohave all his senses, including hearing, 'perfectly acute.'[35]Terrible recriminations have, as usual, ensued between theinvestigators, Ferrier denying that Brown and Schaefer'sablations were complete,[36] Schaefer that Ferrier's monkeywas really deaf.[37] In this unsatisfactory condition the subjectmust be left, although there seems no reason to doubtthat Brown and Schaefer's observation is the more importantof the two.
In man the temporal lobe is unquestionably the seat ofthe hearing function, and the superior convolution adjacentto the sylvian fissure is its most important part. The phenomenaof aphasia show this. We studied motor aphasia afew pages back; we must now considersensory aphasia.[Pg 54]Our knowledge of this disease has had three stages: wemay talk of the period of Broca, the period of Wernicke,and the period of Charcot. What Broca's discovery was wehave seen. Wernicke was the first to discriminate thosecases in which the patient cannot even understand speechfrom those in which he can understand, only not talk; andto ascribe the former condition to lesion of the temporallobe.[38] The condition in question isword-deafness, and thedisease isauditory aphasia. The latest statistical survey ofthe subject is that by Dr. Allen Starr.[39] In the seven casesofpure word-deafness which he has collected, cases in whichthe patient could read, talk, and write, but not understandwhat was said to him, the lesion was limited to the first andsecond temporal convolutions in their posterior two thirds.The lesion (in right-handed, i.e. left-brained, persons) isalways on the left side, like the lesion in motor aphasia.Crude hearing would not be abolished, even were the leftcentre for it utterly destroyed; the right centre would stillprovide for that. But thelinguistic use of hearing appearsbound up with the integrity of the left centre more or lessexclusively. Here it must be that words heard enter intoassociation with the things which they represent, on the onehand, and with the movements necessary for pronouncingthem, on the other. In a large majority of Dr. Starr's fiftycases, the power either to name objects or to talk coherentlywas impaired. This shows that in most of us (as Wernickesaid) speech must go on from auditory cues; that is, itmust be that our ideas do not innervate our motor centresdirectly, but only after first arousing the mental sound ofthe words. This is the immediate stimulus to articulation;and where the possibility of this is abolished by the destructionof its usual channel in the left temporal lobe, thearticulation must suffer. In the few cases in which thechannel is abolished with no bad effect on speech we mustsuppose an idiosyncrasy. The patient must innervate hisspeech-organs either from the corresponding portion of theother hemisphere or directly from the centres of ideation,[Pg 55]those, namely, of vision, touch, etc., without leaning on theauditory region. It is the minuter analysis of the facts inthe light of such individual differences as these which constitutesCharcot's contribution towards clearing up thesubject.
Every nameable thing, act, or relation has numerousproperties, qualities, or aspects. In our minds the propertiesof each thing, together with its name, form an associatedgroup. If different parts of the brain are severally concernedwith the several properties, and a farther part withthe hearing, and still another with the uttering, of the name,there must inevitably be brought about (through the law ofassociation which we shall later study) such a dynamic connectionamongst all these brain-parts that the activity of any oneof them will be likely to awaken the activity of all the rest.When we are talking as we think, theultimate process is thatof utterance. If the brain-part forthat be injured, speechis impossible or disorderly, even though all the other brain-partsbe intact: and this is just the condition of thingswhich, onpage 37, we found to be brought about bylimited lesion of the left inferior frontal convolution. Butback of that last act various orders of succession arepossible in the associations of a talking man's ideas. Themore usual order seems to be from the tactile, visual, orother properties of the things thought-about to the soundof their names, and then to the latter's utterance. But if ina certain individual the thought of thelook of an object orof thelook of its printed name be the process whichhabitually precedes articulation, then the loss of thehearing centre willpro tanto not affect that individual'sspeech. He will be mentally deaf, i.e. hisunderstanding ofspeech will suffer, but he will not be aphasic. In this wayit is possible to explain the seven cases ofpure word-deafnesswhich figure in Dr. Starr's table.
If this order of association be ingrained and habitual inthat individual, injury to hisvisual centres will make himnot only word-blind, but aphasic as well. His speech willbecome confused in consequence of an occipital lesion.Naunyn, consequently, plotting out on a diagram of thehemisphere the 71 irreproachably reported cases of[Pg 56]aphasia which he was able to collect, finds that the lesionsconcentrate themselves in three places: first, on Broca'scentre; second, on Wernicke's; third, on the supra-marginaland angular gyri under which those fibres pass which connectthe visual centres with the rest of the brain[40] (see Fig.17). With this result Dr. Starr's analysis of purely sensorycases agrees.
In a later chapter we shall again return to these differencesin the effectiveness of the sensory spheres in differentindividuals. Meanwhile few things show more beautifullythan the history of our knowledge of aphasia how thesagacity and patience of many banded workers are in timecertain to analyze the darkest confusion into an orderlydisplay.[41] There is no 'centre of Speech' in the brain anymore than there is a faculty of Speech in the mind. Theentire brain, more or less, is at work in a man who useslanguage. The subjoined diagram, from Boss, shows thefour parts most critically concerned, and, in the light of ourtext, needs no farther explanation (see Fig. 18).
Everything conspires to point to the median descendingpart of the temporal lobes as being the organs of smell.Even Ferrier and Munk agree on the hippocampal gyrus,though Ferrier restricts olfaction, as Munk does not, to thelobule or uncinate process of the convolution, reserving therest of it for touch. Anatomy and pathology also point tothe hippocampal gyrus; but as the matter is less interestingfrom the point of view of human psychology than weresight and hearing, I will say no more, but simply addLuciani and Seppili's diagram of the dog's smell-centre.[42] Of
we know little that is definite. What little there is pointsto the lower temporal regions again. Consult Ferrier asbelow.
Interesting problems arise with regard to the seat oftactile and muscular sensibility. Hitzig, whose experimentsondogs' brains fifteen years ago opened the entire subjectwhich we are discussing, ascribed the disorders of motilityobserved after ablations of the motor region to a loss ofwhat he called muscular consciousness. The animals donot notice eccentric positions of their limbs, will stand withtheir legs crossed, with the affected paw resting on its backor hanging over a table's edge, etc.; and do not resist ourbending and stretching of it as they resist with the unaffectedpaw. Goltz, Munk, Schiff, Herzen, and otherspromptly ascertained an equal defect of cutaneous sensibilityto pain, touch, and cold. The paw is not withdrawnwhen pinched, remains standing in cold water, etc. Ferriermeanwhile denied that there was any true anæsthesiaproduced by ablations in the motor zone, and explainsthe appearance of it as an effect of the sluggish motorresponses of the affected side.[43] Munk[44] and Schiff[45], on the[Pg 59]contrary, conceive of the 'motor zone' as essentially sensory,and in different ways explain the motor disorders assecondary results of the anæsthesia which is always there,Munk calls the motor zone the Fühlsphäre of the animal'slimbs, etc., and makes it coördinate with the Sehsphäre,the Hörsphäre, etc., the entire cortex being, according tohim, nothing but a projection-surface for sensations, withno exclusively or essentially motor part. Such a viewwould be important if true, through its bearings on thepsychology of volition. What is the truth? As regardsthe fact of cutaneous anæsthesia from motor-zone ablations,all other observers are against Ferrier, so that he is probablywrong in denying it. On the other hand, Munk andSchiff are wrong in making the motor symptomsdepend onthe anæsthesia, for in certain rare cases they have beenobserved to exist not only without insensibility, but withactual hyperæsthesia of the parts.[46] The motor andsensory symptoms seem, therefore, to be independentvariables.
In monkeys the latest experiments are those of Horsleyand Schaefer,[47] whose results Ferrier accepts. They findthat excision of the hippocampal convolution produces transientinsensibility of the opposite side of the body, and thatpermanent insensibility is produced by destruction of itscontinuation upwards above the corpus callosum, the so-calledgyrus fornicatus (the part just below the 'calloso-marginalfissure' in Fig. 7). The insensibility is at its maximumwhen the entire tract comprising both convolutions isdestroyed. Ferrier says that the sensibility of monkeys is'entirely unaffected' by ablations of the motor zone,[48] andHorsley and Schaefer consider it by no means necessarily[Pg 60]abolished.[49] Luciani found it diminished in his three experimentson apes.[50]
In man we have the fact that one-sided paralysis fromdisease of the opposite motor zone may or may not beaccompanied with anæsthesia of the parts. Luciani, whobelieves that the motor zone is also sensory, tries to minimizethe value of this evidence by pointing to the insufficiencywith which patients are examined. He himself believes thatin dogs the tactile sphere extends backwards and forwardsof the directly excitable region, into the frontal and parietallobes (see Fig. 20). Nothnagel considers that pathologicalevidence points in the same direction;[51] and Dr. Mills, carefullyreviewing the evidence, adds the gyri fornicatus andhippocampi to the cutaneo-muscular region in man.[52] If onecompare Luciani's diagrams together (Figs. 14, 16, 19, 20)one will see that the entire parietal region of the dog's skullis common to the four senses of sight, hearing, smell, andtouch, including muscular feeling. The corresponding regionin the human brain (upper parietal and supra-marginalgyri—see Fig. 17) seems to be a somewhat similarplace of conflux. Optical aphasias and motor and tactiledisturbances all result from its injury, especially when that ison the left side.[53] The lower we go in the animal scale the[Pg 61]less differentiated the functions of the several brain-partsseem to be.[54] It may be that the region in question stillrepresents in ourselves something like this primitive condition,and that the surrounding parts, in adapting themselvesmore and more to specialized and narrow functions, haveleft it as a sort ofcarrefour through which they send currentsand converse. That it should be connected withmusculo-cutaneous feeling is, however, no reason why themotor zone proper should not be so connected too. Andthe cases of paralysis from the motor zone with no accompanyinganæsthesia may be explicable without denying allsensory function to that region. For, as my colleague Dr.James Putnam informs me, sensibility is always harder tokill than motility, even where we know for a certainty thatthe lesion affects tracts that are both sensory and motor.Persons whose hand is paralyzed in its movements fromcompression of arm-nerves during sleep, still feel with theirfingers; and they may still feel in their feet when their legsare paralyzed by bruising of the spinal cord. In a similarway, the motor cortex might be sensitive as well asmotor, and yet by this greater subtlety (or whatever thepeculiarity may be) in the sensory currents, the sensibilitymight survive an amount of injury there by which themotility was destroyed. Nothnagel considers that there aregrounds for supposing themuscular sense to be exclusivelyconnected with the parietal lobe and not with the motorzone. "Disease of this lobe gives pure ataxy without palsy,and of the motor zone pure palsy without loss of muscularsense."[55] He fails, however, to convince more competentcritics than the present writer,[56] so I conclude with themthat as yet we have no decisive grounds for locating muscularand cutaneous feeling apart. Much still remains to belearned about the relations between musculo-cutaneoussensibility and the cortex, but one thing is certain: thatneither the occipital, the forward frontal, nor the temporallobes seem to have anything essential to do with it in man.[Pg 62]It is knit up with the performances of themotor zone andof the convolutions backwards and midwards of them. Thereader must remember this conclusion when we come tothe chapter on the Will.
I must add a word about the connection of aphasiawith the tactile sense. Onp. 40 I spoke of those casesin which the patient can write but not read his own writing.He cannot read by his eyes; but he can read by thefeeling in his fingers, if he retrace the letters in the air.It is convenient for such a patient to have a pen in handwhilst reading in this way, in order to make the usual feelingof writing more complete.[57] In such a case we mustsuppose that the path between the optical and the graphiccentres remains open, whilst that between the optical andthe auditory and articulatory centres is closed. Only thuscan we understand how the look of the writing should failto suggest the sound of the words to the patient's mind,whilst it still suggests the proper movements of graphicimitation. These movements in their turn must of coursebe felt, and the feeling of them must be associated withthe centres for hearing and pronouncing the words. Theinjury in cases like this where very special combinationsfail, whilst others go on as usual, must always be supposedto be of the nature of increased resistance to the passageof certain currents of association. If any of theelements ofmental function were destroyed the incapacity wouldnecessarily be much more formidable. A patient who canboth read and write with his fingers most likely uses anidentical 'graphic' centre, at once sensory and motor, forboth operations.
I have now given, as far as the nature of this book willallow, a complete account of the present state of the localization-question.In its main outlines it stands firm, thoughmuch has still to be discovered. The anterior frontal lobes,for example, so far as is yet known, have no definite functions.Goltz finds that dogs bereft of them both are incessantly inmotion, and excitable by every small stimulus. They are[Pg 63]irascible and amative in an extraordinary degree, and theirsides grow bare with perpetual reflex scratching; but theyshow nolocal troubles of either motion or sensibility. Inmonkeys not even this lack of inhibitory ability is shown,and neither stimulation nor excision of the prefrontal lobesproduces any symptoms whatever. One monkey of Horsleyand Schaefer's was as tame, and did certain tricks as well,after as before the operation.[58] It is probable that we haveabout reached the limits of what can be learned about brain-functionsfrom vivisecting inferior animals, and that wemust hereafter look more exclusively to human pathologyfor light. The existence of separate speech and writingcentres in the left hemisphere in man; the fact that palsyfrom cortical injury is so much more complete and enduringin man and the monkey than in dogs; and the fartherfact that it seems more difficult to get complete sensorialblindness from cortical ablations in the lower animals thanin man, all show that functions get more specially localizedas evolution goes on. In birds localization seemshardly to exist, and in rodents it is much less conspicuousthan in carnivora. Even for man, however, Munk's way ofmapping out the cortex into absolute areas within whichonly one movement or sensation is represented is surelyfalse. The truth seems to be rather that, although there isa correspondence of certain regions of the brain to certainregions of the body, yet the severalparts within each bodilyregion are represented throughout thewhole of the correspondingbrain-region like pepper and salt sprinkled fromthe same caster. This, however, does not prevent each'part' from having itsfocus at one spot within the brain-region.The various brain-regions merge into each otherin the same mixed way. As Mr. Horsley says: "There areborder centres, and the area of representation of the facemerges into that for the representation of the upper limb.If there was a focal lesion at that point, you would havethe movements of these two parts starting together."[Pg 64][59]The accompanying figure from Paneth shows just how thematter stands in the dog.[60]
I am speaking now of localizationsbreadthwise over the brain-surface.It is conceivable thatthere might be also localizationsdepthwise through the cortex. Themore superficial cells are smaller,the deepest layer of them is large;and it has been suggested that thesuperficial cells are sensorial, thedeeper ones motor;[61] or that thesuperficial ones in the motor regionare correlated with the extremitiesof the organs to be moved (fingers,etc.), the deeper ones with the morecentral segments (wrist, elbow,etc.).[62] It need hardly be said thatall such theories are as yet butguesses.
We thus see that the postulateof Meynert and Jackson which westarted with onp. 30 is on the wholemost satisfactorily corroboratedby subsequent objective research.The highest centres do probablycontain nothing but arrangementsfor representing impressions andmovements, and other arrangementsfor coupling the activity Of thesearrangements together.[63] Currentspouring in from the sense-organsfirst excite some arrangements,[Pg 65]which in turn excite others, until at last a motor dischargedownwards of some sort occurs. When this is onceclearly grasped there remains little ground for keepingup that old controversy about the motor zone, as towhether it is in reality motor or sensitive. The wholecortex, inasmuch as currents run through it, is both. Allthe currents probably have feelings going with them, andsooner or later bring movements about. In one aspect, then,every centre is afferent, in another efferent, even the motorcells of the spinal cord having these two aspects inseparablyconjoined. Marique,[64] and Exner and Paneth[65] haveshown that by cuttinground a 'motor' centre and so separatingit from the influence of the rest of the cortex, thesame disorders are produced as by cutting it out, so thatreally it is only the mouth of the funnel, as it were,through which the stream of innervation, starting from elsewhere,pours;[66] consciousness accompanying the stream,and being mainly of things seen if the stream is strongestoccipitally, of things heard if it is strongest temporally,of things felt, etc., if the stream occupies most intensely the'motor zone.' It seems to me that some broad and vagueformulation like this is as much as we can safely venture onin the present state of science; and in subsequent chaptersI expect to give confirmatory reasons for my view.
But is the consciousness which accompanies the activity ofthe cortex the only consciousness that man has? orare his lowercentres conscious as well?
This is a difficult question to decide, how difficult oneonly learns when one discovers that the cortex-consciousnessitself of certain objects can be seemingly annihilatedin any good hypnotic subject by a bare wave of his operator's[Pg 66]hand, and yet be proved by circumstantial evidence toexist all the while in a split-off condition, quite as 'ejective'[67]to the rest of the subject's mind as that mind is to the mindof the bystanders.[68] The lower centres themselves mayconceivably all the while have a split-off consciousness oftheir own, similarly ejective to the cortex-consciousness;but whether they have it or not can never be known frommerely introspective evidence. Meanwhile the fact thatoccipital destruction in man may cause a blindness whichis apparently absolute (no feeling remaining either of lightor dark over one half of the field of view), would lead us tosuppose that if our lower optical centres, the corporaquadrigemina, and thalami, do have any consciousness, itis at all events a consciousness which does not mix withthat which accompanies the cortical activities, and whichhas nothing to do with our personal Self. In loweranimals this may not be so much the case. The traces ofsight found (supra,p. 46) in dogs and monkeys whose occipitallobes were entirely destroyed, may possibly have beendue to the fact that the lower centres of these animals saw,and that what they saw was not ejective but objective tothe remaining cortex, i.e. it formed part of one and thesame inner world with the things which that cortex perceived.It may be, however, that the phenomena were dueto the fact that in these animals the cortical 'centres' forvision reach outside of the occipital zone, and that destructionof the latter fails to remove them as completely as inman. This, as we know, is the opinion of the experimentersthemselves. For practical purposes, nevertheless, andlimiting the meaning of the word consciousness to the personalself of the individual, we can pretty confidently answerthe question prefixed to this paragraph by saying thatthecortex is the sole organ of consciousness in man.[69] If there[Pg 67]be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it isa consciousness of which the self knows nothing.
Another problem, not so metaphysical, remains. Themost general and striking fact connected with cortical injuryis that of therestoration of function. Functions lost atfirst are after a few days or weeks restored.How are weto understand this restitution?
Two theories are in the field:
1) Restitution is due to the vicarious action either of therest of the cortex or of centres lower down, acquiring functionswhich until then they had not performed;
2) It is due to the remaining centres (whether cortical or'lower') resuming functions which they had always had,but of which the wound had temporarily inhibited theexercise. This is the view of which Goltz and Brown-Séquardare the most distinguished defenders.
Inhibition is avera causa, of that there can be no doubt.The pneumogastric nerve inhibits the heart, the splanchnicinhibits the intestinal movements, and the superiorlaryngeal those of inspiration. The nerve-irritations whichmay inhibit the contraction of arterioles are innumerable,and reflex actions are often repressed by the simultaneousexcitement of other sensory nerves. For all such facts thereader must consult the treatises on physiology. Whatconcerns us here is the inhibition exerted by different partsof the nerve-centres, when irritated, on the activity of distantparts. The flaccidity of a frog from 'shock,' for aminute or so after his medulla oblongata is cut, is an inhibitionfrom the seat of injury which quickly passes away.
What is known as 'surgical shock '(unconsciousness,pallor, dilatation of splanchnic blood-vessels, and generalsyncope and collapse) in the human subject is an inhibitionwhich lasts a longer time. Goltz, Freusberg, and others,cutting the spinal cord in dogs, proved that there werefunctions inhibited still longer by the wound, but which re-establishedthemselves ultimately if the animal was keptalive. The lumbar region of the cord was thus found tocontain independent vaso-motor centres, centres for erection,[Pg 68]for control of the sphincters, etc., which could beexcited to activity by tactile stimuli and as readily reinhibitedby others simultaneously applied.[70] We may thereforeplausibly suppose that the rapid reappearance of motility,vision, etc., after their first disappearance in consequenceof a cortical mutilation, is due to the passing off ofinhibitions exerted by the irritated surface of the wound.The only question is whetherall restorations of functionmust be explained in this one simple way, or whether somepart of them may not be owing to the formation of entirelynew paths in the remaining centres, by which they become'educated' to duties which they did not originally possess.In favor of an indefinite extension of the inhibition theoryfacts may be cited such as the following: In dogs whose disturbancesdue to cortical lesion have disappeared, they mayin consequence of some inner or outer accident reappear in alltheir intensity for 24 hours or so and then disappear again.[71]In a dog made half blind by an operation, and then shutup in the dark, vision comes back just as quickly as inother similar dogs whose sight is exercised systematicallyevery day.[72] A dog which has learned to beg before theoperation recommences this practice quitespontaneouslya week after a double-sided ablation of the motor zone.[73]Occasionally, in a pigeon (or even, it is said, in a dog)we see the disturbances less marked immediately afterthe operation than they are half an hour later.[74] Thiswould be impossible were they due to the subtraction of theorgans which normally carried them on. Moreover theentire drift of recent physiological and pathological speculationis towards enthroning inhibition as an ever-presentand indispensable condition of orderly activity. We shallsee how great is its importance, in the chapter on the Will.Mr. Charles Mercier considers that no muscular contraction,once begun, would ever stop without it, short of exhaustion[Pg 69]of the system;[75] and Brown-Séquard has for years beenaccumulating examples to show how far its influence extends.[76]Under these circumstances it seems as if errormight more probably lie in curtailing its sphere too muchthan in stretching it too far as an explanation of thephenomena following cortical lesion.[77]
On the other hand, if we admitno re-education of centres,we not only fly in the face of ana priori probability,but we find ourselves compelled by facts to suppose analmost incredible number of functions natively lodged in thecentres below thethalami or even in those below thecorporaquadrigemina. I will consider thea priori objection afterfirst taking a look at the facts which I have in mind. Theyconfront us the moment we ask ourselves justwhich are theparts which perform the functions abolished by an operationafter sufficient time has elapsed for restoration to occur?
The first observers thought that they must be thecorrespondingparts of the opposite or intact hemisphere. But aslong ago as 1875 Carville and Duret tested this by cuttingout the fore-leg-centre on one side, in a dog, and then, afterwaiting till restitution had occurred, cutting it out on theopposite side as well. Goltz and others have done thesame thing.[78] If the opposite side were really the seat of therestored function, the original palsy should have appearedagain and been permanent. But it did not appear at all;there appeared only a palsy of the hitherto unaffected side.The next supposition is thatthe parts surrounding the cut-outregion learn vicariously to perform its duties. But here,again, experiment seems to upset the hypothesis, so far asthe motor zone goes at least; for we may wait till motilityhas returned in the affected limb, and then both irritate the[Pg 70]cortex surrounding the wound without exciting the limbto movement, and ablate it, without bringing back thevanished palsy.[79] It would accordingly seem thatthe cerebralcentres below the cortex must be the seat of the regainedactivities. But Goltz destroyed a dog's entire left hemisphere,together with thecorpus striatum and thethalamuson that side, and kept him alive until a surprisingly smallamount of motor and tactile disturbance remained.[80] Thesecentres cannot here have accounted for the restitution. Hehas even, as it would appear,[81] ablated both the hemispheresof a dog, and kept him alive 51 days, able to walk and stand.The corpora striata and thalami in this dog were also practicallygone. In view of such results we seem driven, withM. François-Franck,[82] to fall back on theganglia lower still,or even on thespinal cord as the 'vicarious' organ of whichwe are in quest. If the abeyance of function between theoperation and the restoration was dueexclusively to inhibition,then we must suppose these lowest centres to be inreality extremely accomplished organs. They must alwayshave done what we now find them doing after function isrestored, even when the hemispheres were intact. Ofcourse this is conceivably the case; yet it does not seemvery plausible. And thea priori considerations which amoment since I said I should urge, make it less plausiblestill.
For, in the first place, the brain is essentially a place ofcurrents, which run in organized paths. Loss of functioncan only mean one of two things, either that a current canno longer run in, or that if it runs in, it can no longer runout, by its old path. Either of these inabilities may comefrom a local ablation; and 'restitution' can then only meanthat, in spite of a temporary block, an inrunning current hasat last become enabled to flow out by its old path again—e.g.,the sound of 'give your paw' discharges after some[Pg 71]weeks into the same canine muscles into which it used todischarge before the operation. As far as the cortex itselfgoes, since one of the purposes for which it actually existsis the production of new paths,[83] the only question beforeus is: Is the formation ofthese particular 'vicarious' pathstoo much to expect of its plastic powers? It would certainlybe too much to expect that a hemisphere shouldreceive currents from optic fibres whosearriving-place withinit is destroyed, or that it should discharge into fibres ofthe pyramidal strand if theirplace of exit is broken down.Such lesions as these must be irreparablewithin thathemisphere. Yet even then, through the other hemisphere,thecorpus callosum, and the bilateral connections in thespinal cord, one can imagine some road by which the oldmuscles might eventually be innervated by the same incomingcurrents which innervated them before the block.And for all minor interruptions, not involving the arriving-placeof the 'cortico-petal' or the place of exit of the 'cortico-fugal'fibres, roundabout paths of some sort through theaffected hemisphere itself must exist, for every point of itis, remotely at least, in potential communication with everyother point. The normal paths are only paths of leastresistance. If they get blocked or cut, paths formerly moreresistant become the least resistant paths under the changedconditions. It must never be forgotten that a current thatruns in has got to run outsomewhere; and if it only oncesucceeds by accident in striking into its old place of exitagain, the thrill of satisfaction which the consciousnessconnected with the whole residual brain then receives willreinforce and fix the paths of that moment and make themmore likely to be struck into again. The resultant feelingthat the old habitual act is at last successfully back again,becomes itself a new stimulus which stamps all the existingcurrents in. It is matter of experience that such feelingsof successful achievement do tend to fix in our memorywhatever processes have led to them; and we shall have[Pg 72]a good deal more to say upon the subject when we come tothe Chapter on the Will.
My conclusion then is this: that some of the restitutionof function (especially where the cortical lesion is not toogreat) is probably due to genuinely vicarious function onthe part of the centres that remain; whilst some of itis due to the passing off of inhibitions. In other words,both the vicarious theory and the inhibition theory aretrue in their measure. But as for determining that measure,or saying which centres are vicarious, and to what extentthey can learn new tricks, that is impossible at present.
And now, after learning all these facts, what are we tothink of the child and the candle-flame, and of that schemewhich provisionally imposed itself on our acceptance aftersurveying the actions of the frog? (Cf.pp. 25-6,supra.) Itwill be remembered that we then considered the lower centresen masse as machines for responding to present sense-impressionsexclusively, and the hemispheres as equallyexclusive organs of action from inward considerations orideas; and that, following Meynert, we supposed the hemispheresto have no native tendencies to determinate activity,but to be merely superadded organs for breaking up thevarious reflexes performed by the lower centres, and combiningtheir motor and sensory elements in novel ways. Itwill also be remembered that I prophesied that we shouldbe obliged to soften down the sharpness of this distinctionafter we had completed our survey of the farther facts.The time has now come for that correction to be made.
Wider and completer observations show us both that thelower centres are more spontaneous, and that the hemispheresare more automatic, than the Meynert schemeallows. Schrader's observations in Goltz's Laboratory onhemisphereless frogs[84] and pigeons[85] give an idea quitedifferent from the picture of these creatures which isclassically current. Steiner's[86] observations on frogs[Pg 73]already went a good way in the same direction, showing,for example, that locomotion is a well-developed functionof the medulla oblongata. But Schrader, by great carein the operation, and by keeping the frogs a long time alive,found that at least in some of them the spinal cord wouldproduce movements of locomotion when the frog wassmartly roused by a poke, and that swimming and croakingcould sometimes be performed when nothing above themedulla oblongata remained.[87] Schrader's hemispherelessfrogs moved spontaneously, ate flies, buried themselvesin the ground, and in short did many things which beforehis observations were supposed to be impossible unless thehemispheres remained. Steiner[88] and Vulpian have remarkedan even greater vivacity in fishes deprived of theirhemispheres. Vulpian says of his brainless carps[89] thatthree days after the operation one of them darted at foodand at a knot tied on the end of a string, holding the latter sotight between his jaws that his head was drawn out ofwater. Later, "they see morsels of white of egg; themoment these sink through the water in front of them,they follow and seize them, sometimes after they are on thebottom, sometimes before they have reached it. In capturingand swallowing this food they execute just the samemovements as the intact carps which are in the same aquarium.The only difference is that they seem to see them atless distance, seek them with less impetuosity and less perseverancein all the points of the bottom of the aquarium,but they struggle (so to speak) sometimes with the soundcarps to grasp the morsels. It is certain that they do notconfound these bits of white of egg with other white bodies,small pebbles for example, which are at the bottom of thewater. The same carp which, three days after operation,seized the knot on a piece of string, no longer snaps at itnow, but if one brings it near her, she draws away from itby swimming backwards before it comes into contact with[Pg 74]her mouth."[90] Already onpp. 9-10, as the reader may remember,we instanced those adaptations of conduct to newconditions, on the part of the frog's spinal cord and thalami,which led Pflüger and Lewes on the one hand and Goltz onthe other to locate in these organs an intelligence akin tothat of which the hemispheres are the seat.
When it comes to birds deprived of their hemispheres,the evidence that some of their acts have conscious purposebehind them is quite as persuasive. In pigeons Schraderfound that the state of somnolence lasted only three or fourdays, after which time the birds began indefatigably towalk about the room. They climbed out of boxes in whichthey were put, jumped over or flew up upon obstacles, andtheir sight was so perfect that neither in walking nor flyingdid they ever strike any object in the room. They hadalso definite ends or purposes, flying straight for moreconvenient perching places when made uncomfortable bymovements imparted to those on which they stood; and ofseveral possible perches they always chose the most convenient."If we give the dove the choice of a horizontalbar (Reck) or an equally distant table to fly to, she alwaysgives decided preference to the table. Indeed she choosesthe table even if it is several meters farther off than the baror the chair." Placed on the back of a chair, she flies firstto the seat and then to the floor, and in general "will forsakea high position, although it give her sufficiently firmsupport, and in order to reach the ground will make use ofthe environing objects as intermediate goals of flight, showinga perfectly correct judgment of their distance. Althoughable to fly directly to the ground, she prefers to make thejourney in successive stages.... Once on the ground, shehardly ever rises spontaneously into the air."[91]
Young rabbits deprived of their hemispheres will stand,run, start at noises, avoid obstacles in their path, and giveresponsive cries of suffering when hurt. Rats will do thesame, and throw themselves moreover into an attitude ofdefence. Dogs never survive such an operation if performedat once. But Goltz's latest dog, mentioned on[Pg 75]p. 70, which is said to have been kept alive for fifty-one daysafter both hemispheres had been removed by a series ofablations and the corpora striata and thalami had softenedaway, shows how much the mid-brain centres and the cordcan do even in the canine species. Taken together, thenumber of reactions shown to exist in the lower centres bythese observations make out a pretty good case for the Meynertscheme, as applied to these lower animals. Thatscheme demands hemispheres which shall be mere supplementsor organs of repetition, and in the light of theseobservations they obviously are so to a great extent. Butthe Meynert scheme also demands that the reactions of thelower centres shall all benative, and we are not absolutelysure that some of those which we have been consideringmay not have been acquired after the injury; and it furthermoredemands that they should be machine-like, whereasthe expression of some of them makes us doubt whetherthey may not be guided by an intelligence of low degree.
Even in the lower animals, then, there is reason to softendown that opposition between the hemispheres and thelower centres which the scheme demands. The hemispheresmay, it is true, only supplement the lower centres,but the latter resemble the former in nature and havesome small amount at least of 'spontaneity' and choice.
But when we come to monkeys and man the schemewell-nigh breaks down altogether; for we find that thehemispheres do not simply repeat voluntarily actions whichthe lower centres perform as machines. There are manyfunctions which the lower centres cannot by themselvesperform at all. When the motor cortex is injured in a manor a monkey genuine paralysis ensues, which in man isincurable, and almost or quite equally so in the ape. Dr.Seguin knew a man with hemi-blindness, from corticalinjury, which had persisted unaltered for twenty-threeyears. 'Traumatic inhibition' cannot possibly accountfor this. The blindness must have been an 'Ausfallserscheinung,'due to the loss of vision's essential organ. Itwould seem, then, that in these higher creatures the lowercentres must be less adequate than they are farther downin the zoological scale; and that even for certain elementary[Pg 76]combinations of movement and impression the co-operationof the hemispheres is necessary from the start. Even inbirds and dogs the power ofeating properly is lost whenthe frontal lobes are cut off.[92]
The plain truth is that neither in man nor beast are thehemispheres the virgin organs which our scheme calledthem. So far from being unorganized at birth, they musthave native tendencies to reaction of a determinate sort.[93]These are the tendencies which we know asemotions andinstincts, and which we must study with some detail in laterchapters of this book. Both instincts and emotions are reactionsupon special sorts of objects ofperception; they dependon the hemispheres; and they are in the first instancereflex, that is, they take place the first time the exciting objectis met, are accompanied by no forethought or deliberation,and are irresistible. But they are modifiable to acertain extent by experience, and on later occasions ofmeeting the exciting object, the instincts especially haveless of the blind impulsive character which they had atfirst. All this will be explained at some length in ChapterXXIV. Meanwhile we can say that the multiplicity of emotionaland instinctive reactions in man, together with hisextensive associative power, permit of extensive recouplingsof the original sensory and motor partners. Theconsequencesof one instinctive reaction often prove to be theinciters of an opposite reaction, and beingsuggested on lateroccasions by the original object, may then suppress thefirst reaction altogether, just as in the case of the child andthe flame. For this education the hemispheres do not need[Pg 77]to betabulæ rasæ at first, as the Meynert scheme wouldhave them; and so far from their being educated by thelower centres exclusively, they educate themselves.[94]
We have already noticed the absence of reactions fromfear and hunger in the ordinary brainless frog. Schradergives a striking account of the instinctless condition of hisbrainless pigeons, active as they were in the way of locomotionand voice. "The hemisphereless animal moves in aworld of bodies which ... are all of equal value for him....He is, to use Goltz's apt expression,impersonal.... Everyobject is for him only a space-occupying mass, he turns outof his path for an ordinary pigeon no otherwise than for astone. He may try to climb over both. All authors agreethat they never found any difference, whether it was an inanimatebody, a cat, a dog, or a bird of prey which came intheir pigeon's way. The creature knows neither friendsnor enemies, in the thickest company it lives like a hermit.The languishing cooing of the male awakens no more impressionthan the rattling of the peas, or the call-whistlewhich in the days before the injury used to make the birdshasten to be fed. Quite as little as the earlier observershave I seen hemisphereless she-birds answer the courtingof the male. A hemisphereless male will coo all day longand show distinct signs of sexual excitement, but his activityis without any object, it is entirely indifferent to himwhether the she-bird be there or not. If one is placed nearhim, he leaves her unnoticed.... As the male pays no attentionto the female, so she pays none to her young. Thebrood may follow the mother ceaselessly calling for food,but they might as well ask it from a stone.... The hemisphereless[Pg 78]sphereless pigeon is in the highest degree tame, and fearsman as little as cat or bird of prey."[95]
Putting together now all the facts and reflections whichwe have been through, it seems to me thatwe can no longerhold strictly to the Meynert scheme. If anywhere, it willapply to the lowest animals; but in them especially thelower centres seem to have a degree of spontaneity andchoice. On the whole, I think that we are driven to substitutefor it some such general conception as the following,which allows for zoological differences as we know them,and is vague and elastic enough to receive any number offuture discoveries of detail.
All the centres, in all animals, whilst they are in oneaspect mechanisms, probably are, or at least once were,organs of consciousness in another, although the consciousnessis doubtless much more developed in the hemispheresthan it is anywhere else. The consciousness must everywhereprefer some of the sensations which it gets to others;and if it can remember these in their absence, howeverdimly, they must be itsends of desire. If, moreover, it canidentify in memory any motor discharges which may haveled to such ends, and associate the latter with them, thenthese motor discharges themselves may in turn becomedesired asmeans. This is the development ofwill; and itsrealization must of course be proportional to the possiblecomplication of the consciousness. Even the spinal cordmay possibly have some little power of will in this sense,and of effort towards modified behavior in consequence ofnew experiences of sensibility.[Pg 79][96]
All nervous centres have then in the first instance oneessential function, that of 'intelligent' action. They feel,prefer one thing to another, and have 'ends.' Like allother organs, however, theyevolve from ancestor to descendant,and their evolution takes two directions, the lowercentres passing downwards into more unhesitating automatism,and the higher ones upwards into larger intellectuality.[97]Thus it may happen that those functions whichcan safely grow uniform and fatal become least accompaniedby mind, and that their organ, the spinal cord, becomes amore and more soulless machine; whilst on the contrarythose functions which it benefits the animal to have adaptedto delicate environing variations pass more and more to thehemispheres, whose anatomical structure and attendantconsciousness grow more and more elaborate as zoologicalevolution proceeds. In this way it might come about thatin man and the monkeys the basal ganglia should do fewerthings by themselves than they can do in dogs, fewer in dogsthan in rabbits, fewer in rabbits than in hawks,[98] fewer inhawks than in pigeons, fewer in pigeons than in frogs, fewerin frogs than in fishes, and that the hemispheres shouldcorrespondingly do more. This passage of functions forwardto the ever-enlarging hemispheres would be itself oneof the evolutive changes, to be explained like the developmentof the hemispheres themselves, either by fortunatevariation or by inherited effects of use. The reflexes, onthis view, upon which the education of our human hemispheresdepends, would not be due to the basal ganglia[Pg 80]alone. They would be tendencies in the hemispheres themselves,modifiable by education, unlike the reflexes of themedulla oblongata, pons, optic lobes and spinal cord. Suchcerebral reflexes, if they exist, form a basis quite as goodas that which the Meynert scheme offers, for the acquisitionof memories and associations which may later result in allsorts of 'changes of partners' in the psychic world. Thediagram of the baby and the candle (seepage 25) can bere-edited, if need be, as an entirely cortical transaction.The original tendency to touch will be a cortical instinct;the burn will leave an image in another part of the cortex,which, being recalled by association, will inhibit the touchingtendency the next time the candle is perceived, andexcite the tendency to withdraw—so that the retinal picturewill, upon that next time, be coupled with the originalmotor partner of the pain. We thus get whatever psychologicaltruth the Meynert scheme possesses without entanglingourselves on a dubious anatomy and physiology.
Some such shadowy view of the evolution of the centres,of the relation of consciousness to them, and of the hemispheresto the other lobes, is, it seems to me, that in whichit is safest to indulge. If it has no other advantage, it atany rate makes us realize how enormous are the gaps in ourknowledge, the moment we try to cover the facts by anyone formula of a general kind.
[4] It should be said that this particular cut commonly proves fatal. Thetext refers to the rare cases which survive.
[5] I confine myself to the frog for simplicity's sake. In higher animals,especially the ape and man, it would seem as if not only determinate combinationsof muscles, but limited groups or even single muscles could beinnervated from the hemispheres.
[6] I hope that the reader will take no umbrage at my so mixing thephysical and mental, and talking of reflex acts and hemispheres and reminiscencesin the same breath, as if they were homogeneous quantities andfactors of one causal chain. I have done so deliberately; for although Iadmit that from the radically physical point of view it is easy to conceiveof the chain of events amongst the cells and fibres as complete in itself,and that whilst so conceiving it one need make no mention of 'ideas,'I yet suspect that point of view of being an unreal abstraction. Reflexesin centres may take place even where accompanying feelings or ideas guidethem. In another chapter I shall try to show reasons for not abandoningthis common-sense position; meanwhile language lends itself so muchmore easily to the mixed way of describing, that I will continue to employthe latter. The more radical-minded reader can always read 'ideationalprocess' for 'idea.'
[7] I shall call it hereafter for shortness 'the Meynert scheme;' for thechild-and-flame example, as well as the whole general notion that the hemispheresare a supernumerary surface for the projection and association ofsensations and movements natively coupled in the centres below, is due toTh. Meynert, the Austrian anatomist. For a popular account of his views,see his pamphlet 'Zur Mechanik des Gehirnbaues,' Vienna, 1874. Hismost recent development of them is embodied in his 'Psychiatry,' aclinical treatise on diseases of the forebrain, translated by B. Sachs, NewYork, 1885.
[8] Geschichte des Materialismus, 2d ed., ii, p. 345.
[9] West Riding Asylum Reports, 1876, p. 267.
[10] For a thorough discussion of the various objections, see Ferrier's'Functions of the Brain,' 2d ed., pp. 227-234, and François-Franck's'Leçons sur les Fonctions Motrices du Cerveau' (1887), Leçon 31. The mostminutely accurate experiments on irritation of cortical points are thoseof Paneth, in Pflüger's Archiv, vol 37, p. 528.—Recently the skull has beenfearlessly opened by surgeons, and operations upon the human brain performed,sometimes with the happiest results. In some of these operationsthe cortex has been electrically excited for the purpose of more exactlylocalizing the spot, and the movements first observed in dogs and monkeyshave then been verified in men.
[11] J. Loeb: Beiträge zur Physiologie des Grosshirns; Pflüger's Archiv,xxxix, 293. I simplify the author's statement.
[12] Goltz: Pflüger's Archiv, xlii, 419.
[13] 'Hemiplegia' means one-sided palsy.
[14] Philosophical Transactions, vol. 179, pp. 6, 10 (1888). In a later paper(ibid. p. 205) Messrs. Beevor and Horsley go into the localization still moreminutely, showing spots from which single muscles or single digits can bemade to contract.
[15] Nothnagel und Naunyn; Die Localization in den Gehirnkrankheiten(Wiesbaden, 1887), p. 34.
[16] An accessible account of the history of our knowledge of motoraphasia is in W. A. Hammond's 'Treatise on the Diseases of the NervousSystem,' chapter vii.
[17] The history up to 1885 may be found in A. Christiani: Zur Physiologiedes Gehirnes (Berlin, 1885).
[18] Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 44, p. 176. Munk (Berlin Academy Sitzsungberichte,1889, xxxi) returns to the charge, denying the extirpations ofSchrader to be complete: "Microscopic portions of theSehsphäre mustremain."
[19] A. Christiani; Zur Physiol. d. Gehirnes (Berlin, 1885), chaps. ii, iii, iv,H. Munk: Berlin Akad. Stzgsb. 1884, xxiv.
[20] Luciani und Seppili: Die Functions-Localization auf der Grosshirnrinde(Deutsch von Fraenkel), Leipzig, 1886, Dogs M, N, and S. Goltz inPflüger's Archiv, vol. 34, pp. 490-6; vol. 42, p. 454. Cf. also Munk: BerlinAkad. Stzgsb. 1886, vii, viii, pp. 113-121, and Loeb: Pflüger's Archiv,vol. 39, p. 337.
[21] Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte, 1886, vii, viii, p. 124.
[22] H. Munk: Functionen der Grosshirnrinde (Berlin, 1881), pp. 36-40.Ferrier: Functions, etc., 2d ed., chap, ix, pt. i. Brown and Schaefer,Philos. Transactions, vol. 179, p. 321. Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. pp.131-138. Lannegrace found traces of sight with both occipital lobes destroyed,and in one monkey even when angular gyri and occipital lobeswere destroyed altogether. His paper is in the Archives de MédecineExpérimentale for January and March, 1889. I only know it from theabstract in the Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, pp. 108-420. The reporterdoubts the evidence of vision in the monkey. It appears to have consistedin avoiding obstacles and in emotional disturbance in the presence of men.
[23] Localization of Cerebral Disease (1878), pp. 117-8.
[24] For cases see Flechsig: Die Leitungsbahnen in Gehirn u. Rückenmark(Leipzig, 1876), pp. 112, 272; Exner's Untersuchungen, etc., p. 83; Ferrier'sLocalization, etc., p. 11; François-Franck's Cerveau Moteur, p. 63, note.
[25] E. C. Seguin: Hemianopsia of Cerebral Origin, in Journal of Nervousand Mental Disease, vol. xiii, p. 30. Nothnagel und Naunyn: Ueber dieLocalization der Gehirnkrankheiten (Wiesbaden, 1887), p. 16.
[26] Die Seelenblindheit, etc., p. 51 ff. The mental blindness was inthis woman's case moderate in degree.
[27] Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vol. 21, p. 222.
[28] Nothnagel (loc. cit. p. 22) says: "Dies trifft aber nicht zu." He gives,however, no case in support of his opinion that double-sided cortical lesionmay make one stone-blind and yet not destroy one's visual images; so thatI do not know whether it is an observation of fact or ana priori assumption.
[29] In a case published by C. S. Freund: Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vol. xx, theoccipital lobes were injured, but their cortex was not destroyed, on bothsides. There was still vision. Cf.pp. 291-5.
[30] I say 'need,' for I do not of course deny thepossible coexistence of thetwo symptoms. Many a brain-lesion might block optical associations and atthe same time impair optical imagination, without entirely stopping vision.Such a case seems to have been the remarkable one from Charcot which Ishall give rather fully in the chapter on Imagination.
[31] Freund (in the article cited above 'Ueber optische Aphasie undSeelenblindheit') and Bruns ('Ein Fall von Alexie,' etc., in the NeurologischesCentralblatt for 1888, pp. 581, 509) explain their cases by broken-downconduction. Wilbrand, whose painstaking monograph on mentalblindness was referred to a moment ago, gives none buta priori reasons forhis belief that the optical 'Erinnerungsfeld' must be locally distinct fromthe Wahrnehmungsfeld (cf.pp. 84,93). Thea priori reasons are really theother way. Mauthner ('Gehirn u. Auge' (1881), p. 487 ff.) tries to showthat the 'mental blindness' of Munk's dogs and apes after occipital mutilationwas not such, but real dimness of sight. The best case of mentalblindness yet reported is that by Lissauer, as above. The reader will alsodo well to read Bernard: De l'Aphasie (1885) chap. v; Ballet: Le LangageIntérieur (1886), chap. viii; and Jas. Boss's little book on Aphasia (1887), p. 74.
[32] For a case see Wernicke's Lehrb. d. Gehirnkrankheiten, vol. ii, p.554 (1881).
[33] The latest account of them is the paper 'Über die optischen Centrenu. Bahnen' by von Monakow in the Archiv für Psychiatrie, vol. xx, p. 714.
[34] Die Functions-Localization, etc., Dog X; see also p. 161.
[35] Philos. Trans., vol. 179, p. 312.
[36] Brain, vol. xi, p. 10.
[37]Ibid. p. 147.
[38] Der aphasische Symptomencomplex (1874). See in Fig. 11 the convolutionmarkedWernicke.
[39] 'The Pathology of Sensory Aphasia,' 'Brain,' July, 1889.
[40] Nothnagel und Naunyn;op. cit. plates.
[41] Ballet's and Bernard's works cited onp. 51 are the most accessibledocuments of Charcot's school. Bastian's book on the Brain as an Organof Mind (last three chapters) is also good.
[42] For details, see Ferrier's 'Functions,' chap. ix, pt. iii, and Chas.K. Mills: Transactions of Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons,1888, vol. i, p. 278.
[43] Functions of the Brain, chap. x, § 14.
[44] Ueber die Functionen d. Grosshirnrinde (1881), p. 50.
[45] Lezioni di Fisiologia sperimentale sul sistema nervoso encefalico(l. 73), p. 527 ff. Also 'Brain,' vol. ix, p. 298.
[46] Bechterew (Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 35, p. 137) foundno anæsthesia ina cat with motor symptoms from ablation of sigmoid gyrus. Luciani gothyperæsthesia coexistent with cortical motor defect in a dog, by simultaneouslyhemisecting the spinal cord (Luciani u. Seppili,op. cit. p. 234).Goltz frequently found hyperæsthesia of the whole body to accompanymotor defect after ablation of both frontal lobes, and he once found itafter ablating the motor zone (Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 34, p. 471).
[47] Philos. Transactions, vol. 179, p. 20 ff.
[48] Functions, p. 375.
[49] Pp. 15-17.
[50] Luciani u. Seppili,op. cit. pp. 275-288.
[51]Op. cit. p. 18.
[52] Trans. of Congress, etc., p. 272.
[53] See Exner's Unters. üb. Localization, plate xxv.
[54] Cf. Ferrier's Functions, etc., chap. iv, and chap. x, §§ 6 to 9.
[55]Op. cit. p. 17.
[56] E.g. Starr,loc. cit. p. 272; Leyden, Beiträge zur Lehre v. d. Localizationim Gehirn (1888), p. 72.
[57] Bernard,op. cit. p. 84.
[58] Philos. Trans., vol. 179, p. 3.
[59] Trans. of Congress of Am. Phys. and Surg. 1888, vol. i, p. 343.Beevor and Horsley's paper on electric stimulation of the monkey's brainis the most beautiful work yet done for precision. See Phil. Trans., vol.179, p. 205, especially the plates.
[60] Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 37, p. 523 (1885).
[61] By Luys in his generally preposterous book 'The Brain'; also byHorsley.
[62] C. Mercier: The Nervous System and the Mind, p. 124.
[63] The frontal lobes as yet remain a puzzle. Wundt tries to explainthem as an organ of 'apperception' (Grundzüge d. PhysiologischenPsychologie, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 233 ff.), but I confess myself unable to apprehendclearly the Wundtian philosophy so far as this word enters into it, somust be contented with this bare reference.—Until quite recently it wascommon to talk of an 'ideational centre' as of something distinct from theaggregate of other centres. Fortunately this custom is already on thewane.
[64] Rech. Exp. sur le Fonctionnement des Centres Psycho-moteurs (Brussels,1885).
[65] Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 44, p. 544.
[66] I ought to add, however, that François-Franck (Fonctions Motrices,p. 370) got, in two dogs and a cat, a different result from this sort of 'circumvallation.'
[67] For this word, see T. K. Clifford's Lectures and Essays (1879), vol. ii,p. 72.
[68] See below,Chapter VIII.
[69] Cf. Ferrier's Functions, pp. 120, 147, 414. See also Vulpian: Leçonssur la Physiol. du Syst. Nerveux, p. 548; Luciani u. Seppili,op. cit. pp.404-5; H. Maudsley: Physiology of Mind (1876), pp. 138 ff., 197 ff., and241 ff. In G. H. Lewes's Physical Basis of Mind, Problem IV: 'The ReflexTheory,' a very full history of the question is given.
[70] Goltz: Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 8, p. 460; Freusberg:ibid. vol. 10, p. 174.
[71] Goltz: Verrichtungen des Grosshirns, p. 78.
[72] Loeb: Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 89, p. 276.
[73]Ibid. p. 289.
[74] Schrader:ibid. vol. 44, p. 218.
[75] The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), chaps. iii, vi; also inBrain, vol. xi, p. 361.
[76] Brown-Séquard has given a resume of his opinions in the Archivesde Physiologie for Oct. 1889, 5me. Série, vol. i, p 751.
[77] Goltz first applied the inhibition theory to the brain in his 'Verrichtungendes Grosshirns,' p. 39 ff. On the general philosophy of Inhibitionthe reader may consult Brunton's 'Pharmakology and Therapeutics,'p. 154 ff., and also 'Nature,' vol. 27, p. 419 ff.
[78] E.g. Herzen, Herman u. Schwalbe's Jahres-bericht for 1886, Physiol.Abth. p. 38. (Experiments on new-born puppies.)
[79] François-Franck:op. cit. p. 382. Results are somewhat contradictory.
[80] Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 42, p. 419.
[81] Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, p. 372.
[82]Op. cit. p. 387. See pp. 378 to 388 for a discussion of the wholequestion. Compare also Wundt's Physiol. Psych., 3d ed., i, 225 ff., andLuciani u. Seppili, pp. 243, 293.
[83] The Chapters on Habit, Association, Memory, and Perception willchange our present preliminary conjecture that that is one of its essentialuses, into an unshakable conviction.
[84] Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 41, p. 75 (1887).
[85]Ibid. vol. 44, p. 175 (1889).
[86] Untersuchungen über die Physiologie des Froschhirns. 1885.
[87]Loc. cit. pp. 80, 82-3. Schrader also found abiting-reflex developedwhen the medulla oblongata is cut through just behind the cerebellum.
[88] Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte for 1886.
[89] Comptes Rendus, vol. 102, p. 90.
[90] Comptes Rendus de l'Acad. d. Sciences, vol. 102, p. 1530.
[91]Loc. cit. p. 210.
[92] Goltz: Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 42, p. 447; Schrader:ibid. vol. 44, p.219 ff. It is possible that this symptom may be an effect of traumaticinhibition, however.
[93] A few years ago one of the strongest arguments for the theory thatthe hemispheres are purely supernumerary was Soltmann's often-quotedobservation that in new-born puppies the motor zone of the cortex is notexcitable by electricity and only becomes so in the course of a fortnight,presumably after the experiences of the lower centres have educated it tomotor duties. Paneth's later observations, however, seem to show thatSoltmann may have been misled through overnarcotizing his victims(Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 37, p. 202). In the Neurologisches Centralblattfor 1889, p. 513, Bechterew returns to the subject on Soltmann's side without,however, noticing Paneth's work.
[94] Münsterberg (Die Willenshandlung, 1888, p. 134) challenges Meynert'sschemein toto, saying that whilst we have in our personal experienceplenty of examples of acts which were at first voluntary becoming secondarilyautomatic and reflex, we have no conscious record of a single originallyreflex act growing voluntary.—As far as conscious record is concerned,we could not possibly have it even if the Meynert scheme were wholly true,for the education of the hemispheres which that scheme postulates mustin the nature of things antedate recollection. But it seems to me thatMünsterberg's rejection of the scheme may possibly be correct as regardsreflexes from thelower centres. Everywhere in this department of psychogenesiswe are made to feel how ignorant we really are.
[95] Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 44, p. 230-1.
[96] Naturally, as Schiff long ago pointed out (Lehrb. d. Muskel-u. Nervenphysiologie,1859, p. 213 ff.), the 'Rückenmarksseele,' if it now exist,can have no higher sense-consciousness, for its incoming currents aresolely from the skin. But it may, in its dim way, both feel, prefer, anddesire. See, for the view favorable to the text: G. H. Lewes, The Physiologyof Common Life (1860), chap. ix. Goltz (Nervencentren des Frosches1869, pp. 102-130) thinks that the frog's cord has no adaptative power. Thismay be the case in such experiments as his, because the beheaded frog'sshort span of life does not give it time to learn the new tricks asked for.But Rosenthal (Biologisches Centralblatt, vol. iv, p. 247) and Mendelssohn(Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte, 1885, p. 107) in their investigations on thesimple reflexes of the frog's cord, show that there is some adaptation to newconditions, inasmuch as when usual paths of conduction are interrupted bya cut, new paths are taken. According to Rosenthal, these grow morepervious (i.e. require a smaller stimulus) in proportion as they are moreoften traversed.
[97] Whether this evolution takes place through the inheritance of habitsacquired, or through the preservation of lucky variations, is an alternativewhich we need not discuss here. We shall consider it in the last chapterin the book. For our present purpose themodus operandi of the evolutionmakes no difference, provided it be admitted to occur.
[98] See Schrader's Observations,loc. cit.
The elementary properties of nerve-tissue on whichthe brain-functions depend are far from being satisfactorilymade out. The scheme that suggests itself in the firstinstance to the mind, because it is so obvious, is certainlyfalse: I mean the notion that each cell stands for an ideaor part of an idea, and that the ideas are associated or'bound into bundles' (to use a phrase of Locke's) by thefibres. If we make a symbolic diagram on a blackboard,of the laws of association between ideas, we are inevitablyled to draw circles, or closed figures of some kind, and toconnect them by lines. When we hear that the nerve-centrescontain cells which send off fibres, we say that Naturehas realized our diagram for us, and that the mechanicalsubstratum of thought is plain. Insome way, it is true, ourdiagram must be realized in the brain; but surely in nosuch visible and palpable way as we at first suppose.[99] Anenormous number of the cellular bodies in the hemispheresare fibreless. Where fibres are sent off they soon divide intountraceable ramifications; and nowhere do we see a simplecoarse anatomical connection, like a line on the blackboard,between two cells. Too much anatomy has beenfound to order for theoretic purposes, even by the anatomists;and the popular-science notions of cells and fibresare almost wholly wide of the truth. Let us therefore relegatethe subject of theintimate workings of the brain to[Pg 82]the physiology of the future, save in respect to a few pointsof which a word must now be said. And first of
in the same nerve-tract. This is a property extremely importantfor the understanding of a great many phenomenaof the neural, and consequently of the mental, life; and itbehooves us to gain a clear conception of what it means beforewe proceed any farther.
The law is this, thata stimulus which would be inadequate byitself to excite a nerve-centre to effective discharge may, by actingwith one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by themselvesalone) bring the discharge about. The natural way to considerthis is as a summation of tensions which at last overcomea resistance. The first of them produce a 'latentexcitement' or a 'heightened irritability'—the phrase isimmaterial so far as practical consequences go; the last isthe straw which breaks the camel's back. Where theneural process is one that has consciousness for its accompaniment,the final explosion would in all cases seem toinvolve a vivid state of feeling of a more or less substantivekind. But there is no ground for supposing that the tensionswhilst yet submaximal or outwardly ineffective, maynot also have a share in determining the total consciousnesspresent in the individual at the time. In laterchapters we shall see abundant reason to suppose that theydo have such a share, and that without their contributionthe fringe of relations which is at every moment a vital ingredientof the mind's object, would not come to consciousnessat all.
The subject belongs too much to physiology for theevidence to be cited in detail in these pages. I will throwinto a note a few references for such readers as may be interestedin following it out,[100] and simply say that the direct[Pg 83]electrical irritation of the cortical centres sufficiently provesthe point. For it was found by the earliest experimentershere that whereas it takes an exceedingly strong currentto produce any movement when a single induction-shockis used, a rapid succession of induction-shocks ('faradization')will produce movements when the current is comparativelyweak. A single quotation from an excellentinvestigation will exhibit this law under further aspects:
"If we continue to stimulate the cortex at short intervals with thestrength of current which produces the minimal muscular contraction[of the dog's digital extensor muscle], the amount of contractiongradually increases till it reaches the maximum. Each earlier stimulationleaves thus an effect behind it, which increases the efficacy of thefollowing one. In this summation of the stimuli.... the followingpoints may be noted: 1) Single stimuli entirely inefficacious whenalone may become efficacious by sufficiently rapid reiteration. If thecurrent used is very much less than that which provokes the first beginningof contraction, a very large number of successive shocks may beneeded before the movement appears—20, 50, once 106 shocks wereneeded. 2) The summation takes place easily in proportion to theshortness of the interval between the stimuli. A current too weak togive effective summation when its shocks are 3 seconds apart will becapable of so doing when the interval is shortened to 1 second. 3)Not only electrical irritation leaves a modification which goes to swellthe following stimulus, but every sort of irritant which can produce acontraction does so. If in any way a reflex contraction of the muscleexperimented on has been produced, or if it is contracted spontaneouslyby the animal (as not unfrequently happens 'by sympathy,' during adeep inspiration), it is found that an electrical stimulus, until theninoperative, operates energetically if immediately applied."[101]
Furthermore:
"In a certain stage of the morphia-narcosis an ineffectively weakshock will become powerfully effective, if, immediately before its application[Pg 84]to the motor centre, the skin of certain parts of the body isexposed to gentle tactile stimulation.... If, having ascertained thesubminimal strength of current and convinced one's self repeatedly of itsinefficacy, we draw our hand a single time lightly over the skin of thepaw whose cortical centre is the object of stimulation, we find the currentat once strongly effective. The increase of irritability lasts someseconds before it disappears. Sometimes the effect of a single lightstroking of the paw is only sufficient to make the previously ineffectualcurrent produce a very weak contraction. Repeating the tactile stimulationwill then, as a rule, increase the contraction's extent."[102]
We constantly use the summation of stimuli in ourpractical appeals. If a car-horse balks, the final way ofstarting him is by applying a number of customary incitementsat once. If the driver uses reins and voice, if onebystander pulls at his head, another lashes his hindquarters, and the conductor rings the bell, and the dismountedpassengers shove the car, all at the same moment,his obstinacy generally yields, and he goes on his way rejoicing.If we are striving to remember a lost name or fact,we think of as many 'cues' as possible, so that by theirjoint action they may recall what no one of them can recallalone. The sight of a dead prey will often not stimulate abeast to pursuit, but if the sight of movement be added tothat of form, pursuit occurs. "Brücke noted that his brainlesshen, which made no attempt to peck at the grain underher very eyes, began pecking if the grain were thrown onthe ground with force, so as to produce a rattling sound."[103]"Dr. Allen Thomson hatched out some chickens on a carpet,where he kept them for several days. They showed no inclinationto scrape,... but when Dr. Thomson sprinkleda little gravel on the carpet,... the chickens immediatelybegan their scraping movements."[104] A strange person, anddarkness, are both of them stimuli to fear and mistrust indogs (and for the matter of that, in men). Neither circumstance[Pg 85]alone may awaken outward manifestations, but together,i.e. when the strange man is met in the dark, the dogwill be excited to violent defiance.[105] Street-hawkers wellknow the efficacy of summation, for they arrange themselvesin a line upon the sidewalk, and the passer often buys fromthe last one of them, through the effect of the reiterated solicitation,what he refused to buy from the first in the row.Aphasia shows many examples of summation. A patientwho cannot name an object simply shown him, will name itif he touches as well as sees it, etc.
Instances of summation might be multiplied indefinitely,but it is hardly worth while to forestall subsequent chapters.Those on Instinct, the Stream of Thought, Attention, Discrimination,Association, Memory, Æsthetics, and Will, willcontain numerous exemplifications of the reach of the principlein the purely psychological field.
One of the lines of experimental investigation mostdiligently followed of late years is that of the ascertainmentof thetime occupied by nervous events. Helmholtz ledoff by discovering the rapidity of the current in the sciaticnerve of the frog. But the methods he used were soonapplied to the sensory nerves and the centres, and theresults caused much popular scientific admiration whendescribed as measurements of the 'velocity of thought.'The phrase 'quick as thought' had from time immemorialsignified all that was wonderful and elusive of determinationin the line of speed; and the way in which Sciencelaid her doomful hand upon this mystery reminded peopleof the day when Franklin first 'eripuit cœlo fulmen,' foreshadowing[Pg 86]the reign of a newer and colder race of gods.We shall take up the various operations measured, each inthe chapter to which it more naturally pertains. I maysay, however, immediately, that the phrase 'velocity ofthought' is misleading, for it is by no means clear in anyof the cases what particular act of thought occurs duringthe time which is measured. 'Velocity of nerve-action' isliable to the same criticism, for in most cases we do not knowwhat particular nerve-processes occur. What the timesin question really represent is the total duration of certainreactions upon stimuli. Certain of the conditions of the reactionare prepared beforehand; they consist in the assumptionof those motor and sensory tensions which we namethe expectant state. Just what happens during the actualtime occupied by the reaction (in other words, just whatis added to the pre-existent tensions to produce the actualdischarge) is not made out at present, either from theneural or from the mental point of view.
The method is essentially the same in all these investigations.A signal of some sort is communicated to the subject,and at the same instant records itself on a time-registeringapparatus. The subject then makes a muscular movementof some sort, which is the 'reaction,' and which alsorecords itself automatically. The time found to have elapsedbetween the two records is the total time of that observation.The time-registering instruments are of various types.One type is that of the revolving drum covered with smokedpaper, on which one electric pen traces a line which thesignal breaks and the 'reaction' draws again; whilst anotherelectric pen (connected with a pendulum or a rod of metalvibrating at a known rate) traces alongside of the former[Pg 87]line a 'time-line' of which each undulation or link standsfor a certain fraction of a second, and against which thebreak in the reaction-line can be measured. CompareFig. 21, where the line is broken by the signal at the firstarrow, and continued again by the reaction at the second.Ludwig's Kymograph, Marey's Chronograph are good examplesof this type of instrument.
Another type of instrument is represented by the stopwatch,of which the most perfect form is Hipp's Chronoscope.The hand on the dial measures intervals as shortas 1/1000 of a second. The signal (by an appropriate electricconnection) starts it; the reaction stops it; and by readingoff its initial and terminal positions we have immediatelyand with no farther trouble the time we seek. A stillsimpler instrument, though one not very satisfactory in itsworking, is the 'psychodometer' of Exner & Obersteiner,of which I picture a modification devised by my colleagueProfessor H. P. Bowditch, which works very well.
The manner in which the signal and reaction are connectedwith the chronographic apparatus varies indefinitely[Pg 88]in different experiments. Every new problem requiressome new electric or mechanical disposition of apparatus.[106]
The least complicated time-measurement is that knownassimple reaction-time, in which there is but one possiblesignal and one possible movement, and both are known inadvance. The movement is generally the closing of an electrickey with the hand. The foot, the jaw, the lips, eventhe eyelid, have been in turn made organs of reaction, andthe apparatus has been modified accordingly.[107] The timeusually elapsing between stimulus and movement lies betweenone and three tenths of a second, varying accordingto circumstances which will be mentioned anon.
The subject of experiment, whenever the reactions areshort and regular, is in a state of extreme tension, and feels,when the signal comes, as ifit started the reaction, by asort of fatality, and as if no psychic process of perceptionor volition had a chance to intervene. The whole successionis so rapid that perception seems to be retrospective, andthe time-order of events to be read off in memory ratherthan known at the moment. This at least is my own personalexperience in the matter, and with it I find others toagree. The question is, What happens inside of us, eitherin brain or mind? and to answer that we must analyze justwhat processes the reaction involves. It is evident thatsome time is lost in each of the following stages:
1. The stimulus excites the peripheral sense-organadequately for a current to pass into the sensory nerve;
2. The sensory nerve is traversed;
3. The transformation (or reflection) of the sensory intoa motor current occurs in the centres;
4. The spinal cord and motor nerve are traversed;
5. The motor current excites the muscle to the contractingpoint.
Time is also lost, of course, outside the muscle, in thejoints, skin, etc., and between the parts of the apparatus;and when the stimulus which serves as signal is applied tothe skin of the trunk or limbs, time is lost in the sensorialconduction through the spinal cord.
The stage marked 3 is the only one that interests ushere. The other stages answer to purely physiologicalprocesses, but stage 3 is psycho-physical; that is, it is ahigher-central process, and has probably some sort of consciousnessaccompanying it. What sort?
Wundt has little difficulty in deciding that it is consciousnessof a quite elaborate kind. He distinguishesbetween two stages in the conscious reception of an impression,calling oneperception, and the otherapperception,and likening the one to the mere entrance of an object intothe periphery of the field of vision, and the other to itscoming to occupy the focus or point of view.Inattentiveawareness of an object, andattention to it, are, it seems tome, equivalents for perception and apperception, as Wundtuses the words. To these two forms of awareness of theimpression Wundt adds the conscious volition to react,gives to the trio the name of 'psycho-physical' processes,and assumes that they actually follow upon each other inthe succession in which they have been named.[108] So atleast I understand him. The simplest way to determinethe time taken up by this psycho-physical stage No. 3would be to determine separately the duration of the severalpurely physical processes, 1, 2, 4, and 5, and to subtractthem from the total reaction-time. Such attemptshave been made.[109] But the data for calculation are too[Pg 90]inaccurate for use, and, as Wundt himself admits,[110] the preciseduration of stage 3 must at present be left envelopedwith that of the other processes, in the total reaction-time.
My own belief is that no such succession of consciousfeelings as Wundt describes takes place during stage 3.It is a process of central excitement and discharge, withwhich doubtless some feeling coexists, butwhat feeling wecannot tell, because it is so fugitive and so immediatelyeclipsed by the more substantive and enduring memory ofthe impression as it came in, and of the executed movementof response. Feeling of the impression, attention toit, thought of the reaction, volition to react,would, undoubtedly,all be links of the processunder other conditions,[111] andwould lead to the same reaction—after an indefinitely longertime. But these other conditions are not those of theexperiments we are discussing; and it is mythological psychology(of which we shall see many later examples) to concludethat because two mental processes lead to the sameresult they must be similar in their inward subjective constitution.The feeling of stage 3 is certainly no articulateperception. It can be nothing but the mere sense of areflex discharge.The reaction whose time is measured is,in short,a reflex action pure and simple, and not a psychicact. A foregoing psychic condition is, it is true, a prerequisitefor this reflex action. The preparation of theattention and volition; the expectation of the signal andthe readiness of the hand to move, the instant it shall come;the nervous tension in which the subject waits, are all conditionsof the formation in him for the time being of a newpath or arc of reflex discharge. The tract from the sense-organwhich receives the stimulus, into the motor centrewhich discharges the reaction, is already tingling with premonitoryinnervation, is raised to such a pitch of heightenedirritability by the expectant attention, that the signal isinstantaneously sufficient to cause the overflow.[112] No other[Pg 91]tract of the nervous system is, at the moment, in this hair-triggercondition. The consequence is that one sometimesresponds to awrong signal, especially if it be an impressionof the samekind with the signal we expect.[113] But if bychance we are tired, or the signal is unexpectedly weak,and we do not react instantly, but only after an expressperception that the signal has come, and an express volition,the time becomes quite disproportionately long (asecond or more, according to Exner[114]), and we feel that theprocess is in nature altogether different.
In fact, the reaction-time experiments are a case towhich we can immediately apply what we have just learnedabout the summation of stimuli. 'Expectant attention' isbut the subjective name for what objectively is a partialstimulation of a certain pathway, the pathway from the'centre' for the signal to that for the discharge. InChapterXI we shall see that all attention involves excitement fromwithin of the tract concerned in feeling the objects to whichattention is given. The tract here is the excito-motor arcabout to be traversed. The signal is but the spark fromwithout which touches off a train already laid. The performance,under these conditions, exactly resembles anyreflex action. The only difference is that whilst, in theordinarily so-called reflex acts, the reflex arc is a permanentresult of organic growth, it is here a transient result ofprevious cerebral conditions.[Pg 92][115]
I am happy to say that since the preceding paragraphs(and the notes thereto appertaining) were written, Wundthas himself become converted to the view which I defend.He now admits that in the shortest reactions "there isneither apperception nor will, but that they are merelybrain-reflexes due to practice."[116] The means of his conversionare certain experiments performed in his laboratoryby Herr L. Lange,[117] who was led to distinguish betweentwo ways of setting the attention in reacting on a signal,and who found that they gave very different time-results.In the 'extreme sensorial' way, as Lange calls it, of reacting,[Pg 93]one keeps one's mind as intent as possible upon the expectedsignal, and 'purposely avoids'[118] thinking of the movementto be executed; in the 'extreme muscular' way one'does not think at all'[119] of the signal, but stands as ready aspossible for the movement. The muscular reactions aremuch shorter than the sensorial ones, the average differencebeing in the neighborhood of a tenth of a second.Wundt accordingly calls them 'shortened reactions' and,with Lange, admits them to be mere reflexes; whilst thesensorial reactions he calls 'complete,' and holds to hisoriginal conception as far as they are concerned. Thefacts, however, do not seem to me to warrant even thisamount of fidelity to the original Wundtian position.When we begin to react in the 'extreme sensorial' way,Lange says that we get times so very long that they mustbe rejected from the count as non-typical. "Only afterthe reacter has succeeded by repeated and conscientiouspractice in bringing about an extremely precise co-ordinationof his voluntary impulse with his sense-impressiondo we get times which can be regarded as typical sensorialreaction-times."[120] Now it seems to me that these excessiveand 'untypical' times are probably the real 'complete times,'the only ones in which distinct processes of actual perceptionand volition occur (see above,pp. 88-9). The typicalsensorial time which is attained by practice is probablyanother sort of reflex, less perfect than the reflexes preparedby straining one's attention towards the movement.[121]The times are much more variable in the sensorial waythan in the muscular. The several muscular reactionsdiffer little from each other. Only in them does the phenomenonoccur of reacting on a false signal, or of reactingbefore the signal. Times intermediate between these twotypes occur according as the attention fails to turn itselfexclusively to one of the extremes. It is obvious that HerrLange's distinction between the two types of reaction is ahighly important one, and that the 'extreme muscular[Pg 94]method,' giving both the shortest times and the most constantones, ought to be aimed at in all comparative investigations.Herr Lange's own muscular time averaged0''.123; his sensorial time, 0''.230.
These reaction-time experiments are then in no sensemeasurements of the swiftness ofthought. Only when wecomplicate them is there a chance for anything like anintellectual operation to occur. They may be complicatedin various ways. The reaction may be withheld until thesignal has consciously awakened a distinct idea (Wundt'sdiscrimination-time, association-time) and then performed.Or there may be a variety of possible signals, each witha different reaction assigned to it, and the reacter maybe uncertain which one he is about to receive. Thereaction would then hardly seem to occur without a preliminaryrecognition and choice. We shall see, however,in the appropriate chapters, that the discrimination andchoice involved in such a reaction are widely different fromthe intellectual operations of which we are ordinarily consciousunder those names. Meanwhile the simple reaction-timeremains as the starting point of all these superinducedcomplications. It is the fundamental physiological constantin all time-measurements. As such, its own variationshave an interest, and must be briefly passed in review.[122]
The reaction-time varies with theindividual and hisage.An individual may have it particularly long in respect ofsignals of one sense (Buccola, p. 147), but not of others.Old and uncultivated people have it long (nearly a second,in an old pauper observed by Exner, Pflüger's Archiv, vii,612-4). Children have it long (half a second, Herzen inBuccola, p. 152).
Practice shortens it to a quantity which is for each individuala minimum beyond which no farther reduction canbe made. The aforesaid old pauper's time was, aftermuch practice, reduced to 0.1866 sec. (loc. cit. p. 626).
Fatigue lengthens it.
Concentration of attention shortens it. Details will begiven in the chapter on Attention.
Thenature of the signal makes it vary.[123] Wundt writes:
"I found that the reaction-time for impressions on the skin withelectric stimulus is less than for true touch-sensations, as the followingaverages show:
Average. Average Variation Sound 0.167 sec. 0.0221 sec. Light 0.222 sec. 0.0219 sec. Electric skin-sensation 0.201 sec. 0.0115 sec. Touch-sensations 0.213 sec. 0.0134 sec. "I here bring together the averages which have been obtained bysome other observers:
Hirsch. Hankel. Exner. Sound 0.149 0.1505 0.1360 Light 0.200 0.2246 0.1506 Skin-sensation 0.182 0.1546 0.1337"[124]
Thermic reactions have been lately measured by A.Goldscheider and by Vintschgau (1887), who find themslower than reactions from touch. That from heat especiallyis very slow, more so than from cold, the differences(according to Goldscheider) depending on the nerve-terminationsin the skin.
Gustatory reactions were measured by Vintschgau. Theydiffered according to the substances used, running up tohalf a second as a maximum when identification took place.The mere perception of the presence of the substance onthe tongue varied from 0''.159 to 0''.219 (Pflüger's Archiv,xiv, 529).
Olfactory reactions have been studied by Vintschgau,[Pg 96]Buccola, and Beaunis. They are slow, averaging abouthalf a second (cf. Beaunis, Recherches exp. sur l'ActivitéCérébrale, 1884, p. 49 ff.).
It will be observed thatsound is more promptly reactedon than eithersight ortouch. Taste andsmell are slowerthan either. One individual, who reacted to touch uponthe tip of the tongue in 0''.125, took 0''.993 to react uponthe taste of quinine applied to the same spot. In another,upon the base of the tongue, the reaction to touch being0''.141, that to sugar was 0''.552 (Vintschgau, quoted byBuccola, p. 103). Buccola found the reaction to odors tovary from 0''.334 to 0''.681, according to the perfume usedand the individual.
Theintensity of the signal makes a difference. The intenserthe stimulus the shorter the time. Herzen (Grundlinieneiner allgem. Psychophysiologie, p. 101) comparedthe reaction from acorn on the toe with that from the skinof the hand of the same subject. The two places werestimulated simultaneously, and the subject tried to reactsimultaneously with both hand and foot, but the foot alwayswent quickest. When the sound skin of the foot wastouched instead of the corn, it was the hand which alwaysreacted first. Wundt tries to show that when the signal ismade barely perceptible, the time is probably the same inall the senses, namely, about 0.332'' (Physiol. Psych., 2ded., ii, 224).
Where the signal is of touch, the place to which it isapplied makes a difference in the resultant reaction-time.G. S. Hall and V. Kries found (Archiv f. Anat. u. Physiol.,1879) that when the finger-tip was the place the reactionwas shorter than when the middle of the upper arm wasused, in spite of the greater length of nerve-trunk to betraversed in the latter case. This discovery invalidates themeasurements of the rapidity of transmission of the currentin human nerves, for they are all based on the method ofcomparing reaction-times from places near the root andnear the extremity of a limb. The same observers foundthat signals seen by the periphery of the retina gave longertimes than the same signals seen by direct vision.
Theseason makes a difference, the time being some hundredths[Pg 97]of a second shorter on cold winter days (Vintschgauapud Exner, Hermann's Hdbh., p. 270).
Intoxicants alter the time.Coffee andtea appear toshorten it. Small doses ofwine andalcohol first shorten andthen lengthen it; but the shortening stage tends to disappearif a large dose be given immediately. This, at least,is the report of two German observers. Dr. J. W. Warren,whose observations are more thorough than any previousones, could find no very decided effects from ordinary doses(Journal of Physiology, viii, 311).Morphia lengthens thetime.Amyl-nitrite lengthens it, but after the inhalation itmay fall to less than the normal. Ether and chloroformlengthen it (for authorities, etc., see Buccola, p. 189).
Certaindiseased states naturally lengthen the time.
Thehypnotic trance has no constant effect, sometimesshortening and sometimes lengthening it (Hall, Mind, viii,170; James, Proc. Am. Soc. for Psych. Research, 246).
The time taken toinhibit a movement (e.g. to cease contractionof jaw-muscles) seems to be about the same as toproduce one (Gad, Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1887, 468;Orchansky,ibid.1889, 1885).
An immense amount of work has been done on reaction-time,of which I have cited but a small part. It is a sortof work which appeals particularly to patient and exactminds, and they have not failed to profit by the opportunity.
The next point to occupy our attention is thechanges ofcirculation which accompany cerebral activity.
All parts of the cortex, when electrically excited, producealterations both of respiration and circulation. The blood-pressurerises, as a rule, all over the body, no matter wherethe cortical irritation is applied, though the motor zone isthe most sensitive region for the purpose. Elsewhere thecurrent must be strong enough for an epileptic attack to beproduced.[125] Slowing and quickening of the heart are alsoobserved, and are independent of the vaso-constrictivephenomenon. Mosso, using his ingenious 'plethysmograph'[Pg 98]as an indicator, discovered that the blood-supply tothe arms diminished during intellectual activity, and foundfurthermore that the arterial tension (as shown by thesphygmograph) was increased in these members (seeFig. 23). So slight an emotion as that produced by theentrance of Professor Ludwig into the laboratory was instantlyfollowed by a shrinkage of the arms.[126] The brainitself is an excessively vascular organ, a sponge full ofblood, in fact; and another of Mosso's inventions showedthat when less blood went to the arms, more went to thehead. The subject to be observed lay on a delicately balancedtable which could tip downward either at the heador at the foot if the weight of either end were increased.The moment emotional or intellectual activity began in thesubject, down went the balance at the head-end, in consequenceof the redistribution of blood in his system. Butthe best proof of the immediate afflux of blood to the brainduring mental activity is due to Mosso's observations onthree persons whose brain had been laid bare by lesion ofthe skull. By means of apparatus described in his book,[127]this physiologist was enabled to let the brain-pulse recorditself directly by a tracing. The intra-cranial blood-pressurerose immediately whenever the subject was spoken to, orwhen he began to think actively, as in solving a problem inmental arithmetic. Mosso gives in his work a large numberof reproductions of tracings which show the instantaneityof the change of blood-supply, whenever the mentalactivity was quickened by any cause whatever, intellectual[Pg 99]or emotional. He relates of his female subject that oneday whilst tracing her brain-pulse he observed a suddenrise with no apparent outer or inner cause. She howeverconfessed to him afterwards that at that moment she hadcaught sight of askull on top of a piece of furniture in theroom, and that this had given her a slight emotion.
The fluctuations of the blood supply to the brain wereindependent of respiratory changes,[128] and followed thequickening of mental activity almost immediately. Wemust suppose a very delicate adjustment whereby the circulationfollows the needs of the cerebral activity. Bloodvery likely may rush to each region of the cortex accordingas it is most active, but of this we know nothing. I needhardly say that the activity of the nervous matter is theprimary phenomenon, and the afflux of blood its secondaryconsequence. Many popular writers talk as if it werethe other way about, and as if mental activity were due tothe afflux of blood. But, as Professor H. N. Martin haswell said, "that belief has no physiological foundationwhatever; it is even directly opposed to all that we know ofcell life."[129] A chronic pathological congestion may, it is true,have secondary consequences, but the primary congestionswhich we have been consideringfollow the activity of thebrain-cells by an adaptive reflex vaso-motor mechanismdoubtless as elaborate as that which harmonizes blood-supplywith cell-action in any muscle or gland.
Of the changes in the cerebral circulation during sleepI will speak in the chapter which treats of that subject.
Brain-activity seems accompanied by a local disengagementof heat. The earliest careful work in this direction was byDr. J. S. Lombard in 1867. Dr. Lombard's latest results includethe records of over 60,000 observations.[130] He noted the[Pg 100]changes in delicate thermometers and electric piles placedagainst the scalp in human beings, and found that any intellectualeffort, such as computing, composing, reciting poetrysilently or aloud, and especially that emotional excitementsuch as an anger fit, caused a general rise of temperature,which rarely exceeded a degree Fahrenheit. The rise wasin most cases more marked in the middle region of the headthan elsewhere. Strange to say, it was greater in recitingpoetry silently than in reciting it aloud. Dr. Lombard'sexplanation is that "in internal recitation an additionalportion of energy, which in recitation aloud was convertedinto nervous and muscular force, now appears asheat."[131] I should suggest rather, if we must have a theory,that the surplus of heat in recitation to one's self is due toinhibitory processes which are absent when we recite aloud.In the chapter on the Will we shall see that thesimple centralprocess is tospeak when we think; to think silentlyinvolves a check in addition. In 1870 the indefatigableSchiff took up the subject, experimenting on live dogs andchickens, plunging thermo-electric needles into the substanceof their brain, to eliminate possible errors fromvascular changes in the skin when the thermometers wereplaced upon the scalp. After habituation was established,he tested the animals with various sensations, tactile, optic,olfactory, and auditory. He found very regularly an immediatedeflection of the galvanometer, indicating an abruptalteration of the intra-cerebral temperature. When, for instance,he presented an empty roll of paper to the nose ofhis dog as it lay motionless, there was a small deflection,but when a piece of meat was in the paper the deflectionwas much greater. Schiff concluded from these and otherexperiments that sensorial activity heats the brain-tissue,but he did not try to localize the increment of heat beyondfinding that it was in both hemispheres, whatever might bethe sensation applied.[132] Dr. R. W. Amidon in 1880 madea farther step forward, in localizing the heat produced byvoluntary muscular contractions. Applying a number of[Pg 101]delicate surface-thermometers simultaneously against thescalp, he found that when different muscles of the bodywere made to contract vigorously for ten minutes or more,different regions of the scalp rose in temperature, that theregions were well focalized, and that the rise of temperaturewas often considerably over a Fahrenheit degree. As a resultof his investigations he gives a diagram in which numberedregions represent the centres of highest temperaturefor the various special movements which were investigated.To a large extent they correspond to the centres for thesame movements assigned by Ferrier and others on othergrounds; only they cover more of the skull.[133]
Chemical action must of course accompany brain-activity.But little definite is known of its exact nature. Cholesterinand creatin are both excrementitious products, and areboth found in the brain. The subject belongs to chemistryrather than to psychology, and I only mention it here forthe sake of saying a word about a wide-spread popularerror about brain-activity and phosphorus. 'OhnePhosphor, kein Gedanke,' was a noted war-cry of the'materialists' during the excitement on that subject whichfilled Germany in the '60s. The brain, like every otherorgan of the body, contains phosphorus, and a score ofother chemicals besides. Why the phosphorus should bepicked out as its essence, no one knows. It would beequally true to say 'Ohne Wasser kein Gedanke,' or 'OhneKochsalz kein Gedanke'; for thought would stop as quicklyif the brain should dry up or lose its NaCl as if it lost itsphosphorus. In America the phosphorus-delusion hastwined itself round a saying quoted (rightly or wrongly)from Professor L. Agassiz, to the effect that fishermen aremore intelligent than farmers because they eat so much fish,which contains so much phosphorus. All the facts may bedoubted.
The only straight way to ascertain the importance of[Pg 102]phosphorus to thought would be to find whether more isexcreted by the brain during mental activity than duringrest. Unfortunately we cannot do this directly, but canonly gauge the amount of PO5 in the urine, which representsother organs as well as the brain, and this procedure,as Dr. Edes says, is like measuring the rise of water at themouth of the Mississippi to tell where there has been athunder-storm in Minnesota.[134] It has been adopted, however,by a variety of observers, some of whom found thephosphates in the urine diminished, whilst others foundthem increased, by intellectual work. On the whole, it isimpossible to trace any constant relation. In maniacalexcitement less phosphorus than usual seems to be excreted.More is excreted during sleep. There are differences betweenthe alkaline and earthy phosphates into which I willnot enter, as my only aim is to show that the popular wayof looking at the matter has no exact foundation.[135] Thefact that phosphorus-preparations may do good in nervousexhaustion proves nothing as to the part played by phosphorusin mental activity. Like iron, arsenic, and otherremedies it is a stimulant or tonic, of whose intimate workingsin the system we know absolutely nothing, and whichmoreover does good in an extremely small number of thecases in which it is prescribed.
The phosphorus-philosophers have often comparedthought to a secretion. "The brain secretes thought, as thekidneys secrete urine, or as the liver secretes bile," arephrases which one sometimes hears. The lame analogyneed hardly be pointed out. The materials which the brainpours into the blood (cholesterin, creatin, xanthin, or whateverthey may be) are the analogues of the urine and thebile, being in fact real material excreta. As far as thesematters go, the brain is a ductless gland. But we know ofnothing connected with liver-and kidney-activity which can[Pg 103]be in the remotest degree compared with the stream ofthought that accompanies the brain's material secretions.
There remains another feature of general brain-physiology,and indeed for psychological purposes the mostimportant feature of all. I refer to the aptitude of the brainfor acquiringhabits. But I will treat of that in a chapterby itself.
[99] I shall myself in later places indulge in much of this schematization.The reader will understand once for all that it is symbolic; and that theuse of it is hardly more than to show what a deep congruity there is betweenmental processes and mechanical processes ofsome kind, not necessarily ofthe exact kind portrayed.
[100] Valentin: Archiv f. d. gesammt. Physiol., 1873, p. 458. Stirling:Leipzig Acad. Berichte, 1875, p. 372 (Journal of Physiol., 1875). J.Ward: Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1880, p. 72. H. Sewall: JohnsHopkins Studies, 1880, p. 30. Kronecker u. Nicolaides: Archiv f.(Anat. u.) Physiol., 1880, p. 437. Exner: Archiv f. die ges. Physiol., Bd.28, p. 487 (1882). Eckhard: in Hermann's Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. I, Thl.ii, p. 31. François-Franck: Leçons sur les Fonctions motrices du Cerveau,p. 51 ff., 339.—For the process of summation innerves andmuscles,cf. Hermann:ibid. Thl. i, p. 109, and vol. i, p. 40. Also Wundt:Physiol. Psych., i, 243 ff.; Richet: Travaux du Laboratoire de Marey, 1877,p. 97; L'Homme et l'Intelligence, pp. 24 ff., 468; Revue Philosophique,t. xxi, p. 564. Kronecker u. Hall: Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1879;Schönlein:ibid.1882, p. 357. Sertoli (Hofmann and Schwalbe's Jahres-bericht),1882, p. 25. De Watteville: Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1883,No. 7. Grünhagen: Arch. f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. 34, p. 301 (1884).
[101] Bubnoff und Heidenhain: Ueber Erregungs- und Hemmungsvorgängeinnerhalb der motorischen Hirncentren. Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd.26, p. 156 (1881).
[102] Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. 26, p. 176 (1881). Exner thinks (ibid.Bd. 28, p. 497 (1882)) that the summation here occurs in the spinal cord.It makes no difference where this particular summation occurs, so far asthe general philosophy of summation goes.
[103] G H. Lewes: Physical Basis of Mind, p. 479, where many similarexamples are given, 487-9.
[104] Romanes: Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 168.
[105] See a similar instance in Mach: Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen,p. 36, a sparrow being the animal. My young children are afraidof their own pug-dog, if he enters their room after they are in bed and thelights are out. Compare this statement also: "The first question to apeasant seldom proves more than a flapper to rouse the torpid adjustmentsof his ears. The invariable answer of a Scottish peasant is, 'What's yourwull?'—that of the English, a vacant stare. A second and even a thirdquestion may be required to elicit an answer." (R. Fowler; Some Observationson the Mental State of the Blind, and Deaf, and Dumb (Salisbury,1843), p. 14.)
[106] The reader will find a great deal about chronographic apparatus inJ. Marey: La Méthode Graphique, pt. ii, chap. ii. One can make prettyfair measurements with no other instrument than a watch, by making alarge number of reactions, each serving as a signal for the following one,and dividing the total time they take by their number. Dr. O. W. Holmesfirst suggested this method, which has been ingeniously elaborated andapplied by Professor Jastrow. See 'Science' for September 10, 1886.
[107] See, for a few modifications, Cattell, Mind, xi, 220 ff.
[108] Physiol. Psych., ii, 221-2. Cf. also the first edition, 728-9. I mustconfess to finding all Wundt's utterances about 'apperception' both vacillatingand obscure. I see no use whatever for the word, as he employs it,in Psychology. Attention, perception, conception, volition, are its ampleequivalents. Why we should need a single word to denote all these thingsby turns, Wundt fails to make clear. Consult, however, his pupil Staude'sarticle, 'Ueber den Begriff der Apperception,' etc., in Wundt's periodicalPhilosophische Studien, i, 149, which may be supposed official. For aminute criticism of Wundt's 'apperception,' see Marty: Vierteljahrschriftf. wiss. Philos., x, 346.
[109] By Exner, for example, Pflüger's Archiv, vii, 628 ff.
[110] P. 222. Cf. also Richet, Rev. Philos., vi, 395-6.
[111] For instance, if, on the previous day, one had resolved to act on asignal when it should come, and it now came whilst we were engaged inother things, and reminded us of the resolve.
[112] "I need hardly mention that success in these experiments depends ina high degree on our concentration of attention. If inattentive, one getsvery discrepant figures.... This concentration of the attention is in thehighest degree exhausting. After some experiments in which I was concernedto get results as uniform as possible, I was covered with perspirationand excessively fatigued although I had sat quietly in my chair all thewhile." (Exner,loc. cit. vii, 618.)
[113] Wundt, Physiol. Psych., ii, 226
[114] Pflüger's Archiv, vii, 616.
[115] In short, what M. Delbœuf calls an 'organe adventice.' The reaction-time,moreover, is quite compatible with the reaction itself being of a reflexorder. Some reflexes (sneezing, e.g.) are very slow. The only time-measurementof a reflex act in the human subject with which I amacquainted is Exner's measurement of winking (in Pflüger's Archiv f.d. gesammt. Physiol., Bd. viii, p. 526, 1874). He found that when thestimulus was a flash of light it took the wink 0.2168 sec. to occur. A strongelectric shock to the cornea shortened the time to 0.0578 sec. The ordinary'reaction-time' is midway between these values. Exner 'reduces' his timesby eliminating the physiological process of conduction. His 'reducedminimum winking-time' is then 0.0471 (ibid. 531), whilst his reduced reaction-timeis 0.0828 (ibid. vii, 637). These figures have really no scientificvalue beyond that of showing, according to Exner's own belief (vii, 531),that reaction-time and reflex-time measure processes of essentially the sameorder. His description, moreover, of the process is an excellent descriptionof a reflex act. "Every one," says he, "who makes reaction-time experimentsfor the first time is surprised to find how little he is master of his ownmovements, so soon as it becomes a question of executing them with amaximum of speed. Not only does their energy lie, as it were, outside thefield of choice, but even the time in which the movement occurs dependsonly partly upon ourselves. We jerk our arm, and we can afterwards tellwith astonishing precision whether we have jerked it quicker or slower thananother time, although we have no power to jerk it exactly at the wished-formoment."—Wundt himself admits that when we await a strong signal withtense preparation there is no consciousness of any duality of 'apperception'and motor response; the two are continuous (Physiol. Psych., ii,226).—Mr. Cattell's view is identical with the one I defend. "I think,"he says, "that if the processes of perception and willing are present at allthey are very rudimentary.... The subject, by a voluntary effort [beforethe signal comes], puts the lines of communication between the centre for"the stimulus "and the centre for the co-ordination of motions ... in a stateof unstable equilibrium. When, therefore, a nervous impulse reaches the"former centre, "it causes brain-changes in two directions; an impulse movesalong to the cortex and calls forth there a perception corresponding to thestimulus, while at the same time an impulse follows a line of small resistanceto the centre for the co-ordination of motions, and the proper nervousimpulse, already prepared and waiting for the signal, is sent from thecentre to the muscle of the hand. When the reaction has often beenmade the entire cerebral process becomes automatic, the impulse of itselftakes the well-travelled way to the motor centre, and releases the motorimpulse." (Mind, xi, 232-3.)—Finally, Prof. Lipps has, in his elaborateway (Grundtatsachen, 179-188), made mince-meat of the view that stage 3involves either conscious perception or conscious will.
[116] Physiol. Psych., 3d edition (1887), vol. ii, p. 266.
[117] Philosophische Studien, vol. iv, p. 479 (1888).
[118]Loc. cit. p. 488.
[119]Loc. cit. p. 487.
[120]Loc. cit. p. 489.
[121] Lange has an interesting hypothesis as to the brain-process concernedin the latter, for which I can only refer to his essay.
[122] The reader who wishes to know more about the matter will find amost faithful compilation of all that has been done, together with muchoriginal matter, in G. Buccola's 'Legge del Tempo,' etc. See also chapterxvi of Wundt's Physiol. Psychology; Exner in Hermann's Hdbch.,Bd. 2, Thl. ii, pp. 252-280; also Ribot's Contemp. Germ. Psych.chap. viii.
[123] The nature of the movement also seems to make it vary. Mr. B. I.Gilman and I reacted to the same signal by simply raising our hand, andagain by carrying our hand towards our back. The moment registered wasalways that at which the hand broke an electric contact instarting tomove. But it started one or two hundredths of a second later when themore extensive movement was the one to be made. Orchansky, on theother hand, experimenting on contractions of the masseter muscle, found(Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1889, p. 187) that the greater the amplitudeof contraction intended, the shorter grew the time of reaction. Heexplains this by the fact that a more ample contraction makes a greaterappeal to the attention, and that this shortens the times.
[124] Physiol. Psych., ii, 223.
[125] François-Franck, Fonctions Motrices, Leçon xxii.
[126] La Paura (1884), p. 117.
[127] Ueber den Kreislauf des Blutes im menschlichen Gehirn (1881),chap. ii. The Introduction gives the history of our previous knowledgeof the subject.
[128] In this conclusion M. Gley (Archives de Physiologie, 1881, p. 742)agrees with Professor Mosso. Gley found his pulse rise 1-3 beats, hiscarotid dilate, and his radial artery contract during hard mental work.
[129] Address before Med. and Chirurg. Society of Maryland, 1879.
[130] See his book; "Experimental Researches on the Regional Temperatureof the Head" (London, 1879).
[131]Loc. cit. p. 195.
[132] The most convenient account of Schiff's experiments is by Prof.Hierzen, in the Revue Philosophique, vol. iii, p. 36.
[133] A New Study of Cerebral Cortical Localization (N. Y., Putnam,1880), pp. 48-53.
[134] Archives of Medicine, vol. x, No. 1 (1883).
[135] Without multiplying references, I will simply cite Mendel (Archiv f.Psychiatrie, vol. iii, 1871), Mairet (Archives de Neurologie, vol. ix, 1885),and Beaunis (Rech. Expérimentales sur l'Activité Cérébrale, 1887). Richetgives a partial bibliography in the Revue Scientifique, vol. 38, p. 788 (1886).
When we look at living creatures from an outward pointof view, one of the first things that strike us is that theyare bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round ofdaily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; inanimals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to agreat extent, to be the result of education. The habits towhich there is an innate tendency are called instincts; someof those due to education would by most persons be calledacts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a verylarge part of life, and that one engaged in studying theobjective manifestations of mind is bound at the very outsetto define clearly just what its limits are.
The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is ledto the fundamental properties of matter. The laws ofNature are nothing but the immutable habits which thedifferent elementary sorts of matter follow in their actionsand reactions upon each other. In the organic world, however,the habits are more variable than this. Even instinctsvary from one individual to another of a kind; and aremodified in the same individual, as we shall later see, tosuit the exigencies of the case. The habits of an elementaryparticle of matter cannot change (on the principles ofthe atomistic philosophy), because the particle is itself anunchangeable thing; but those of a compound mass ofmatter can change, because they are in the last instance dueto the structure of the compound, and either outward forcesor inward tensions can, from one hour to another, turn thatstructure into something different from what it was. Thatis, they can do so if the body be plastic enough to maintain[Pg 105]its integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields.
The change of structure here spoken of need not involvethe outward shape; it may be invisible and molecular, aswhen a bar of iron becomes magnetic or crystalline throughthe action of certain outward causes, or India-rubberbecomes friable, or plaster 'sets.' All these changes arerather slow; the material in question opposes a certainresistance to the modifying cause, which it takes time toovercome, but the gradual yielding whereof often saves thematerial from being disintegrated altogether. When thestructure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a conditionof its comparative permanence in the new form, and of thenew habits the body then manifests.Plasticity, then, inthe wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structureweak enough to yield to an influence, but strongenough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stablephase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked bywhat we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter,especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinarydegree of plasticity of this sort; so that wemay without hesitation lay down as our first propositionthe following, thatthe phenomena of habit in living beings aredue to the plasticity[137] of the organic materials of which theirbodies are composed.
But the philosophy of habit is thus, in the first instance,a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or psychology.That it is at bottom a physical principle is admittedby all good recent writers on the subject. They call attentionto analogues of acquired habits exhibited by dead matter.Thus, M. Léon Dumont, whose essay on habit is perhapsthe most philosophical account yet published, writes:
"Every one knows how a garment, after having been worn a certaintime, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new;there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit ofcohesion. A lock works better after being used some time; at the outsetmore force was required to overcome certain roughnesses in themechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon ofhabituation. It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been[Pg 106]folded already. This saving of trouble is due to the essential nature ofhabit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amountof the outward cause is required. The sounds of a violin improve byuse in the hands of an able artist, because the fibres of the wood at lastcontract habits of vibration conformed to harmonic relations. This iswhat gives such inestimable value to instruments that have belonged togreat masters. Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, whichgrows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes,when it flows again, the path traced by itself before. Just so, the impressionsof outer objects fashion for themselves in the nervous systemmore and more appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena recurunder similar excitements from without, when they have been interrupteda certain time."[138]
Not in the nervous system alone. A scar anywhere isalocus minoris resistentiæ, more liable to be abraded,inflamed, to suffer pain and cold, than are the neighboringparts. A sprained ankle, a dislocated arm, are in dangerof being sprained or dislocated again; joints that have oncebeen attacked by rheumatism or gout, mucous membranesthat have been the seat of catarrh, are with each fresh recurrencemore prone to a relapse, until often the morbidstate chronically substitutes itself for the sound one. Andif we ascend to the nervous system, we find how many so-calledfunctional diseases seem to keep themselves goingsimply because they happen to have once begun; and howthe forcible cutting short by medicine of a few attacks isoften sufficient to enable the physiological forces to get possessionof the field again, and to bring the organs back tofunctions of health. Epilepsies, neuralgias, convulsive affectionsof various sorts, insomnias, are so many cases in point.And, to take what are more obviously habits, the successwith which a 'weaning' treatment can often be applied tothe victims of unhealthy indulgence of passion, or ofmere complaining or irascible disposition, shows us howmuch the morbid manifestations themselves were due to themere inertia of the nervous organs, when once launched ona false career.
Can we now form a notion of what the inward physicalchanges may be like, in organs whose habits have thus[Pg 107]struck into new paths? In other words, can we say justwhat mechanical facts the expression 'change of habit'covers when it is applied to a nervous system? Certainlywe cannot in anything like a minute or definite way. Butour usual scientific custom of interpreting hidden molecularevents after the analogy of visible massive ones enables us toframe easily an abstract and general scheme of processeswhich the physical changes in questionmay be like. Andwhen once the possibility ofsome kind of mechanical interpretationis established, Mechanical Science, in her presentmood, will not hesitate to set her brand of ownership uponthe matter, feeling sure that it is only a question of timewhen the exact mechanical explanation of the case shall befound out.
If habits are due to the plasticity of materials to outwardagents, we can immediately see to what outwardinfluences, if to any, the brain-matter is plastic. Not tomechanical pressures, not to thermal changes, not to anyof the forces to which all the other organs of our body areexposed; for nature has carefully shut up our brain andspinal cord in bony boxes, where no influences of this sortcan get at them. She has floated them in fluid so thatonly the severest shocks can give them a concussion, andblanketed and wrapped them about in an altogether exceptionalway. The only impressions that can be made uponthem are through the blood, on the one hand, and throughthe sensory nerve-roots, on the other; and it is to the infinitelyattenuated currents that pour in through these latterchannels that the hemispherical cortex shows itself to be sopeculiarly susceptible. The currents, once in, must find away out. In getting out they leave their traces in the pathswhich they take. The only thing theycan do, in short, isto deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the wholeplasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words whenwe call it an organ in which currents pouring in from thesense-organs make with extreme facility paths which donot easily disappear. For, of course, a simple habit, likeevery other nervous event—the habit of snuffling, forexample, or of putting one's hands into one's pockets, or ofbiting one's nails—is, mechanically, nothing but a reflex[Pg 108]discharge; and its anatomical substratum must be a pathin the system. The most complex habits, as we shallpresently see more fully, are, from the same point of view,nothing butconcatenated discharges in the nerve-centres,due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths, soorganized as to wake each other up successively—the impressionproduced by one muscular contraction serving asa stimulus to provoke the next, until a final impressioninhibits the process and closes the chain. The only difficultmechanical problem is to explain the formationde novoof a simple reflex or path in a pre-existing nervous system.Here, as in so many other cases, it is only thepremier pasqui coûte. For the entire nervous systemis nothing but asystem of paths between a sensoryterminus a quo and a muscular,glandular, or otherterminus ad quem. A path oncetraversed by a nerve-current might be expected to followthe law of most of the paths we know, and to be scoopedout and made more permeable than before;[139] and this oughtto be repeated with each new passage of the current.Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from beinga path should then, little by little, and more and more, beswept out of the way, until at last it might become a naturaldrainage-channel. This is what happens where eithersolids or liquids pass over a path; there seems no reasonwhy it should not happen where the thing that passes is amere wave of rearrangement in matter that does not displaceitself, but merely changes chemically or turns itselfround in place, or vibrates across the line. The mostplausible views of the nerve-current make it out to be thepassage of some such wave of rearrangement as this. Ifonly a part of the matter of the path were to 'rearrange'itself, the neighboring parts remaining inert, it is easy tosee how their inertness might oppose a friction which itwould take many waves of rearrangement to break downand overcome. If we call the path itself the 'organ,' andthe wave of rearrangement the 'function,' then it is obviously[Pg 109]a case for repeating the celebrated French formulaof 'La fonction fait l'organe.'
So nothing is easier than to imagine how, when a currentonce has traversed a path, it should traverse it morereadily still a second time. But what made it ever traverseit the first time?[140] In answering this question we can onlyfall back on our general conception of a nervous system asa mass of matter whose parts, constantly kept in states ofdifferent tension, are as constantly tending to equalize theirstates. The equalization between any two points occursthrough whatever path may at the moment be most pervious.But, as a given point of the system may belong,actually or potentially, to many different paths, and, as theplay of nutrition is subject to accidental changes,blocksmay from time to time occur, and make currents shootthrough unwonted lines. Such an unwonted line would bea new-created path, which if traversed repeatedly, wouldbecome the beginning of a new reflex arc. All this is vagueto the last degree, and amounts to little more than sayingthat a new path may be formed by the sort ofchances thatin nervous material are likely to occur. But, vague as itis, it is really the last word of our wisdom in the matter.[141]
It must be noticed that the growth of structural modificationin living matter may be more rapid than in anylifeless mass, because the incessant nutritive renovation ofwhich the living matter is the seat tends often to corroborate[Pg 110]and fix the impressed modification, rather than to counteractit by renewing the original constitution of the tissuethat has been impressed. Thus, we notice after exercisingour muscles or our brain in a new way, that we can do sono longer at that time; but after a day or two of rest, whenwe resume the discipline, our increase in skill not seldomsurprises us. I have often noticed this in learning a tune;and it has led a German author to say that we learn to swimduring the winter and to skate during the summer.
Dr. Carpenter writes:[142]
"It is a matter of universal experience that every kind of trainingfor special aptitudes is both far more effective, and leaves a more permanentimpress, when exerted on thegrowing organism than whenbrought to bear on the adult. The effect of such training is shown inthe tendency of the organ to 'grow to' the mode in which it is habituallyexercised; as is evidenced by the increased size and power of particularsets of muscles, and the extraordinary flexibility of joints, which areacquired by such as have been early exercised in gymnastic performances....There is no part of the organism of man in which thereconstructive activity is so great, during the whole period of life, as itis in the ganglionic substance of the brain. This is indicated by theenormous supply of blood which it receives.... It is, moreover, afact of great significance that the nerve-substance is specially distinguishedby itsreparative power. For while injuries of other tissues(such as the muscular) which are distinguished by thespeciality of theirstructure and endowments, are repaired by substance of a lower or lessspecialized type, those of nerve-substance are repaired by a completereproduction of the normal tissue; as is evidenced in the sensibility ofthe newly forming skin which is closing over an open wound, or in therecovery of the sensibility of a piece of 'transplanted' skin, which hasfor a time been rendered insensible by the complete interruption of thecontinuity of its nerves. The most remarkable example of this reproduction,however, is afforded by the results of M. Brown-Séquard's[143]experiments upon the gradual restoration of the functional activity ofthe spinal cord after its complete division; which takes place in a waythat indicates rather areproduction of the whole, or the lower part ofthe cord and of the nerves proceeding from it, than a merereunion ofdivided surfaces. This reproduction is but a special manifestation ofthe reconstructive change which isalways taking place in the nervoussystem; it being not less obvious to the eye of reason that the 'waste'occasioned by its functional activity must be constantly repaired by the[Pg 111]production of new tissue, than it is to the eye of sense that such reparationsupplies an actualloss of substance by disease or injury.
"Now, in this constant and active reconstruction of the nervoussystem, we recognize a most marked conformity to the general planmanifested in the nutrition of the organism as a whole. For, in thefirst place, it is obvious that there is a tendency to the production of adeterminate type of structure; which type is often not merely that ofthe species, but some special modification of it which characterized oneor both of the progenitors. But this type is peculiarly liable to modificationduring the early period of life; in which the functional activityof the nervous system (and particularly of the brain) is extraordinarilygreat, and the reconstructive process proportionally active. And thismodifiability expresses itself in the formation of the mechanism bywhich thosesecondarily automatic modes of movement come to beestablished, which, in man, take the place of those that arecongenitalin most of the animals beneath him; and those modes of sense-perceptioncome to beacquired, which are elsewhere clearlyinstinctive. Forthere can be no reasonable doubt that, in both cases, a nervousmechanism isdeveloped in the course of this self-education, correspondingwith that which the lower animals inherit from their parents. Theplan of thatrebuilding process, which is necessary to maintain theintegrity of the organism generally, and which goes on with peculiaractivity in this portion of it, is thus being incessantly modified; and inthis manner all that portion of it which ministers to theexternal life ofsense and motion that is shared by man with the animal kingdom atlarge, becomes at adult age the expression of the habits which theindividual has acquired during the period of growth and development.Of these habits, some are common to the race generally, while othersare peculiar to the individual; those of the former kind (such as walkingerect) being universally acquired, save where physical inabilityprevents; while for the latter a special training is needed, which isusually the more effective the earlier it is begun—as is remarkablyseen in the case of such feats of dexterity as require a conjoint educationof the perceptive and of the motor powers. And when thusdeveloped during the period of growth, so as to have become a part ofthe constitution of the adult, the acquired mechanism is thenceforthmaintained in the ordinary course of the nutritive operations, so as tobe ready for use when called upon, even after long inaction.
"What is so clearly true of the nervous apparatus of animal life canscarcely be otherwise than true of that which ministers to the automaticactivity of the mind. For, as already shown, the study of psychologyhas evolved no more certain result than that there are uniformities ofmental action which are so entirely conformable to those of bodily actionas to indicate their intimate relation to a 'mechanism of thought andfeeling,' acting under the like conditions with that of sense and motion.The psychical principles ofassociation, indeed, and the physiologicalprinciples ofnutrition, simply express—the former in terms of mind,[Pg 112]the latter in terms of brain—the universally admitted fact that anysequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends toperpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted tothink, feel, ordo what we have been before accustomed to think, feel,or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formedpurpose,or anticipation of results. For there is no reason to regard thecerebrum as an exception to the general principle that, while each partof the organism tends toform itself in accordance with the mode inwhich it is habitually exercised, this tendency will be especially strongin the nervous apparatus, in virtue of thatincessant regeneration whichis the very condition of its functional activity. It scarcely, indeed,admits of doubt that every state of ideational consciousness which iseithervery strong or ishabitually repeated leaves an organic impressionon the cerebrum; in virtue of which that same state may be reproducedat any future time, in respondence to a suggestion fitted toexcite it.... The 'strength of early association' is a fact souniversally recognized that the expression of it has become proverbial;and this precisely accords with the physiological principle that, duringthe period of growth and development, the formative activity of thebrain will be most amenable to directing influences. It is in this waythat what is early 'learned by heart' becomes branded in (as it were)upon the cerebrum; so that its 'traces' are never lost, even thoughthe conscious memory of it may have completely faded out. For, whenthe organic modification has been oncefixed in the growing brain, itbecomes a part of the normal fabric, and is regularlymaintained bynutritive substitution; so that it may endure to the end of life, like thescar of a wound."
Dr. Carpenter's phrase thatour nervous system grows tothe modes in which it has been exercised expresses the philosophyof habit in a nutshell. We may now trace some ofthe practical applications of the principle to human life.
The first result of it is thathabit simplifies the movementsrequired to achieve a given result, makes them more accurateand diminishes fatigue.
"The beginner at the piano not only moves his finger up and downin order to depress the key, he moves the whole hand, the forearm andeven the entire body, especially moving its least rigid part, the head,as if he would press down the key with that organ too. Often a contractionof the abdominal muscles occurs as well. Principally, however,the impulse is determined to the motion of the hand and of the singlefinger. This is, in the first place, because the movement of the fingeris the movementthought of and, in the second place, because its movementand that of the key are the movements we try toperceive, alongwith the results of the latter on the ear. The more often the process[Pg 113]is repeated, the more easily the movement follows, on account of theincrease in permeability of the nerves engaged.
"But the more easily the movement occurs, the slighter is thestimulus required to set it up; and the slighter the stimulus is, themore its effect is confined to the fingers alone.
"Thus, an impulse which originally spread its effects over the wholebody, or at least over many of its movable parts, is gradually determinedto a single definite organ, in which it effects the contraction ofa few limited muscles. In this change the thoughts and perceptionswhich start the impulse acquire more and more intimate causal relationswith a particular group of motor nerves.
"To recur to a simile, at least partially apt, imagine the nervoussystem to represent a drainage-system, inclining, on the whole, towardcertain muscles, but with the escape thither somewhat clogged. Thenstreams of water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the drains thatgo towards these muscles and to wash out the escape. In case of asudden 'flushing,' however, the whole system of channels will fill itself,and the water overflow everywhere before it escapes. But a moderatequantity of water invading the system will flow through the properescape alone.
"Just so with the piano-player. As soon as his impulse, which hasgradually learned to confine itself to single muscles, grows extreme,it overflows into larger muscular regions. He usually plays with hisfingers, his body being at rest. But no sooner does he get excited thanhis whole body becomes 'animated,' and he moves his head and trunk,in particular, as if these also were organs with which he meant tobelabor the keys."[144]
Man is born with a tendency to do more things than hehas ready-made arrangements for in his nerve-centres.Most of the performances of other animals are automatic.But in him the number of them is so enormous, that mostof them must be the fruit of painful study. If practice didnot make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of nervousand muscular energy, he would therefore be in a sorryplight. As Dr. Maudsley says:[145]
"If an act became no easier after being done several times, if thecareful direction of consciousness were necessary to its accomplishmenton each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime mightbe confined to one or two deeds—that no progress could take place indevelopment. A man might be occupied all day in dressing and undressing[Pg 114]himself; the attitude of his body would absorb all his attentionand energy; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a buttonwould be as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child on its firsttrial; and he would, furthermore, be completely exhausted by his exertions.Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of themany efforts which it must make, and of the ease with which it atlast stands, unconscious of any effort. For while secondarily automaticacts are accomplished with comparatively little weariness—inthis regard approaching the organic movements, or the original reflexmovements—the conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaustion.A spinal cord without ... memory would simply be an idioticspinal cord.... It is impossible for an individual to realize howmuch he owes to its automatic agency until disease has impaired itsfunctions."
The next result is thathabit diminishes the conscious attentionwith which our acts are performed.
One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require forits execution a chain,A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., of successivenervous events, then in the first performances of the actionthe conscious will must choose each of these events from anumber of wrong alternatives that tend to present themselves;but habit soon brings it about that each event callsup its own appropriate successor without any alternativeoffering itself, and without any reference to the consciouswill, until at last the whole chain,A, B, C, D, E, F, G, rattlesitself off as soon asA occurs, just as ifA and the rest ofthe chain were fused into a continuous stream. When weare learning to walk, to ride, to swim, skate, fence, write,play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every step by unnecessarymovements and false notes. When we are proficients,on the contrary, the results not only follow withthe very minimum of muscular action requisite to bring themforth, they also follow from a single instantaneous 'cue.'The marksman sees the bird, and, before he knows it, hehas aimed and shot. A gleam in his adversary's eye, amomentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer findsthat he has instantly made the right parry and return. Aglance at the musical hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingershave rippled through a cataract of notes. And not onlyis it the right thing at the right time that we thus involuntarilydo, but the wrong thing also, if it be an habitual[Pg 115]thing. Who is there that has never wound up his watch ontaking off his waistcoat in the daytime, or taken his latch-keyout on arriving at the door-step of a friend? Veryabsent-minded persons in going to their bedroom to dressfor dinner have been known to take off one garment afteranother and finally to get into bed, merely because that wasthe habitual issue of the first few movements when performedat a later hour. The writer well remembers how,on revisiting Paris after ten years' absence, and, findinghimself in the street in which for one winter he had attendedschool, he lost himself in a brown study, from which he wasawakened by finding himself upon the stairs which led tothe apartment in a house many streets away in which hehad lived during that earlier time, and to which his stepsfrom the school had then habitually led. We all of us havea definite routine manner of performing certain daily officesconnected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting offamiliar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centres knowthe order of these movements, and show their knowledgeby their 'surprise' if the objects are altered so as to obligethe movement to be made in a different way. But ourhigher thought-centres know hardly anything about thematter. Few men can tell off-hand which sock, shoe, ortrousers-leg they put on first. They must first mentallyrehearse the act; and even that is often insufficient—theact must beperformed. So of the questions, Whichvalve of my double door opens first? Which way does mydoor swing? etc. I cannottell the answer; yet myhandnever makes a mistake. No one candescribe the order inwhich he brushes his hair or teeth; yet it is likely that theorder is a pretty fixed one in all of us.
These results may be expressed as follows:
In action grown habitual, what instigates each newmuscular contraction to take place in its appointed orderis not a thought or a perception, but thesensation occasionedby the muscular contraction just finished. A strictlyvoluntary act has to be guided by idea, perception, andvolition, throughout its whole course. In an habitual action,mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper[Pg 116]regions of brain and mind are set comparatively free. Adiagram will make the matter clear:
LetA, B, C, D, E, F, G represent an habitual chain ofmuscular contractions, and leta, b, c, d, e, f stand for therespective sensations which these contractions excite in uswhen they are successively performed. Such sensationswill usually be of the muscles, skin, or joints of the partsmoved, but they may also be effects of the movement uponthe eye or the ear. Through them, and through themalone, we are made aware whether the contraction has orhas not occurred. When the series,A, B, C, D, E, F, G, isbeing learned, each of these sensations becomes the objectof a separate perception by the mind. By it we test eachmovement, to see if it be right before advancing to the next.We hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject, etc., by intellectualmeans; and the order by which the next movementis discharged is an express order from the ideational centresafter this deliberation has been gone through.
In habitual action, on the contrary, the only impulsewhich the centres of idea or perception need send down isthe initial impulse, the command tostart. This is representedin the diagram byV; it may be a thought of thefirst movement or of the last result, or a mere perceptionof some of the habitual conditions of the chain, the presence,e.g., of the keyboard near the hand. In the present case,no sooner has the conscious thought or volition instigatedmovementA, thanA, through the sensationa of its ownoccurrence, awakensB reflexly;B then excitesC throughb, and so on till the chain is ended, when the intellect generallytakes cognizance of the final result. The process, infact, resembles the passage of a wave of 'peristaltic' motion[Pg 117]down the bowels. The intellectual perception at the endis indicated in the diagram by the effect ofG being represented,atG', in the ideational centres above the merelysensational line. The sensational impressions,a, b, c, d, e, f,are all supposed to have their seat below the ideationallines. That our ideational centres, if involved at all bya,b, c, d, e, f, are involved in a minimal degree, is shown bythe fact that the attention may be wholly absorbed elsewhere.We may say our prayers, or repeat the alphabet,with our attention far away.
"A musical performer will play a piece which has become familiarby repetition while carrying on an animated conversation, or while continuouslyengrossed by some train of deeply interesting thought; theaccustomed sequence of movements being directly prompted by thesight of the notes, or by the remembered succession of thesounds (ifthe piece is played from memory), aided in both cases by the guidingsensations derived from the muscles themselves. But, further, a higherdegree of the same 'training' (acting on an organism specially fitted toprofit by it) enables an accomplished pianist to play a difficult piece ofmusic at sight; the movements of the hands and fingers following soimmediately upon the sight of the notes that it seems impossible tobelieve that any but the very shortest and most direct track can be thechannel of the nervous communication through which they are calledforth. The following curious example of the same class ofacquiredaptitudes, which differ from instincts only in being prompted to actionby the will, is furnished by Robert Houdin:
"'With a view of cultivating the rapidity of visual and tactile perception,and the precision of respondent movements, which are necessaryfor success in every kind of prestidigitation, Houdin early practisedthe art of juggling with balls in the air; and having, after a month'spractice, become thorough master of the art of keeping upfour balls atonce, he placed a book before him, and, while the balls were in the air,accustomed himself to read without hesitation. 'This,' he says, 'willprobably seem to my readers very extraordinary; but I shall surprisethem still more when I say that I have just amused myself with repeatingthis curious experiment. Though thirty years have elapsed sincethe time I was writing, and though I have scarcely once touched theballs during that period, I can still manage to read with ease whilekeepingthree balls up.'"(Autobiography, p. 26.)[146]
We have calleda, b, c, d, e, f, the antecedents of the successivemuscular attractions, by the name of sensations.Some authors seem to deny that they are even this. If not[Pg 118]even this, they can only be centripetal nerve-currents, notsufficient to arouse feeling, but sufficient to arouse motorresponse.[147] It may be at once admitted that they are notdistinctvolitions. The will, if any will be present, limitsitself to apermission that they exert their motor effects.Dr. Carpenter writes:
"There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that actionswhich were originally prompted by the will with a distinct intention,and which are still entirely under its control, can never cease to bevolitional; and that either an infinitesimally small amount of will isrequired to sustain them when they have been once set going, or thatthe will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscillation between the two actions—themaintenance of the train ofthought, and the maintenance of thetrain ofmovement. But if only an infinitesimally small amount of willis necessary to sustain them, is not this tantamount to saying that theygo on by a force of their own? And does not the experience of theperfect continuity of our train of thought during the performance ofmovements that have become habitual, entirely negative the hypothesisof oscillation? Besides, if such an oscillation existed, there must beintervals in which each action goes onof itself; so that its essentiallyautomatic character is virtually admitted. The physiological explanation,that the mechanism of locomotion, as of other habitual movements,grows to the mode in which it is early exercised, and that it thenworks automatically under the general control and direction of the will,can scarcely be put down by any assumption of an hypothetical necessity,which rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our compositenature."[148]
But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate antecedentsof each movement of the chain are at any rateaccompanied by consciousness of some kind. They aresensations to which we areusually inattentive, but which immediatelycall our attention if they gowrong. Schneider'saccount of these sensations deserves to be quoted. In theact of walking, he says, even when our attention is entirelyoff,
"we are continuously aware of certain muscular feelings; and wehave, moreover, a feeling of certain impulses to keep our equilibriumand to set down one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we couldpreserve equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there,[Pg 119]and doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no sensationof its movement as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of impulseto set it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitterkeeps up her knitting even while she reads or is engaged in lively talk.But if we ask her how this be possible, she will hardly reply that theknitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling ofit, that she feels in her hands that she knits and how she must knit, andthat therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and regulatedby the sensations associated therewithal, even when the attention iscalled away.
"So of every one who practises, apparently automatically, a long-familiarhandicraft. The smith turning his tongs as he smites the iron,the carpenter wielding his plane, the lace-maker with her bobbin, theweaver at his loom, all will answer the same question in the same wayby saying that they have a feeling of the proper management of theimplement in their hands.
"In these cases, the feelings which are conditions of the appropriateacts are very faint. But none the less are they necessary. Imagineyour hands not feeling; your movements could then only be provokedby ideas, and if your ideas were then diverted away, the movementsought to come to a standstill, which is a consequence that seldomoccurs."[149]
Again:
"An idea makes you take, for example, a violin into your left hand.But it is not necessary that your idea remain fixed on the contractionof the muscles of the left hand and fingers in order that theviolin may continue to be held fast and not let fall. The sensationsthemselves which the holding of the instrument awakens in the hand,since they are associated with the motor impulse of grasping, are sufficientto cause this impulse, which then lasts as long as the feelingitself lasts, or until the impulse is inhibited by the idea of some antagonisticmotion."
And the same may be said of the manner in which the righthand holds the bow:
"It sometimes happens, in beginning these simultaneous combinations,that one movement or impulse will cease if the consciousnessturn particularly toward another, because at the outset the guidingsensations mustall be stronglyfelt. The bow will perhaps slip fromthe fingers, because some of the muscles have relaxed. But theslipping is a cause of new sensations starting up in the hand, so thatthe attention is in a moment brought back to the grasping of the bow.
"The following experiment shows this well: When one begins toplay on the violin, to keep him from raising his right elbow in playing[Pg 120]a book is placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to holdfast by keeping the upper arm tight against his body. The muscularfeelings, and feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke animpulse to press it tight. But often it happens that the beginner,whose attention gets absorbed in the production of the notes, lets dropthe book. Later, however, this never happens; the faintest sensationsof contact suffice to awaken the impulse to keep it in its place, and theattention may be wholly absorbed by the notes and the fingering withthe left hand.The simultaneous combination of movements is thusin the first instance conditioned by the facility with which in us, alongsideof intellectual processes, processes of inattentive feeling may stillgo on."[150]
This brings us by a very natural transition to theethicalimplications of the law of habit. They are numerous andmomentous. Dr. Carpenter, from whose 'Mental Physiology'we have quoted, has so prominently enforced theprinciple that our organs grow to the way in which theyhave been exercised, and dwelt upon its consequences, thathis book almost deserves to be called a work of edification,on this account alone. We need make no apology, then,for tracing a few of these consequences ourselves:
"Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature,"the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and thedegree to which this is true no one can probably appreciateas well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The dailydrill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a mancompletely over again, as to most of the possibilities of hisconduct.
"There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may notbe true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veterancarrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!' whereuponthe man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his muttonand potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and itseffects had become embodied in the man's nervous structure."[151]
Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have beenseen to come together and go through their customaryevolutions at the sound of the bugle-call. Most traineddomestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and car-horses,[Pg 121]seem to be machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly,unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute theduties they have been taught, and giving no sign that thepossibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to theirmind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be readmittedafter being once set free. In a railroad accident toa travelling menagerie in the United States some time in1881, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to haveemerged, but presently crept back again, as if too muchbewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was withoutdifficulty secured.
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its mostprecious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us allwithin the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children offortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It aloneprevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life frombeing deserted by those brought up to tread therein. Itkeeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through thewinter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails thecountryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm throughall the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by thenatives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us allto fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurtureor our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit thatdisagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted,and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different socialstrata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five yousee the professional mannerism settling down on the youngcommercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the youngminister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the littlelines of cleavage running through the character, the tricksof thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shop,' in aword, from which the man can by-and-by no more escapethan his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set offolds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. Itis well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty,the character has set like plaster, and will never softenagain.
If the period between twenty and thirty is the criticalone in the formation of intellectual and professional habits,[Pg 122]the period below twenty is more important still for the fixingofpersonal habits, properly so called, such as vocalizationand pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address.Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spokenwithout a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferredto the society of his betters unlearn the nasality andother vices of speech bred in him by the associations ofhis growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter howmuch money there be in his pocket, can he even learn todress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer theirwares as eagerly to him as to the veriest 'swell,' but hesimplycannot buy the right things. An invisible law, asstrong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayedthis year as he was the last; and how his better-bredacquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will befor him a mystery till his dying day.
The great thing, then, in all education, is tomake ournervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fundand capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon theinterest of the fund.For this we must make automatic andhabitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can,and guard against the growing into ways that are likely tobe disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against theplague. The more of the details of our daily life we canhand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the moreour higher powers of mind will be set free for their ownproper work. There is no more miserable human beingthan one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, andfor whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of everycup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, andthe beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of expressvolitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a mangoes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which oughtto be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for hisconsciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yetingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this veryhour to set the matter right.
In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits'there are some admirable practical remarks laid down.Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first[Pg 123]is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving offof an old one, we must take care tolaunch ourselves with asstrong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate allthe possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the rightmotives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encouragethe new way; make engagements incompatiblewith the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; inshort, envelop your resolution with every aid you know.This will give your new beginning such a momentum thatthe temptation to break down will not occur as soon as itotherwise might; and every day during which a breakdownis postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.
The second maxim is:Never suffer an exception to occurtill the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapseis like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefullywinding up; a single slip undoes more than a greatmany turns will wind again.Continuity of training is thegreat means of making the nervous system act infalliblyright. As Professor Bain says:
"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing themfrom the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers,one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It isnecessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle.Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests onthe right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate thetwo opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterruptedsuccesses, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enableit to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is thetheoretically best career of mental progress."
The need of securing success at theoutset is imperative.Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all futureattempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one tofuture vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted himabout an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: "Ach!you need only blow on your hands!" And the remarkillustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habituallysuccessful career. Prof. Baumann, from whom I borrowthe anecdote,[152] says that the collapse of barbarian[Pg 124]nations when Europeans come among them is due to theirdespair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in thelarger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new onesnot formed.
The question of 'tapering-off,' in abandoning suchhabits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, andis a question about which experts differ within certainlimits, and in regard to what may be best for an individualcase. In the main, however, all expert opinion wouldagree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the bestway,if there be a real possibility of carrying it out. Wemust be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insureits defeat at the very outset; but,provided one canstand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time,is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habitlike that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours ofrising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire willdie of inanition if it benever fed.
"One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right norleft, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one canbegin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes afresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is toleap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Withoutunbrokenadvance there is no such thing asaccumulation of the ethical forcespossible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate usin it, is the sovereign blessing of regularwork."[153]
A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair:Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolutionyou make, and on every emotional prompting you mayexperience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. Itis not in the moment of their forming, but in the momentof their producingmotor effects, that resolves and aspirationscommunicate the new 'set' to the brain. As theauthor last quoted remarks:
"The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes thefulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moralwill may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has nosolid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of emptygesture-making."
No matter how full a reservoir ofmaxims one may possess,and no matter how good one'ssentiments may be, if onehave not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity toact, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for thebetter. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbiallypaved. And this is an obvious consequence of the principleswe have laid down. A 'character,' as J. S. Mill says,'is a completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense inwhich he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in afirm and prompt and definite way upon all the principalemergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectivelyingrained in us in proportion to the uninterruptedfrequency with which the actions actually occur, and thebrain 'grows' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fineglow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit isworse than a chance lost; it works so as positively tohinder future resolutions and emotions from taking thenormal path of discharge. There is no more contemptibletype of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalistand dreamer, who spends his life in a welteringsea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manlyconcrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers ofFrance, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse theirbabies themselves, while he sends his own children to thefoundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean.But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowingfor an abstractly formulated Good, he practicallyignores some actual case, among the squalid 'other particulars'of which that same Good lurks disguised, treadsstraight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised bythe vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-dayworld; but woe to him who can only recognize them whenhe thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habitof excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will producetrue monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian ladyover the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachmanis freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort ofthing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for thosewho are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted[Pg 126]enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probablya relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filledwith emotions which habitually pass without prompting toany deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is keptup. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self tohave an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterwardinsome active way.[154] Let the expression be the leastthing in the world—speaking genially to one's aunt, orgiving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroicoffers—but let it not fail to take place.
These latter cases make us aware that it is not simplyparticular lines of discharge, but alsogeneral forms of discharge,that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain.Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into away of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that ifwe often flinch from making an effort, before we know it theeffort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we sufferthe wandering of our attention, presently it will wander allthe time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later,but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processesthey correspond we do not know. The strongestreason for believing that they do depend on brain-processesat all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact,that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit,which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, relativeto these habits of the will, we may, then, offer somethinglike this:Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by alittle gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematicallyascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, doevery day or two something for no other reason than thatyou would rather not do it, so that when the hour of direneed draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrainedto stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurancewhich a man pays on his house and goods. The taxdoes him no good at the time, and possibly may never bringhim a return. But if the firedoes come, his having paid itwill be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has[Pg 127]daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention,energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things.He will stand like a tower when everything rocks aroundhim, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed likechaff in the blast.
The physiological study of mental conditions is thus themost powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to beendured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse thanthe hell we make for ourselves in this world by habituallyfashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could theyoung but realize how soon they will become mere walkingbundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conductwhile in the plastic state. We are spinning our ownfates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smalleststroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuseshimself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't countthis time!' Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heavenmay not count it; but it is being counted none the less.Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules arecounting it, registering and storing it up to be used againsthim when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever dois, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, thishas its good side as well as its bad one. As we becomepermanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so webecome saints in the moral, and authorities and experts inthe practical and scientific spheres, by so many separateacts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxietyabout the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it maybe. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day,he may safely leave the final result to itself. He canwith perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning,to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation,in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.Silently, between all the details of his business, thepower ofjudging in all that class of matter will have built itself upwithin him as a possession that will never pass away.Young people should know this truth in advance. Theignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragementand faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduouscareers than all other causes put together.
[136] This chapter has already appeared in the Popular Science Monthlyfor February 1887.
[137] In the sense above explained, which applies to inner structure as wellas to outer form.
[138] Revue Philosophique, i, 324.
[139] Some paths, to be sure, are banked up by bodies moving throughthem under too great pressure, and made impervious. These special caseswe disregard.
[140] We cannot saythe will, for, though many, perhaps most, humanhabits were once voluntary actions, no action, as we shall see in a laterchapter, can beprimarily such. While an habitual action may once havebeen voluntary, the voluntary action must before that, at least once, havebeen impulsive or reflex. It is this very first occurrence of all that weconsider in the text.
[141] Those who desire a more definite formulation may consult J. Fiske's'Cosmic Philosophy,' vol. ii, pp. 142-146 and Spencer's 'Principles ofBiology,' sections 302 and 303, and the part entitled 'Physical Synthesis'of his 'Principles of Psychology.' Mr. Spencer there tries, not only toshow how new actions may arise in nervous systems and form new reflexarcs therein, but even how nervous tissue may actually be born by the passageof new waves of isometric transformation through an originally indifferentmass. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Spencer's data, under a greatshow of precision, conceal vagueness and improbability, and even self-contradiction.
[142] 'Mental Physiology' (1874) pp. 339-345.
[143] [See, later, Masius in Van Benedens' and Van Bambeke's 'Archivesde Biologie,' vol. i (Liège, 1880).—W. J.]
[144] G. H. Schneider: 'Der menschliche Wille' (1882), pp. 417-419 (freelytranslated). For the drain-simile, see also Spencer's 'Psychology,' partv, chap. viii.
[145] Physiology of Mind, p. 155.
[146] Carpenter's 'Mental Physiology' (1874), pp. 217, 218.
[147] Von Hartmann devotes a chapter of his 'Philosophy of the Unconscious'(English translation, vol. i, p. 72) to proving that they must bebothideas andunconscious.
[148] 'Mental Physiology,' p. 20.
[149] 'Der menschliche Wille,' pp. 447, 448.
[150] 'Der menschliche Wille,' p. 439. The last sentence is rather freelytranslated—the sense is unaltered.
[151] Huxley's 'Elementary Lessons in Physiology,' lesson xii.
[152] See the admirable passage about success at the outset, in his Handbuchder Moral (1878), pp. 38-43.
[153] J. Bahnsen: 'Beiträge zu Charakterologie' (1867), vol i, p. 209.
[154] See for remarks on this subject a readable article by Miss V. Scudderon 'Musical Devotees and Morals,' in the Andover Review for January.1887.
In describing the functions of the hemispheres a shortway back, we used language derived from both the bodilyand the mental life, saying now that the animal made indeterminateand unforeseeable reactions, and anon that hewas swayed by considerations of future good and evil;treating his hemispheres sometimes as the seat of memoryand ideas in the psychic sense, and sometimes talkingof them as simply a complicated addition to hisreflex machinery. This sort of vacillation in the point ofview is a fatal incident of all ordinary talk about thesequestions; but I must now settle my scores with thosereaders to whom I already dropped a word in passing (seeFootnote 6) and who have probably been dissatisfiedwith my conduct ever since.
Suppose we restrict our view to facts of one and the sameplane, and let that be the bodily plane: cannot all the outwardphenomena of intelligence still be exhaustively described?Those mental images, those 'considerations,'whereof we spoke,—presumably they do not arise withoutneural processes arising simultaneously with them, andpresumably each consideration corresponds to a processsuigeneris, and unlike all the rest. In other words, howevernumerous and delicately differentiated the train of ideasmay be, the train of brain-events that runs alongside of itmust in both respects be exactly its match, and we mustpostulate a neural machinery that offers a living counterpartfor every shading, however fine, of the history of its owner'smind. Whatever degree of complication the latter mayreach, the complication of the machinery must be quite asextreme, otherwise we should have to admit that theremay be mental events to which no brain-events correspond.[Pg 129]But such an admission as this the physiologist is reluctantto make. It would violate all his beliefs. 'No psychosiswithout neurosis,' is one form which the principle of continuitytakes in his mind.
But this principle forces the physiologist to make stillanother step. If neural action is as complicated as mind;and if in the sympathetic system and lower spinal cord wesee what, so far as we know, is unconscious neural actionexecuting deeds that to all outward intent may be calledintelligent; what is there to hinder us from supposing thateven where we know consciousness to be there, the stillmore complicated neural action which we believe to be itsinseparable companion is alone and of itself the real agentof whatever intelligent deeds may appear? "As actions ofa certain degree of complexity are brought about by meremechanism, why may not actions of a still greater degree ofcomplexity be the result of a more refined mechanism?"The conception of reflex action is surely one of the bestconquests of physiological theory; why not be radical withit? Why not say that just as the spinal cord is a machinewith few reflexes, so the hemispheres are a machine withmany, and that that is all the difference? The principle ofcontinuity would press us to accept this view.
But what on this view could be the function of the consciousnessitself?Mechanical function it would have none.The sense-organs would awaken the brain-cells; thesewould awaken each other in rational and orderly sequence,until the time for action came; and then the last brain-vibrationwould discharge downward into the motor tracts.But this would be a quite autonomous chain of occurrences,and whatever mind went with it would be thereonly as an 'epiphenomenon,' an inert spectator, a sort of'foam, aura, or melody' as Mr. Hodgson says, whose oppositionor whose furtherance would be alike powerless overthe occurrences themselves. When talking, some time ago,we ought not, accordingly,as physiologists, to have said anythingabout 'considerations' as guiding the animal. Weought to have said 'paths left in the hemispherical cortexby former currents,' and nothing more.
Now so simple and attractive is this conception from the[Pg 130]consistently physiological point of view, that it is quitewonderful to see how late it was stumbled on in philosophy,and how few people, even when it has been explained tothem, fully and easily realize its import. Much of thepolemic writing against it is by men who have as yet failedto take it into their imaginations. Since this has been thecase, it seems worth while to devote a few more words tomaking it plausible, before criticising it ourselves.
To Descartes belongs the credit of having first been boldenough to conceive of a completely self-sufficing nervousmechanism which should be able to perform complicatedand apparently intelligent acts. By a singularly arbitraryrestriction, however, Descartes stopped short at man, andwhile contending that in beasts the nervous machinery wasall, he held that the higher acts of man were the resultof the agency of his rational soul. The opinion thatbeasts have no consciousness at all was of course too paradoxicalto maintain itself long as anything more than acurious item in the history of philosophy. And with itsabandonment the very notion that the nervous systemper semight work the work of intelligence, which was an integral,though detachable part of the whole theory, seemed also toslip out of men's conception, until, in this century, theelaboration of the doctrine of reflex action made it possibleand natural that it should again arise. But it was not till1870, I believe, that Mr. Hodgson made the decisive step,by saying that feelings, no matter how intensely they maybe present, can have no causal efficacy whatever, and comparingthem to the colors laid on the surface of a mosaic, ofwhich the events in the nervous system are represented bythe stones.[155] Obviously the stones are held in place by eachother and not by the several colors which they support.
About the same time Mr. Spalding, and a little laterMessrs. Huxley and Clifford, gave great publicity to anidentical doctrine, though in their case it was backed byless refined metaphysical considerations.[Pg 131][156]
A few sentences from Huxley and Clifford may be subjoinedto make the matter entirely clear. Professor Huxleysays:
"The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to themechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working,and to be as completely without any power of modifying that workingas the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engineis without influence on its machinery. Their volition, if they have any,is an emotionindicative of physical changes, not acause of such changes....The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works,and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out whenit is struck.... Thus far I have strictly confined myself to theautomatism of brutes.... It is quite true that, to the best of myjudgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equallygood of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, asin them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance.It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof thatany state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of thematter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it followsthat our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness ofthe changes which take place automatically in the organism; and that,to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not thecause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain whichis the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata."
Professor Clifford writes:
"All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical worldgets along entirely by itself, according to practically universal rules....The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into the eye,or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and thetrain of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even when there isno stimulus and no exertion,—these are perfectly complete physicaltrams, and every step is fully accounted for by mechanical conditions....The two things are on utterly different platforms—the physicalfacts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by themselves.There is a parallelism between them, but there is no interferenceof one with the other. Again, if anybody says that the willinfluences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense. Suchan assertion belongs to the crude materialism of the savage. The only[Pg 132]thing which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter orthe motion of surrounding matter.... The assertion that anotherman's volition, a feeling in his consciousness that I cannot perceive, ispart of the train of physical facts which I may perceive,—this is neithertrue nor untrue, but nonsense; it is a combination of words whose correspondingideas will not go together.... Sometimes one series isknown better, and sometimes the other; so that in telling a story wespeak sometimes of mental and sometimes of material facts. A feelingof chill made a man run; strictly speaking, the nervous disturbancewhich coexisted with that feeling of chill made him run, if we want totalk about material facts; or the feeling of chill produced the form ofsub-consciousness which coexists with the motion of legs, if we wantto talk about mental facts.... When, therefore, we ask: 'What is thephysical link between the ingoing message from chilled skin and theoutgoing message which moves the leg? 'and the answer is, 'A man'swill,' we have as much right to be amused as if we had asked our friendwith the picture what pigment was used in painting the cannon in theforeground, and received the answer, 'Wrought iron.' It will be foundexcellent practice in the mental operations required by this doctrine toimagine a train, the fore part of which is an engine and three carriageslinked with iron couplings, and the hind part three other carriageslinked with iron couplings; the bond between the two parts beingmade up out of the sentiments of amity subsisting between the stokerand the guard."
To comprehend completely the consequences of thedogma so confidently enunciated, one should unflinchinglyapply it to the most complicated examples. The movementsof our tongues and pens, the flashings of our eyes inconversation, are of course events of a material order, and assuch their causal antecedents must be exclusively material.If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare,and as thoroughly all his environing conditions, weshould be able to show why at a certain period of his lifehis hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper thosecrabbed little black marks which we for shortness'sake call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understandthe rationale of every erasure and alteration therein,and we should understand all this without in the slightestdegree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare'smind. The words and sentences would be taken,not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as littleoutward facts, pure and simple. In like manner we mightexhaustively write the biography of those two hundred[Pg 133]pounds, more or less, of warmish albuminoid matter calledMartin Luther, without ever implying that it felt.
But, on the other hand, nothing in all this could preventus from giving an equally complete account of eitherLuther's or Shakespeare's spiritual history, an account inwhich every gleam of thought and emotion should find itsplace. The mind-history would run alongside of the body-historyof each man, and each point in the one would correspondto, but not react upon, a point in the other. Sothe melody floats from the harp-string, but neither checksnor quickens its vibrations; so the shadow runs alongsidethe pedestrian, but in no way influences his steps.
Another inference, apparently more paradoxical still,needs to be made, though, as far as I am aware, Dr. Hodgsonis the only writer who has explicitly drawn it. Thatinference is that feelings, not causing nerve-actions, cannoteven cause each other. To ordinary common sense, feltpain is, as such, not only the cause of outward tears andcries, but also the cause of such inward events as sorrow,compunction, desire, or inventive thought. So the consciousnessof good news is the direct producer of the feelingof joy, the awareness of premises that of the belief inconclusions. But according to the automaton-theory, eachof the feelings mentioned is only the correlate of some nerve-movementwhosecause lay wholly in a previous nerve-movement.The first nerve-movement called up the second;whatever feeling was attached to the second consequentlyfound itself following upon the feeling that was attachedto the first. If, for example, good news was the consciousnesscorrelated with the first movement, then joy turnedout to be the correlate in consciousness of the second.But all the while the items of the nerve series were theonly ones in causal continuity; the items of the consciousseries, however inwardly rational their sequence, weresimply juxtaposed.
The 'conscious automaton-theory,' as this conception isgenerally called, is thus a radical and simple conception ofthe manner in which certain facts may possibly occur. But[Pg 134]between conception and belief, proof ought to lie. Andwhen we ask, 'What proves that all this is more than amere conception of the possible?' it is not easy to get asufficient reply. If we start from the frog's spinal cordand reason by continuity, saying, as that acts so intelligently,though unconscious, so the higher centres,thoughconscious, may have the intelligence they show quite asmechanically based; we are immediately met by the exactcounter-argument from continuity, an argument actuallyurged by such writers as Pflüger and Lewes, which startsfrom the acts of the hemispheres, and says: "Asthese owetheir intelligence to the consciousness which we know tobe there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts mustreally be due to the invisible presence of a consciousnesslower in degree." All arguments from continuity work intwo ways: you can either level up or level down by theirmeans. And it is clear that such arguments as these caneat each other up to all eternity.
There remains a sort of philosophic faith, bred likemost faiths from an æsthetic demand. Mental and physicalevents are, on all hands, admitted to present the strongestcontrast in the entire field of being. The chasm whichyawns between them is less easily bridged over by themind than any interval we know. Why, then, not call it anabsolute chasm, and say not only that the two worldsare different, but that they are independent? This givesus the comfort of all simple and absolute formulas, and itmakes each chain homogeneous to our consideration.When talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, wemay feel secure against intrusion from an irrelevant mentalworld. When, on the other hand, we speak of feelings, wemay with equal consistency use terms always of one denomination,and never be annoyed by what Aristotle calls'slipping into another kind.' The desire on the part of meneducated in laboratories not to have their physical reasoningsmixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelingsis certainly very strong. I have heard a most intelligentbiologist say: "It is high time for scientific men to protestagainst the recognition of any such thing as consciousnessin a scientific investigation." In a word, feeling constitutes[Pg 135]the 'unscientific' half of existence, and any one who enjoyscalling himself a 'scientist' will be too happy to purchasean untrammelled homogeneity of terms in the studies of hispredilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualismwhich, in the same breath that it allows to mind an independentstatus of being, banishes it to a limbo of causalinertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on itspart need ever be feared.
Over and above this great postulate that matters mustbe kept simple, there is, it must be confessed, still anotherhighly abstract reason for denying causal efficacity to ourfeelings. We can form no positive image of themodusoperandi of a volition or other thought affecting the cerebralmolecules.
"Let us try to imagine an idea, say of food, producing a movement,say of carrying food to the mouth.... What is the method of itsaction? Does it assist the decomposition of the molecules of the graymatter, or does it retard the process, or does it alter the direction inwhich the shocks are distributed? Let us imagine the molecules of thegray matter combined in such a way that they will fall into simplercombinations on the impact of an incident force. Now suppose the incidentforce, in the shape of a shock from some other centre, to impingeupon these molecules. By hypothesis it will decompose them, and theywill fall into the simpler combination. How is the idea of food to preventthis decomposition? Manifestly it can do so only by increasing;the force which binds the molecules together. Good! Try to imaginethe idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules together. It is impossible.Equally impossible is it to imagine a similar idea loosening theattractive force between two molecules."[157]
This passage from an exceedingly clever writer expressesadmirably the difficulty to which I allude. Combined witha strong sense of the 'chasm' between the two worlds, andwith a lively faith in reflex machinery, the sense of thisdifficulty can hardly fail to make one turn consciousnessout of the door as a superfluity so far as one's explanationsgo. One may bow her out politely, allow her to remain asan 'epiphenomenon' (invaluable word!), but one insists thatmatter shall hold all the power.
"Having thoroughly recognized the fathomless abyss that separatesmind from matter, and having so blended the very notion into his very[Pg 136]nature that there is no chance of his ever forgetting it or failing tosaturate with it all his meditations, the student of psychology has nextto appreciate the association between these two orders of phenomena....They are associated in a manner so intimate that some of thegreatest thinkers consider them different aspects of the same process....When the rearrangement of molecules takes place in the higherregions of the brain, a change of consciousness simultaneously occurs....The change of consciousness never takes place without the changein the brain; the change in the brain never ... without the changein consciousness. Butwhy the two occur together, or what the link iswhich connects them, we do not know, and most authorities believethat we never shall and never can know. Having firmly and tenaciouslygrasped these two notions, of the absolute separateness of mindand matter, and of the invariable concomitance of a mental changewith a bodily change, the student will enter on the study of psychologywith half his difficulties surmounted."[158]
Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say. Forthis 'concomitance' in the midst of 'absolute separateness'is an utterly irrational notion. It is to my mind quite inconceivablethat consciousness should havenothing to dowith a business which it so faithfully attends. And thequestion, 'What has it to do?' is one which psychologyhas no right to 'surmount,' for it is her plain duty to considerit. The fact is that the whole question of interactionand influence between things is a metaphysical question,and cannot be discussed at all by those who are unwillingto go into matters thoroughly. It is truly enough hard toimagine the 'idea of a beefsteak binding two moleculestogether;' but since Hume's time it has been equally hardto imagineanything binding them together. The wholenotion of 'binding' is a mystery, the first step towards thesolution of which is to clear scholastic rubbish out of theway. Popular science talks of 'forces,' 'attractions' or'affinities' as binding the molecules; but clear science,though she may use such words to abbreviate discourse, hasno use for the conceptions, and is satisfied when she canexpress in simple 'laws' the bare space-relations of themolecules as functions of each other and of time. To themore curiously inquiring mind, however, this simplifiedexpression of the bare facts is not enough; there must[Pg 137]be a 'reason' for them, and something must 'determine'the laws. And when one seriously sits down to considerwhat sort of a thing onemeans when one asksfor a 'reason,' one is led so far afield, so far away frompopular science and its scholasticism, as to see that evensuch a fact as the existence or non-existence in the universeof 'the idea of a beefsteak' may not be wholly indifferentto other facts in the same universe, and in particular mayhave something to do with determining the distance atwhich two molecules in that universe shall lie apart. Ifthis is so, then common-sense, though the intimate natureof causality and of the connection of things in the universelies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root andgist of the truth in her hands when she obstinately holdsto it that feelings and ideas are causes. However inadequateour ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wideof the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings haveit, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it.As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysicalcriticism all causes are obscure. But one has noright to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subjectonly, as the automatists do, and to say thatthat causationis unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizesaboutmaterial causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze hadnever been born. One cannot thus blow hot and cold. Onemust be impartiallynaif or impartially critical. If thelatter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or 'metaphysical,'and will probably preserve the common-senseview that ideas are forces, in some translated form. ButPsychology is a mere natural science, accepting certainterms uncritically as her data, and stopping short ofmetaphysical reconstruction. Like physics, she must benaive; and if she finds that in her very peculiar field ofstudy ideasseem to be causes, she had better continue totalk of them as such. She gains absolutely nothing by abreach with common-sense in this matter, and she loses,to say the least, all naturalness of speech. If feelings arecauses, of course their effects must be furtherances andcheckings of internal cerebral motions, of which in themselveswe are entirely without knowledge. It is probable[Pg 138]that for years to come we shall have to infer what happensin the brain either from our feelings or from motor effectswhich we observe. The organ will be for us a sort of vatin which feelings and motions somehow go on stewingtogether, and in which innumerable things happen of whichwe catch but the statistical result. Why, under these circumstances,we should be asked to forswear the languageof our childhood I cannot well imagine, especially as it isperfectly compatible with the language of physiology. Thefeelings can produce nothing absolutely new, they can onlyreinforce and inhibit reflex currents which already exist,and the original organization of these by physiologicalforces must always be the ground-work of the psychologicalscheme.
My conclusion is that to urge the automaton-theoryupon us, as it is now urged, on purelya priori andquasi-metaphysicalgrounds, is anunwarrantable impertinence inthe present state of psychology.
But there are much more positive reasons than this whywe ought to continue to talk in psychology as if consciousnesshad causal efficacy. Theparticulars of the distributionof consciousness, so far as we know them,point to itsbeing efficacious. Let us trace some of them.
It is very generally admitted, though the point wouldbe hard to prove, that consciousness grows the more complexand intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom.That of a man must exceed that of an oyster. From thispoint of view it seems an organ, superadded to the otherorgans which maintain the animal in the struggle for existence;and the presumption of course is that it helps himin some way in the struggle, just as they do. But itcannot help him without being in some way efficacious andinfluencing the course of his bodily history. If now itcould be shown in what way consciousnessmight help him,and if, moreover, the defects of his other organs (whereconsciousness is most developed) are such as to make themneed just the kind of help that consciousness would bringprovided itwere efficacious; why, then the plausible inference[Pg 139]would be that it came justbecause of its efficacy—inother words, its efficacy would be inductively proved.
Now the study of the phenomena of consciousness whichwe shall make throughout the rest of this book will showus that consciousness is at all times primarilya selectingagency.[159] Whether we take it in the lowest sphere of sense,or in the highest of intellection, we find it always doingone thing, choosing one out of several of the materials sopresented to its notice, emphasizing and accentuating thatand suppressing as far as possible all the rest. The itememphasized is always in close connection with someinterestfelt by consciousness to be paramount at the time.
But what are now the defects of the nervous system inthose animals whose consciousness seems most highlydeveloped? Chief among them must beinstability. Thecerebral hemispheres are the characteristically 'high'nerve-centres, and we saw how indeterminate and unforeseeabletheir performances were in comparison with thoseof the basal ganglia and the cord. But this very vaguenessconstitutes their advantage. They allow their possessorto adapt his conduct to the minutest alterations inthe environing circumstances, any one of which may befor him a sign, suggesting distant motives more powerfulthan any present solicitations of sense. It seems as if certainmechanical conclusions should be drawn from thisstate of things. An organ, swayed by slight impressions isan organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium.We may imagine the various lines of discharge in the cerebrumto be almost on a par in point of permeability—whatdischarge a given small impression will produce may becalledaccidental, in the sense in which we say it is a matterof accident whether a rain-drop falling on a mountainridge descend the eastern or the western slope. Itis in this sense that we may call it a matter of accidentwhether a child be a boy or a girl. The ovum is so unstablea body that certain causes too minute for our apprehensionmay at a certain moment tip it one way or theother. The natural law of an organ constituted after this[Pg 140]fashion can be nothing but a law of caprice. I do not seehow one could reasonably expect from it any certain pursuanceof useful lines of reaction, such as the few and fatallydetermined performances of the lower centres constitutewithin their narrow sphere. The dilemma in regard to thenervous system seems, in short, to be of the following kind.We may construct one which will react infallibly and certainly,but it will then be capable of reacting to very fewchanges in the environment—it will fail to be adapted to allthe rest. We may, on the other hand, construct a nervoussystem potentially adapted to respond to an infinite varietyof minute features in the situation; but its fallibility willthen be as great as its elaboration. We can never be surethat its equilibrium will be upset in the appropriate direction.In short, a high brain may do many things, and maydo each of them at a very slight hint. But its hair-triggerorganization makes of it a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-missaffair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing atany given moment. A low brain does few things, and indoing them perfectly forfeits all other use. The performancesof a high brain are like dice thrown forever on atable. Unless they be loaded, what chance is there thatthe highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest?
All this is said of the brain as a physical machine pureand simple.Can consciousness increase its efficiency byloading its dice? Such is the problem.
Loading its dice would mean bringing a more or lessconstant pressure to bear in favor ofthose of its performanceswhich make for the most permanent interests cf thebrain's owner; it would mean a constant inhibition of thetendencies to stray aside.
Well, just such pressure and such inhibition are whatconsciousnessseems to be exerting all the while. And theinterests in whose favor it seems to exert them areits interestsand its alone, interests which itcreates, and which,but for it, would have no status in the realm of being whatever.We talk, it is true, when we are darwinizing, as ifthe merebody that owns the brain had interests; we speakabout the utilities of its various organs and how they helpor hinder the body's survival; and we treat the survival as[Pg 141]if it were an absolute end, existing as such in the physicalworld, a sort of actualshould-be, presiding over the animaland judging his reactions, quite apart from the presence ofany commenting intelligence outside. We forget that inthe absence of some such superadded commenting intelligence(whether it be that of the animal itself, or only oursor Mr. Darwin's), the reactions cannot be properly talkedof as 'useful' or 'hurtful' at all. Considered merelyphysically, all that can be said of them is thatif they occurin a certain way survival will as a matter of fact prove to betheir incidental consequence. The organs themselves, andall the rest of the physical world, will, however, all the timebe quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite ascheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal'sdestruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purelyphysiological discussion only as anhypothesis made by anonlooker, about the future. But the moment you bring aconsciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a merehypothesis. No longer is it, "if survival is to occur, thenso and so must brain and other organs work." It has nowbecome an imperative decree: "Survivalshall occur, andtherefore organsmust so work!"Real ends appear for thefirst time now upon the world's stage. The conception ofconsciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, whichis the pet way of regarding it in many idealistic schools,modern as well as ancient, is thoroughly anti-psychological,as the remainder of this book will show. Every actuallyexisting consciousness seems to itself at any rate tobe afighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence,would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition aremainly subservient to these ends, discerning which factsfurther them and which do not.
Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself,and it will help an instable brain to compass its properends. The movements of the brainper se yield the meansof attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of a lot ofother ends, if so they may be called, which are not theproper ones of the animal, but often quite opposed. Thebrain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties.But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and[Pg 142]knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto andwhich away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforcethe favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable orindifferent ones. The nerve-currents, coursing through thecells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthenedby the fact of their awaking one consciousness and dampenedby awaking another.How such reaction of the consciousnessupon the currents may occur must remain atpresent unsolved: it is enough for my purpose to haveshown that it may not uselessly exist, and that the matteris less simple than the brain-automatists hold.
All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lendcolor to this view. Consciousness, for example, is onlyintense when nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid,automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum. Nothingcould be more fitting than this, if consciousness have theteleological function we suppose; nothing more meaningless,if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in nodanger of going astray from their end, need no extraneoushelp. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative possibilitiesof final nervous discharge. The feeling awakenedby the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tractseems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determinewhether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete.Where indecision is great, as before a dangerousleap, consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, fromthis point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of thechain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links alreadylaid down, and groping among the fresh ends presentedto it for the one which seems best to fit the case.
The phenomena of 'vicarious function' which we studiedinChapter II seem to form another bit of circumstantialevidence. A machine in working order acts fatally inone way. Our consciousness calls this the right way.Take out a valve, throw a wheel out of gear or bend apivot, and it becomes a different machine, acting just asfatally in another way which we call the wrong way. Butthe machine itself knows nothing of wrong or right: matterhas no ideals to pursue. A locomotive will carry its train[Pg 143]through an open drawbridge as cheerfully as to any otherdestination.
A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a newmachine, and during the first days after the operationfunctions in a thoroughly abnormal manner. As a matterof fact, however, its performances become from day to daymore normal, until at last a practised eye may be neededto suspect anything wrong. Some of the restoration is undoubtedlydue to 'inhibitions' passing away. But if theconsciousness which goes with the rest of the brain, be therenot only in order to take cognizance of each functionalerror, but also to exert an efficient pressure to check it if itbe a sin of commission, and to lend a strengthening handif it be a weakness or sin of omission,—nothing seemsmore natural than that the remaining parts, assisted inthis way, should by virtue of the principle of habit growback to the old teleological modes of exercise for whichthey were at first incapacitated. Nothing, on the contrary,seems at first sight more unnatural than that they shouldvicariously take up the duties of a part now lost withoutthoseduties as such exerting any persuasive or coerciveforce. At the end of Chapter XXVI I shall return to thisagain.
There is yet another set of facts which seem explicableon the supposition that consciousness has causal efficacy.It is a well-known fact that pleasures are generally associatedwith beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences.All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law.Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink and sleep,work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, theeffects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungrystomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise afterrest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, arepleasant. Mr. Spencer and others have suggested thatthese coincidences are due, not to any pre-establishedharmony, but to the mere action of natural selection whichwould certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of creaturesto whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemedenjoyable. An animal that should take pleasure in a feeling[Pg 144]of suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficaciousenough to make him immerse his head in water, enjoy alongevity of four or five minutes. But if pleasures andpains have no efficacy, one does not see (without somesucha priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the'scientific' champions of the automaton-theory) why themost noxious acts, such as burning, might not give thrillsof delight, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing,cause agony. The exceptions to the law are, it is true,numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vitalor not universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which thoughnoxious, is to many persons delightful, is a very exceptionalexperience. But, as the excellent physiologist Pick remarks,if all rivers and springs ran alcohol instead of water,either all men would now be born to hate it or our nerveswould have been selected so as to drink it with impunity.The only considerable attempt, in fact, that has been madeto explain thedistribution of our feelings is that of Mr. GrantAllen in his suggestive little workPhysiological Æsthetics;and his reasoning is based exclusively on that causal efficacyof pleasures and pains which the 'double-aspect' partisansso strenuously deny.
Thus, then, from every point of view the circumstantialevidence against that theory is strong.A priori analysisof both brain-action and conscious action shows us that ifthe latter were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis,make amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilstthe studya posteriori of thedistribution of consciousnessshows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organadded for the sake of steering a nervous system grown toocomplex to regulate itself. The conclusion that it is usefulis, after all this, quite justifiable. But, if it is useful,it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and theautomaton-theory must succumb to the theory of common-sense.I, at any rate (pending metaphysical reconstructionsnot yet successfully achieved), shall have no hesitationin using the language of common-sense throughout thisbook.
[155] The Theory of Practice, vol. i, p. 416 ff.
[156] The present writer recalls how in 1869, when still a medical student,he began to write an essay showing how almost every one who speculatedabout brain-processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them linksderived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer,Hodgson (in his Time and Space), Maudsley, Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr. S.Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the confusion.The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the viewwhich he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, withno proofs to be adduced of its reality. Later it seemed to him that whateverproofs existed really told in favor of their view.
[157] Chas. Mercier: The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), p. 9.
[158]Op. cit. p. 11.
[159] See in particular the end ofChapter IX.
The reader who found himself swamped with too muchmetaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worsetime of it in this one, which is exclusively metaphysical.Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinateeffort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions ofpsychology are practically very clear to us, but theoreticallythey are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurestassumptions in this science without realizing, untilchallenged, what internal difficulties they involve. Whenthese assumptions have once established themselves (asthey have a way of doing in our very descriptions of thephenomenal facts) it is almost impossible to get rid of themafterwards or to make any one see that they are not essentialfeatures of the subject. The only way to prevent thisdisaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and make themgive an articulate account of themselves before letting thempass. One of the obscurest of the assumptions of whichI speak isthe assumption that our mental states are compositein structure, made up of smaller states conjoined.This hypothesis has outward advantages which make italmost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and yet it isinwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility, however,half the writers on psychology seem unaware. Asour own aim isto understand if possible, I make no apologyfor singling out this particular notion for very explicittreatment before taking up the descriptive part of our work.The theory of 'mind-stuff' is the theory that our mentalstates are compounds, expressed in its most radical form.
In a general theory of evolution the inorganic comesfirst, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life,then forms of life that possess mentality, and finally thoselike ourselves that possess it in a high degree. As long aswe keep to the consideration of purely outward facts, eventhe most complicated facts of biology, our task as evolutionistsis comparatively easy. We are dealing all the time withmatter and its aggregations and separations; and althoughour treatment must perforce be hypothetical, this does notprevent it from beingcontinuous. The point which as evolutionistswe are bound to hold fast to is that all the newforms of being that make their appearance are really nothingmore than results of the redistribution of the originaland unchanging materials. The self-same atoms which,chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed andtemporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains;and the 'evolution' of the brains, if understood, would besimply the account of how the atoms came to be so caughtand jammed. In this story no newnatures, no factors notpresent at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage.
But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely newnature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency wasnot given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos.
The enemies of evolution have been quick to pounceupon this undeniable discontinuity in the data of the worldand many of them, from the failure of evolutionary explanationsat this point, have inferred their general incapacityall along the line. Every one admits the entire incommensurabilityof feeling as such with material motion assuch. "A motion became a feeling!"—no phrase that ourlips can frame is so devoid of apprehensible meaning.Accordingly, even the vaguest of evolutionary enthusiasts,when deliberately comparing material with mental facts,have been as forward as any one else to emphasize the'chasm' between the inner and the outer worlds.
"Can the oscillations of a molecule," says Mr. Spencer, "be representedside by side with a nervous shock [he means a mental shock],and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate[Pg 147]them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit ofmotion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two intojuxtaposition."[160]
And again:
"Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in consciousnessand a molecular motion are the subjective and objective faces ofthe same thing; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so asto conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces."[161]
In other words, incapable of perceiving in them any commoncharacter. So Tyndall, in that lucky paragraphwhich has been quoted so often that every one knows it byheart:
"The passage from the physics of the brain to the correspondingfacts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thoughtand a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; wedo not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment ofthe organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning,from one to the other."[162]
Or in this other passage:
"We can trace the development of a nervous system and correlatewith it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see withundoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soarin a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connectionbetween them.... There is no fusion possible between the two classesof facts—no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it withoutlogical rupture from the one to the other."[163]
None the less easily, however, when the evolutionaryafflatus is upon them, do the very same writers leap overthe breach whose flagrancy they are the foremost to announce,and talk as if mind grew out of body in a continuousway. Mr. Spencer, looking back on his review ofmental evolution, tells us how "in tracing up the increase[Pg 148]we found ourselves passingwithout break from the phenomenaof bodily life to the phenomena of mental life."[164] And Mr.Tyndall, in the same Belfast Address from which we justquoted, delivers his other famous passage:
"Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to makebefore you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary ofthe experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in ourignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator,have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency ofevery form and quality of life."[165]
—mental life included, as a matter of course.
So strong a postulate is continuity! Now this book willtend to show that mental postulates are on the whole to berespected. The demand for continuity has, over large tractsof science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power.We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possiblemode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that itmaynot appear equivalent to the irruption into the universeof a new nature, non-existent until then.
Merely to call the consciousness 'nascent' will notserve our turn.[166] It is true that the word signifies not yet[Pg 149]quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge betweenexistence and nonentity. But that is a verbal quibble.The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new naturecomes in at all. Thequantity of the latter is quite immaterial.The girl in 'Midshipman Easy' could not excuse theillegitimacy of her child by saying, 'it was a little smallone.' And Consciousness, however little, is an illegitimatebirth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yetprofesses to explain all facts by continuous evolution.
If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shapemust have been present at the very origin of things. Accordinglywe find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophersare beginning to posit it there. Each atom of thenebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atomof consciousness linked with it; and, just as the materialatoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselvestogether, so the mental atoms, by an analogousprocess of aggregation, have fused into those larger consciousnesseswhich we know in ourselves and suppose toexist in our fellow-animals. Some such doctrine ofatomistic hylozoism as this is an indispensable part of athorough-going philosophy of evolution. According to itthere must be an infinite number of degrees of consciousness,[Pg 150]following the degrees of complication and aggregationof the primordial mind-dust. To prove the separateexistence of these degrees of consciousness by indirect evidence,since direct intuition of them is not to be had, becomestherefore the first duty of psychological evolutionism.
Some of this duty we find already performed by a numberof philosophers who, though not interested at all inevolution, have nevertheless on independent grounds convincedthemselves of the existence of a vast amount ofsub-conscious mental life. The criticism of this generalopinion and its grounds will have to be postponed for awhile. At present let us merely deal with the argumentsassumed to prove aggregation of bits of mind-stuff intodistinctly sensible feelings. They are clear and admit of aclear reply.
The German physiologist A. Fick, in 1862, was, so faras I know, the first to use them. He made experiments onthe discrimination of the feelings of warmth and of touch,when only a very small portion of the skin was excitedthrough a hole in a card, the surrounding parts being protectedby the card. He found that under these circumstancesmistakes were frequently made by the patient,[167]and concluded that this must be because the number of[Pg 151]sensations from the elementary nerve-tips affected was toosmall to sum itself distinctly into either of the qualities offeeling in question. He tried to show how a differentmanner of the summation might give rise in one case to theheat and in another to the touch.
"A feeling of temperature," he says, "arises when the intensitiesof the units of feeling are evenly gradated, so that between twoelementsa andb no other unit can spatially intervene whose intensityis not alsobetween that ofa andb. A feeling of contact perhaps ariseswhen this condition is not fulfilled. Both kinds of feeling, however, arecomposed of the same units."
But it is obviously far clearer to interpret such a gradationof intensities as a brain-fact than as a mind-fact. Ifin the brain a tract were first excited in one of the wayssuggested by Prof. Fick, and then again in the other, itmight very well happen, for aught we can say to the contrary,that the psychic accompaniment in the one case wouldbe heat, and in the other pain. The pain and the heat would,however, not be composed of psychic units, but would eachbe the direct result of one total brain-process. So long asthis latter interpretation remains open, Fick cannot be heldto have proved psychic summation.
Later, both Spencer and Taine, independently of eachother, took up the same line of thought. Mr. Spencer'sreasoning is worth quotingin extenso. He writes:
"Although the individual sensations and emotions, real or ideal, ofwhich consciousness is built up, appear to be severally simple, homogeneous,unanalyzable, or of inscrutable natures, yet they are not so.There is at least one kind of feeling which, as ordinarily experienced,seems elementary, that is demonstrably not elementary. And after resolvingit into its proximate components, we can scarcely help suspectingthat other apparently-elementary feelings are also compound, andmay have proximate components like those which we can in this oneinstance identify.
"Musical sound is the name we give to this seemingly simple feelingwhich is clearly resolvable into simpler feelings. Well-known experimentsprove that when equal blows or taps are made one after anotherat a rate not exceeding some sixteen per second, the effect of each isperceived as a separate noise; but when the rapidity with which theblows follow one another exceeds this, the noises are no longer identifiedin separate states of consciousness, and there arises in place of them acontinuous state of consciousness, called a tone. In further increasing[Pg 152]the rapidity of the blows, the tone undergoes the change of quality distinguishedas rise in pitch; and it continues to rise in pitch as the blowscontinue to increase in rapidity, until it reaches an acuteness beyondwhich it is no longer appreciable as a tone. So that out of units of feelingof the same kind, many feelings distinguishable from one anotherin quality result, according as the units are more or less integrated.
"This is not all. The inquiries of Professor Helmholtz have shownthat when, along with one series of these rapidly-recurring noises, thereis generated another series in which the noises are more rapid thoughnot so loud, the effect is a change in that quality known as itstimbre.As various musical instruments show us, tones which are alike in pitchand strength are distinguishable by their harshness or sweetness, theirringing or their liquid characters; and all their specific peculiarities areproved to arise from the combination of one, two, three, or more, supplementaryseries of recurrent noises with the chief series of recurrentnoises. So that while the unlikenesses of feeling known as differencesof pitch in tones are due to differences of integration among the recurrentnoises of one series, the unlikenesses of feeling known as differencesoftimbre, are due to the simultaneous integration with this seriesof other series having other degrees of integration. And thus anenormous number of qualitatively-contrasted kinds of consciousnessthat seem severally elementary prove to be composed of one simplekind of consciousness, combined and recombined with itself in multitudinousways.
"Can we stop short here? If the different sensations known assounds are built out of a common unit, is it not to be rationally inferredthat so likewise are the different sensations known as tastes, and thedifferent sensations known as odors, and the different sensations knownas colors? Nay, shall we not regard it as probable that there is a unitcommon to all these strongly-contrasted classes of sensations? If theunlikenesses among the sensations of each class may be due to unlikenessesamong the modes of aggregation of a unit of consciousness commonto them all; so too may the much greater unlikenesses betweenthe sensations of each class and those of other classes. There may be asingle primordial element of consciousness, and the countless kinds ofconsciousness may be produced by the compounding of this elementwith itself and the recompounding of its compounds with one anotherin higher and higher degrees: so producing increased multiplicity,variety, and complexity.
"Have we any clue to this primordial element? I think we have.That simple mental impression which proves to be the unit of compositionof the sensation of musical tone, is allied to certain other simplemental impressions differently originated. The subjective effect producedby a crack or noise that has no appreciable duration is littleelse than a nervous shock. Though we distinguish such a nervousshock as belonging to what we call sounds, yet it does not differ verymuch from nervous shocks of other kinds. An electric discharge sent[Pg 153]through the body causes a feeling akin to that which a sudden loud reportcauses. A strong unexpected impression made through the eyes,as by a flash of lightning, similarly gives rise to a start or shock; andthough the feeling so named seems, like the electric shock, to have thebody at large for its seat, and may therefore be regarded as the correlativerather of the efferent than of the afferent disturbance, yet on rememberingthe mental change that results from the instantaneoustransit of an object across the field of vision, I think it may be perceivedthat the feeling accompanying the efferent disturbance is itself reducedvery nearly to the same form. The state of consciousness so generatedis, in fact, comparable in quality to the initial state of consciousnesscaused by a blow (distinguishing it from the pain or other feeling thatcommences the instant after); which state of consciousness caused by ablow may be taken as the primitive and typical form of the nervousshock. The fact that sudden brief disturbances thus set up by differentstimuli through different sets of nerves cause feelings scarcelydistinguishable in quality will not appear strange when we recollect thatdistinguishableness of feeling implies appreciable duration; and thatwhen the duration is greatly abridged, nothing more is known than thatsome mental change has occurred and ceased. To have a sensation ofredness, to know a tone as acute or grave, to be conscious of a taste assweet, implies in each case a considerable continuity of state. If thestate does not last long enough to admit of its being contemplated, itcannot be classed as of this or that kind; and becomes a momentarymodification very similar to momentary modifications otherwise caused.
"It is possible, then—may we not even say probable?—that somethingof the same order as that which we call a nervous shock is theultimate unit of consciousness; and that all the unlikenesses amongour feelings result from unlike modes of integration of this ultimateunit. I say of the same order, because there are discernible differencesamong nervous shocks that are differently caused; and the primitivenervous shock probably differs somewhat from each of them. And Isay of the same order, for the further reason that while we mayascribe to them a general likeness in nature, we must suppose a greatunlikeness in degree. The nervous shocks recognized as such are violent—mustbe violent before they can be perceived amid the processionof multitudinous vivid feelings suddenly interrupted by them.But the rapidly-recurring nervous shocks of which the different formsof feeling consist, we must assume to be of comparatively moderate, oreven of very slight intensity. Were our various sensations and emotionscomposed of rapidly-recurring shocks as strong as those ordinarilycalled shocks, they would be unbearable; indeed life would cease atonce. We must think of them rather as successive faint pulses of subjectivechange, each having the same quality as the strong pulse ofsubjective change distinguished as a nervous shock."[168]
Convincing as this argument of Mr. Spencer's mayappear on a first reading, it is singular how weak it reallyis.[169] We do, it is true, when we study the connection betweena musical note and its outward cause, find the notesimple and continuous while the cause is multiple and discrete.Somewhere, then, thereis a transformation, reduction,or fusion. The question is, Where?—in the nerve-worldor in the mind-world? Really we have no experimentalproof by which to decide; and if decide we must,[Pg 155]analogy anda priori probability can alone guide us. Mr.Spencer assumes that the fusion must come to pass in themental world, and that the physical processes get throughair and ear, auditory nerve and medulla, lower brain andhemispheres, without their number being reduced. Figure25 will make the point clear.
Let the linea—b represent the threshold of consciousness:then everything drawn below that line will symbolizea physical process, everything above it will mean a factof mind. Let the crosses stand for the physical blows, thecircles for the events in successively higher orders of nerve-cells,and the horizontal marks for the facts of feeling.Spencer's argument implies that each order of cells transmitsjust as many impulses as it receives to the cells aboveit; so that if the blows come at the rate of 20,000 in a secondthe cortical cells discharge at the same rate, and one unitof feeling corresponds to each one of the 20,000 discharges.Then, and only then, does 'integration' occur, by the20,000 units of feeling 'compounding with themselves' intothe 'continuous state of consciousness' represented by theshort line at the top of the figure.
Now such an interpretation as this flies in the face ofphysical analogy, no less than of logical intelligibility.Consider physical analogy first,
A pendulum may be deflected by a single blow, and swingback. Will it swing back the more often the more we multiplythe blows? No; for if they rain upon the pendulum toofast, it will not swing at all but remain deflected in a sensiblystationary state. In other words, increasing the causenumerically need not equally increase numerically theeffect. Blow through a tube: you get a certain musicalnote; and increasing the blowing increases for a certain timethe loudness of the note. Will this be true indefinitely?No; for when a certain force is reached, the note, instead ofgrowing louder, suddenly disappears and is replaced by itshigher octave. Turn on the gas slightly and light it: youget a tiny flame. Turn on more gas, and the breadth of theflame increases. Will this relation increase indefinitely?No, again; for at a certain moment up shoots the flameinto a ragged streamer and begins to hiss. Send slowly[Pg 156]through the nerve of a frog's gastrocnemius muscle a successionof galvanic shocks: you get a succession of twitches.Increasing the number of shocks does not increase thetwitching; on the contrary, it stops it, and we have themuscle in the apparently stationary state of contractioncalled tetanus. This last fact is the true analogue of whatmust happen between the nerve-cell and the sensory fibre.It is certain that cells are more inert than fibres, and thatrapid vibrations in the latter can only arouse relativelysimple processes or states in the former. The highercells may have even a slower rate of explosion than thelower, and so the twenty thousand supposed blows of theouter air may be 'integrated' in the cortex into a verysmall number of cell-discharges in a second. This otherdiagram will serve to contrast this supposition withSpencer's.
In Fig. 26 all 'integration' occurs below thethreshold of consciousness. The frequency of cell-eventsbecomes more and more reduced as we approach the cellsto which feeling is most directly attached, until at last wecome to a condition of things symbolized by the largerellipse, which may be taken to stand for some rathermassive and slow process of tension and discharge in thecortical centres, to which,as a whole, the feeling of musicaltone symbolized by the line at the top of the diagramsimply and totally corresponds. It is as if a long fileof men were to start one afterthe other to reach a distant point.The road at first is good andthey keep their original distanceapart. Presently it is intersectedby bogs each worse than the last,so that the front men get so retardedthat the hinder ones catchup with them before the journeyis done, and all arrive togetherat the goal.[170]
On this supposition thereare no unperceived units ofmind-stuff preceding and composing the full consciousness.The latter is itself an immediate psychic fact and bearsan immediate relation to the neural state which is its unconditionalaccompaniment. Did each neural shock giverise to its own psychic shock, and the psychic shocks thencombine, it would be impossible to understand why severingone part of the central nervous system from anothershould break up the integrity of the consciousness. Thecut has nothing to do with the psychic world. The atomsof mind-stuff ought to float off from the nerve-matter oneither side of it, and come together over it and fuse, justas well as if it had not been made. We know, however,that they do not; that severance of the paths of conductionbetween a man's left auditory centre or optical centre andthe rest of his cortex will sever all communication betweenthe words which he hears or sees written and the rest ofhis ideas.
Moreover, if feelings can mix into atertium quid, whydo we not take a feeling of greenness and a feeling of redness,and make a feeling of yellowness out of them? Whyhas optics neglected the open road to truth, and wastedcenturies in disputing about theories of color-compositionwhich two minutes of introspection would have settledforever[171] We cannot mix feelings as such, though we maymix the objects we feel, and fromtheir mixture get newfeelings. We cannot even (as we shall later see) have twofeelings in our mind at once. At most we can comparetogetherobjects previously presented to us in distinct feelings;but then we find each object stubbornly maintaining[Pg 158]its separate identity before consciousness, whatever theverdict of the comparison may be.[172]
But there is a still more fatal objection to the theory ofmental units 'compounding with themselves' or 'integrating.'It is logically unintelligible; it leaves out the essentialfeature of all the 'combinations' we actually know.
All the 'combinations' which we actually know areeffects,wrought by the units said to be 'combined,'upon some entityother than themselves. Without this feature of a mediumor vehicle, the notion of combination has no sense.
"A multitude of contractile units, by joint action, and by being allconnected, for instance, with a single tendon, will pull at the same, andwill bring about a dynamical effect which is undoubtedly the resultantof their combined individual energies.... On the whole, tendons areto muscular fibres, and bones are to tendons, combining recipients ofmechanical energies. A medium of composition is indispensable to thesummation of energies. To realize the complete dependence of mechanicalresultants on a combining substratum, one may fancy for a momentall the individually contracting muscular elements severed from theirattachments. They might then still be capable of contracting with thesame energy as before, yet no co-operative result would be accomplished.The medium of dynamical combination would be wanting. The multipleenergies, singly exerted on no common recipient, would losethemselves on entirely isolated and disconnected efforts."[173]
In other words, no possible number of entities (call themas you like, whether forces, material particles, or mentalelements) can sumthemselves together. Each remains, inthe sum, what it always was; and the sum itself exists onlyfor a bystander who happens to overlook the units and to[Pg 159]apprehend the sum as such; or else it exists in the shapeof some othereffect on an entity external to the sum itself.Let it not be objected that H2 and O combine of themselvesinto 'water,' and thenceforward exhibit new properties.They do not. The 'water' is just the old atoms in thenew position, H-O-H; the 'new properties' are just theircombinedeffects, when in this position, upon external media,such as our sense-organs and the various reagents on whichwater may exert its properties and be known.
"Aggregations are organized wholes only when they behave as suchin the presence of other things. A statue is an aggregation of particlesof marble, but as such it has no unity. For the spectator it isone; in itself it is an aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an antcrawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. No summingup of parts can make an unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unlessthis unity exist for some other subject, not for the mass itself."[174]
Just so, in the parallelogram of forces, the 'forces'themselves do not combine into the diagonal resultant; abody is needed on which they may impinge, to exhibit theirresultant effect. No more do musical sounds combineperse into concords or discords. Concord and discord arenames for their combined effects on that external medium,theear.
Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings,the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them,shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can(whatever that may mean); still each remains the same feelingit always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorantof what the other feelings are and mean. There wouldbe a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group orseries of such feelings were set up, a consciousnessbelongingto the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feelingwould be a totally new fact; the 100 original feelingsmight, by a curious physical law, be a signal for itscreation,when they came together; but they would have no substantialidentity with it, nor it with them, and one couldnever deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligiblesense) say that theyevolved it.
Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve menand tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row orjam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word asintently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousnessof the whole sentence.[175] We talk of the 'spirit of the age,'and the 'sentiment of the people,' and in various ways wehypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be symbolicspeech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion,sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, andadditional to, that of the several individuals whom thewords 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. The privateminds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind.This has always been the invincible contention of thespiritualists against the associationists in Psychology,—acontention which we shall take up at greater length inChapter X. The associationists say the mind is constituted[Pg 161]by a multiplicity of distinct 'ideas'associated into a unity.There is, they say, an idea ofa, and also an idea ofb.Therefore, they say, there is an idea ofa +b, or ofa andbtogether. Which is like saying that the mathematicalsquare ofa plus that ofb is equal to the square ofa +b,a palpable untruth. Idea ofa + idea ofb isnot identicalwith idea of (a +b). It is one, they are two; in it, whatknowsa also knowsb; in them, what knowsa is expresslyposited as not knowingb; etc. In short, the two separateideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one andthe same thing as the 'associated' idea.
This is what the spiritualists keep saying; and since wedo, as a matter of fact, have the 'compounded' idea, and doknowa andb together, they adopt a farther hypothesis toexplain that fact. The separate ideas exist, they say, butaffect a third entity, the soul.This has the 'compounded'idea, if you please so to call it; and the compounded ideais an altogether new psychic fact to which the separate ideasstand in the relation, not of constituents, but of occasionsof production.
This argument of the spiritualists against the associationistshas never been answered by the latter. It holds goodagainst any talk about self-compounding amongst feelings,against any 'blending,' or 'complication,' or 'mentalchemistry,' or 'psychic synthesis,' which supposes a resultantconsciousness to float off from the constituentsper se,in the absence of a supernumerary principle of consciousnesswhich they may affect. The mind-stuff theory, inshort, is unintelligible. Atoms of feeling cannot composehigher feelings, any more than atoms of matter can composephysical things! The 'things,' for a clear-headed atomisticevolutionist, are not. Nothing is but the everlastingatoms. When grouped in a certain way,we name themthis 'thing' or that; but the thing we name has no existenceout of our mind. So of the states of mind which aresupposed to be compound because they know many differentthings together. Since indubitably such states do exist,they must exist as single new facts, effects, possibly, asthe spiritualists say, on the Soul (we will not decide that[Pg 162]point here), but at any rate independent and integral, andnot compounded of psychic atoms.[176]
The passion for unity and smoothness is in some mindsso insatiate that, in spite of the logical clearness of thesereasonings and conclusions, many will fail to be influencedby them. They establish a sort of disjointedness in thingswhich in certain quarters will appear intolerable. They[Pg 163]sweep away all chance of 'passing without break' eitherfrom the material to the mental, or from the lower to thehigher mental; and they thrust us back into a pluralism ofconsciousnesses—each arising discontinuously in the midstof two disconnected worlds, material and mental—which iseven worse than the old notion of the separate creation ofeach particular soul. But the malcontents will hardly tryto refute our reasonings by direct attack. It is more probablethat, turning their back upon them altogether, theywill devote themselves to sapping and mining the regionroundabout until it is a bog of logical liquefaction, into themidst of which all definite conclusions of any sort may betrusted ere long to sink and disappear.
Our reasonings have assumed that the 'integration' ofa thousand psychic units must be either just the units overagain, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but thenother than and additional to those units; that if a certainexisting fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at thesame time be that ofone feeling; for the essence of feelingis to be felt, and as a psychic existentfeels, so it mustbe.If the one feeling feels like no one of the thousand, in whatsense can it be said tobe the thousand? These assumptionsare what the monists will seek to undermine. The Hegelizersamongst them will take high ground at once, and saythat the glory and beauty of the psychic life is that in it allcontradictions find their reconciliation; and that it is justbecause the facts we are consideringare facts of the selfthat they are both one and many at the same time. Withthis intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend.As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club,one but overreaches one's self, and the thing one aims atgets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices.
The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, andtry to break down distinctness among mental states bymaking a distinction. This sounds paradoxical, but it isonly ingenious. The distinction is thatbetween the unconsciousand the conscious being of the mental state. It is thesovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology,and of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-groundfor whimsies. It has numerous champions,[Pg 164]and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must thereforeaccord it due consideration. In discussing the question:
it will be best to give the list of so-called proofs as brieflyas possible, and to follow each by its objection, as in scholasticbooks.[177]
First Proof. Theminimum visibile, theminimum audibile,are objects composed of parts. How can the whole affectthe sense unless each part does? And yet each part doesso without being separately sensible. Leibnitz calls thetotal consciousness an 'aperception,' the supposed insensibleconsciousness by the name of 'petites perceptions.'
"To judge of the latter," he says, "I am accustomed to use the exampleof the roaring of the sea with which one is assailed when near theshore. To hear this noise as one does, one must hear the parts whichcompose its totality, that is, the noise of each wave,... although thisnoise would not be noticed if its wave were alone. One must be affecteda little by the movement of one wave, one must have some perceptionof each several noise, however small it be. Otherwise one would nothear that of 100,000 waves, for of 100,000 zeros one can never make aquantity."[178]
Reply. This is an excellent example of the so-called'fallacy of division,' or predicating what is true only of acollection, of each member of the collection distributively.It no more follows that if a thousand things together causesensation, one thing alone must cause it, than it followsthat if one pound weight moves a balance, then one ounceweight must move it too, in less degree. One ounceweight does not move itat all; its movementbegins with[Pg 165]the pound. At most we can say that each ounce affectsit insome way which helps the advent of that movement.And so each infra-sensible stimulus to a nerveno doubt affects the nerve and helps the birth of sensationwhen the other stimuli come. But this affection isa nerve-affection, and there is not the slightest ground forsupposing it to be a 'perception' unconscious of itself."A certainquantity of the cause may be a necessary conditionto the production ofany of the effect,"[179] when thelatter is a mental state.
Second Proof. In all acquired dexterities and habits,secondarily automatic performances as they are called, wedo whatoriginally required a chain of deliberately consciousperceptions and volitions. As the actions still keeptheir intelligent character, intelligence must still presideover their execution. But since our consciousness seemsall the while elsewhere engaged, such intelligence mustconsist of unconscious perceptions, inferences, and volitions.
Reply. There is more than one alternative explanationin accordance with larger bodies of fact. One is that theperceptions and volitions in habitual actions may be performedconsciously, only so quickly and inattentively thatnomemory of them remains. Another is that the consciousnessof these actions exists, but issplit-off from the rest ofthe consciousness of the hemispheres. We shall find inChapter X numerous proofs of the reality of this split-offcondition of portions of consciousness. Since in man thehemispheres indubitably co-operate in these secondarilyautomatic acts, it will not do to say either that they occurwithout consciousness or that their consciousness is that ofthe lower centres, which we know nothing about. Buteither lack of memory or split-off cortical consciousnesswill certainly account for all of the facts.[180]
Third Proof. Thinking of A, we presently find ourselvesthinking of C. Now B is the natural logical linkbetween A and C, but we have no consciousness of havingthought of B. It must have been in our mind 'unconsciously,'[Pg 166]and in that state affected the sequence of ourideas.
Reply. Here again we have a choice between moreplausible explanations. Either B was consciously there,but the next instant forgotten, or itsbrain-tract alone wasadequate to do the whole work of coupling A with C, withoutthe idea B being aroused at all, whether consciouslyor 'unconsciously.'
Fourth Proof. Problems unsolved when we go to bedare found solved in the morning when we wake. Somnambulistsdo rational things. We awaken punctually at anhour predetermined overnight, etc. Unconscious thinking,volition, time-registration, etc., must have presided overthese acts.
Reply. Consciousness forgotten, as in the hypnotictrance.
Fifth Proof. Some patients will often, in an attackof epileptiform unconsciousness, go through complicatedprocesses, such as eating a dinner in a restaurant and payingfor it, or making a violent homicidal attack. In trance,artificial or pathological, long and complex performances,involving the use of the reasoning powers, are executed, ofwhich the patient is wholly unaware on coming to.
Reply. Rapid and complete oblivescence is certainlythe explanation here. The analogue again is hypnotism.Tell the subject of an hypnotic trance, during his trance,that hewill remember, and he may remember everythingperfectly when he awakes, though without your telling himno memory would have remained. The extremely rapidoblivescence of commondreams is a familiar fact.
Sixth Proof. In a musical concord the vibrations of theseveral notes are in relatively simple ratios. The mindmust unconsciously count the vibrations, and be pleased bythe simplicity which it finds.
Reply. The brain-process produced by the simple ratiosmay be as directly agreeable as the conscious process ofcomparing them would be. No counting, either consciousor 'unconscious,' is required.
Seventh Proof. Every hour we make theoretic judgmentsand emotional reactions, and exhibit practical tendencies,[Pg 167]for which we can give no explicit logical justification, butwhich are good inferences from certain premises. Weknow more than we can say. Our conclusions run aheadof our power to analyze their grounds. A child, ignorantof the axiom that two things equal to the same are equal toeach other, applies it nevertheless in his concrete judgmentsunerringly. A boor will use thedictum de omni et nullo whois unable to understand it in abstract terms.
"We seldom consciously think how our house is painted, what theshade of it is, what the pattern of our furniture is, or whether the dooropens to the right or left, or out or in. But how quickly should wenotice a change in any of these things! Think of the door you havemost often opened, and tell, if you can, whether it opens to the right orleft, out or in. Yet when you open the door you never put the handon the wrong side to find the latch, nor try to push it when it openswith a pull.... What is the precise characteristic in your friend's stepthat enables you to recognize it when he is coming? Did you ever consciouslythink the idea, 'if I run into a solid piece of matter I shall gethurt, or be hindered in my progress'? and do you avoid running intoobstacles because you ever distinctly conceived, or consciously acquiredand thought, that idea?"[181]
Most of our knowledge is at all times potential. We actin accordance with the whole drift of what we have learned,but few items rise into consciousness at the time. Manyof them, however, we may recall at will. All this co-operationof unrealized principles and facts, of potentialknowledge, with our actual thought is quite inexplicableunless we suppose the perpetual existence of an immensemass ofideas in an unconscious state, all of them exerting asteady pressure and influence upon our conscious thinking,and many of them in such continuity with it as ever andanon to become conscious themselves.
Reply. No such mass of ideas is supposable. But thereare all kinds of short-cuts in the brain; and processes notaroused strongly enough to give any 'idea' distinct enoughto be a premise, may, nevertheless, help to determine justthat resultant process of whose psychic accompaniment thesaid ideawould be a premise, if the idea existed at all. Acertain overtone may be a feature of my friend's voice, and[Pg 168]may conspire with the other tones thereof to arouse in mybrain the process which suggests to my consciousness hisname. And yet I may be ignorant of the overtoneper se,and unable, even when he speaks, to tell whether it be thereor no. It leads me to the idea of the name; but it producesin me no such cerebral process as that to which theidea of the overtone would correspond. And similarly of ourlearning. Each subject we learn leaves behind it a modificationof the brain, which makes it impossible for the latterto react upon things just as it did before; and the result ofthe difference may be a tendency to act, though with no idea,much as we shouldif we were consciously thinking aboutthe subject. The becoming conscious of the latter at willis equally readily explained as a result of the brain-modification.This, as Wundt phrases it, is a 'predisposition' tobring forth the conscious idea of the original subject, a predispositionwhich other stimuli and brain-processes mayconvert into an actual result. But such a predisposition isno 'unconscious idea;' it is only a particular collocation ofthe molecules in certain tracts of the brain.
Eighth Proof. Instincts, as pursuits of ends by appropriatemeans, are manifestations of intelligence; but as theends are not foreseen, the intelligence must be unconscious.
Reply. Chapter XXIV will show that all the phenomenaof instinct are explicable as actions of the nervous system,mechanically discharged by stimuli to the senses.
Ninth Proof. In sense-perception we have results inabundance, which can only be explained as conclusionsdrawn by a process of unconscious inference from datagiven to sense. A small human image on the retina isreferred, not to a pygmy, but to a distant man of normalsize. A certain gray patch is inferred to be a white objectseen in a dim light. Often the inference leads us astray:e.g., pale gray against pale green looks red, because wetake a wrong premise to argue from. We think a greenfilm is spread over everything; and knowing that undersuch a film a red thing would look gray, we wrongly inferfrom the gray appearance that a red thing must be there.Our study of space-perception in Chapter XVIII will giveabundant additional examples both of the truthful and illusory[Pg 169]percepts which have been explained to result fromunconscious logic operations.
Reply. That chapter will also in many cases refutethis explanation. Color-and light-contrast are certainlypurely sensational affairs, in which inference plays no part.This has been satisfactorily proved by Hering,[182] and shallbe treated of again in Chapter XVII. Our rapid judgmentsof size, shape, distance, and the like, are best explainedas processes of simple cerebral association. Certainsense-impressions directly stimulate brain-tracts, ofwhose activity ready-made conscious percepts are theimmediate psychic counterparts. They do this by a mechanismeither connate or acquired by habit. It is to beremarked that Wundt and Helmholtz, who in their earlierwritings did more than any one to give vogue to the notionthat unconscious inference is a vital factor in sense-perception,have seen fit on later occasions to modify their viewsand to admit that resultslike those of reasoning may accruewithout any actual reasoning process unconsciously takingplace.[183] Maybe the excessive and riotous applications madeby Hartmann of their principle have led them to thischange. It would be natural to feel towards him as thesailor in the story felt towards the horse who got his footinto the stirrup,—"If you're going to get on, I must get off."
Hartmann fairly boxes the compass of the universe withthe principle of unconscious thought. For him there is nonamable thing that does not exemplify it. But his logicis so lax and his failure to consider the most obvious alternativesso complete that it would, on the whole, be awaste of time to look at his arguments in detail. The sameis true of Schopenhauer, in whom the mythology reachesits climax. The visual perception, for example, of anobject in space results, according to him, from the intellectperforming the following operations, all unconscious. First,it apprehends the inverted retinal image and turns it rightside up, constructingflat space as a preliminary operation;[Pg 170]then it computes from the angle of convergence of the eyeballsthat the two retinal images must be the projection ofbut a singleobject; thirdly, it constructs the third dimensionand sees this objectsolid; fourthly, it assigns itsdistance;and fifthly, in each and all of these operations it getsthe objective character of what it 'constructs' by unconsciouslyinferring it as the only possiblecause of some sensationwhich it unconsciously feels.[184] Comment on thisseems hardly called for. It is, as I said, pure mythology.
None of these facts, then, appealed to so confidently inproof of the existence of ideas in an unconscious state,prove anything of the sort. They prove either that consciousideas were present which the next instant wereforgotten; or they prove that certain results,similar toresults of reasoning, may be wrought out by rapid brain-processesto which no ideation seems attached. But thereis one more argument to be alleged, less obviously insufficientthan those which we have reviewed, and demandinga new sort of reply.
Tenth Proof. There is a great class of experiences inour mental life which may be described as discoveries thata subjective condition which we have been having is reallysomething different from what we had supposed. We suddenlyfind ourselves bored by a thing which we thought wewere enjoying well enough; or in love with a person whomwe imagined we only liked. Or else we deliberately analyzeour motives, and find that at bottom they containjealousies and cupidities which we little suspected to bethere. Our feelings towards people are perfect wells ofmotivation, unconscious of itself, which introspection bringsto light. And our sensations likewise: we constantly discovernew elements in sensations which we have been inthe habit of receiving all our days, elements, too, whichhave been there from the first, since otherwise we shouldhave been unable to distinguish the sensations containingthem from others nearly allied. The elements must exist,for we use them to discriminate by; but they must exist in[Pg 171]an unconscious state, since we so completely fail to singlethem out.[185] The books of the analytic school of psychologyabound in examples of the kind. Who knows thecountless associations that mingle with his each and everythought? Who can pick apart all the nameless feelingsthat stream in at every moment from his various internalorgans, muscles, heart, glands, lungs, etc., and compose intheir totality his sense of bodily life? Who is aware of thepart played by feelings of innervation and suggestions ofpossible muscular exertion in all his judgments of distance,shape, and size? Consider, too, the difference between asensation which we simplyhave and one which weattend to.Attention gives results that seem like fresh creations; andyet the feelings and elements of feeling which it revealsmust have been already there—in an unconscious state.We all knowpractically the difference between the so-calledsonant and the so-called surd consonants, between D, B, Z,G, V, and T, P, S, K, F, respectively. But comparatively fewpersons know the differencetheoretically, until their attentionhas been called to what it is, when they perceive itreadily enough. The sonants are nothing but the surdsplus a certain element, which is alike in all, superadded.That element is the laryngeal sound with which they areuttered, surds having no such accompaniment. When wehear the sonant letter, both its component elements mustreally be in our mind; but we remain unconscious of whatthey really are, and mistake the letter for a simple qualityof sound until an effort of attention teaches us its two components.There exist a host of sensations which most menpass through life and never attend to, and consequentlyhave only in an unconscious way. The feelings of openingand closing the glottis, of making tense the tympanic membrane,of accommodating for near vision, of intercepting thepassage from the nostrils to the throat, are instances ofwhat I mean. Every one gets these feelings many times anhour; but few readers, probably, are conscious of exactlywhat sensations are meant by the names I have just used.All these facts, and an enormous number more, seem to[Pg 172]prove conclusively that, in addition to the fully consciousway in which an idea may exist in the mind, there is alsoan unconscious way; that it is unquestionably the sameidentical idea which exists in these two ways; and thattherefore any arguments against the mind-stuff theory,based on the notion thatesse in our mental life issentiri,and that an idea must consciously be felt as what it is, fallto the ground.
Objection. These reasonings are one tissue of confusion.Two states of mind which refer to the same external reality,or two states of mind the later one of which refers to theearlier, are described as the same state of mind, or 'idea,'published as it were in two editions; and then whateverqualities of the second edition are found openly lacking inthe first are explained as having really been there, only inan 'unconscious' way. It would be difficult to believe thatintelligent men could be guilty of so patent a fallacy, werenot the history of psychology there to give the proof. Thepsychological stock-in-trade of some authors is the beliefthat two thoughts about one thing are virtually the samethought, and that this same thought may in subsequentreflections become more and moreconscious of what it reallywas all along from the first. But once make the distinctionbetween simplyhaving an idea at the moment of its presenceand subsequently knowing all sorts of thingsabout it;make moreover that between a state of mind itself, takenas a subjective fact, on the one hand, and the objectivething it knows, on the other, and one has no difficulty inescaping from the labyrinth.
Take the latter distinction first: Immediately all thearguments based on sensations and the new features inthem which attention brings to light fall to the ground.The sensations of the B and the V when we attend to thesesounds and analyze out the laryngeal contribution whichmakes them differ from P and F respectively, aredifferentsensations from those of the B and the V taken in a simpleway. They stand, it is true, for thesame letters, and thusmean thesame outer realities; but they are different mentalaffections, and certainly depend on widely different processesof cerebral activity. It is unbelievable that two mental[Pg 173]states so different as the passive reception of a sound as awhole, and the analysis of that whole into distinct ingredientsby voluntary attention, should be due to processesat all similar. And the subjective difference does not consistin that the first-named stateis the second in an 'unconscious'form. It is an absolute psychic difference, evengreater than that between the states to which two differentsurds will give rise. The same is true of the other sensationschosen as examples. The man who learns for thefirst time how the closure of his glottis feels, experiences inthis discovery an absolutely new psychic modification, thelike of which he never had before. He had another feelingbefore, a feeling incessantly renewed, and of which the sameglottis was the organic starting point; but that was not thelater feeling in an 'unconscious' state; it was a feelingsuigeneris altogether, although it took cognizance of the samebodily part, the glottis. We shall see, hereafter, that thesame reality can be cognized by an endless number ofpsychic states, which may differtoto cœlo among themselves,without ceasing on that account to refer to the reality inquestion. Each of them is a conscious fact: none of themhas any mode of being whatever except a certain way ofbeing felt at the moment of being present. It is simplyunintelligible and fantastical to say, because they point tothe same outer reality, that they must therefore be so manyeditions of the same 'idea,' now in a conscious and now inan 'unconscious' phase. There is only one 'phase' inwhich an idea can be, and that is a fully conscious condition.If it is not in that condition, then it is not at all.Something else is, in its place. The something else may bea merely physical brain-process, or it may be another consciousidea. Either of these things may perform much thesamefunction as the first idea, refer to the same object,and roughly stand in the same relations to the upshot ofour thought. But that is no reason why we should throwaway the logical principle of identity in psychology, andsay that, however it may fare in the outer world, the mindat any rate is a place in which a thing can be all kinds ofother things without ceasing to be itself as well.
Now take the other cases alleged, and the other distinction,[Pg 174]that namely betweenhaving a mental state and knowingallabout it. The truth is here even simpler to unravel.When I decide that I have, without knowing it, been forseveral weeks in love, I am simply giving a name to a statewhich previouslyI have not named, but which was fully conscious;which had no residual mode of being except themanner in which it was conscious; and which, though it wasa feeling towards the same person for whom I now have amuch more inflamed feeling, and though it continuously ledinto the latter, and is similar enough to be called by thesame name, is yet in no sense identical with the latter, andleast of all in an 'unconscious' way. Again, the feelings fromour viscera and other dimly-felt organs, the feelings ofinnervation (if such there be), and those of muscular exertionwhich, in our spatial judgments, are supposed unconsciouslyto determine what we shall perceive, are just exactlywhat we feel them, perfectly determinate conscious states,not vague editions of other conscious states. They may befaint and weak; they may be very vague cognizers of thesame realities which other conscious states cognize and nameexactly; they may be unconscious of much in the realitywhich the other states are conscious of. But that does notmake themin themselves a whit dim or vague or unconscious.Theyare eternally as they feel when they exist,and can, neither actually nor potentially, be identified withanything else than their own faint selves. A faint feelingmay be looked back upon and classified and understood inits relations to what went before or after it in the stream ofthought. But it, on the one hand, and the later state ofmind which knows all these things about it, on the other,are surely not two conditions, one conscious and the other'unconscious,' of the same identical psychic fact. It is thedestiny of thought that, on the whole, our early ideas aresuperseded by later ones, giving fuller accounts of the samerealities. But none the less do the earlier and the laterideas preserve their own several substantive identities as somany several successive states of mind. To believe the contrarywould make any definite science of psychology impossible.The only identity to be found among our successiveideas is their similarity of cognitive or representative[Pg 175]function as dealing with the same objects. Identity ofbeing, there is none; and I believe that throughout the restof this volume the reader will reap the advantages of thesimpler way of formulating the facts which is here begun.[186]
So we seem not only to have ascertained the unintelligibilityof the notion that a mental fact can be two thingsat once, and that what seems like one feeling, of bluenessfor example, or of hatred, may really and 'unconsciously'be ten thousand elementary feelings which do not resembleblueness or hatred at all, but we find that we canexpress all the observed facts in other ways. The mind-stuff[Pg 176]theory, however, though scotched, is, we may be sure,not killed. If we ascribe consciousness to unicellularanimalcules, then single cells can have it, and analogyshould make us ascribe it to the several cells of the brain,each individually taken. And what a convenience would itnot be for the psychologist if, by the adding together of variousdoses of this separate-cell-consciousness, he could treatthought as a kind of stuff or material, to be measured outin great or small amount, increased and subtracted from,and baled about at will! He feels an imperious cravingto be allowed toconstruct synthetically the successivemental states which he describes. The mind-stuff theoryso easily admits of the construction being made, that itseems certain that 'man's unconquerable mind' will devotemuch future pertinacity and ingenuity to setting it on itslegs again and getting it into some sort of plausible working-order.I will therefore conclude the chapter with someconsideration of the remaining difficulties which beset thematter as it at present stands.
It will be remembered that in our criticism of the theoryof the integration of successive conscious units into a feelingof musical pitch, we decided that whatever integrationthere was was that of the air-pulses into a simpler and simplersort of physical effect, as the propagations of materialchange got higher and higher in the nervous system. Atlast, we said (p. 23), there results some simple and massiveprocess in the auditory centres of the hemispherical cortex,to which,as a whole, the feeling of musical pitch directlycorresponds. Already, in discussing the localization offunctions in the brain, I had said (pp. 158-9) that consciousnessaccompanies the stream of innervation through thatorgan and varies in quality with the character of the currents,being mainly of things seen if the occipital lobes aremuch involved, of things heard if the action is focalized inthe temporal lobes, etc., etc.; and I had added that a vagueformula like this was as much as one could safely ventureon in the actual state of physiology. The facts of mental[Pg 177]deafness and blindness, of auditory and optical aphasia,show us that the whole brain must act together if certainthoughts are to occur. The consciousness, which is itselfan integral thing not made of parts, 'corresponds' to theentire activity of the brain, whatever that may be, at themoment. This is a way of expressing the relation of mindand brain from which I shall not depart during the remainderof the book, because it expresses the barephenomenal fact with no hypothesis, and is exposed to nosuch logical objections as we have found to cling to thetheory of ideas in combination.
Nevertheless, this formula which is so unobjectionableif taken vaguely, positivistically, or scientifically, as amere empirical law of concomitance between our thoughtsand our brain, tumbles to pieces entirely if we assumeto represent anything more intimate or ultimate by it.The ultimate of ultimate problems, of course, in thestudy of the relations of thought and brain, is to understandwhy and how such disparate things are connectedat all. But before that problem is solved (if it ever issolved) there is a less ultimate problem which must firstbe settled. Before the connection of thought and braincan be explained, it must at least bestated in an elementaryform; and there are great difficulties about so stating it.To state it in elementary form one must reduce it to itslowest terms and know which mental fact and which cerebralfact are, so to speak, in immediate juxtaposition. We mustfind the minimal mental fact whose being reposes directlyon a brain-fact; and we must similarly find the minimalbrain-event which will have a mental counterpart at all.Between the mental and the physical minima thus foundthere will be an immediate relation, the expression ofwhich, if we had it, would be the elementary psycho-physiclaw.
Our own formula escapes the unintelligibility of psychicatoms bytaking the entire thought (even of a complexobject)as the minimum with which it deals on the mentalside. But in taking the entire brain-process as its minimalfact on the material side it confronts other difficultiesalmost as bad.
In the first place, it ignores analogies on which certaincritics will insist, those, namely, between the compositionof the total brain-process and that of theobject of thethought. The total brain-process is composed of parts,of simultaneous processes in the seeing, the hearing, thefeeling, and other centres. The object thought of is alsocomposed of parts, some of which are seen, others heard,others perceived by touch and muscular manipulation."How then," these critics will say, "should the thoughtnot itself be composed of parts, each the counterpartof a part of the object and of a part of the brain-process?"So natural is this way of looking at the matterthat it has given rise to what is on the whole the mostflourishing of all psychological systems—that of the Lockianschool of associated ideas—of which school the mind-stufftheory is nothing but the last and subtlest offshoot.
The second difficulty is deeper still.The 'entire brain-process'is not a physical fact at all. It is the appearance toan onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts. 'Entirebrain' is nothing but our name for the way in which amillion of molecules arranged in certain positions mayaffect our sense. On the principles of the corpuscular ormechanical philosophy, the only realities are the separatemolecules, or at most the cells. Their aggregation intoa 'brain' is a fiction of popular speech. Such a fictioncannot serve as the objectively real counterpart to anypsychic state whatever. Only a genuinely physical fact canso serve. But the molecular fact is the only genuine physicalfact—whereupon we seem, if we are to have an elementarypsycho-physic law at all, thrust right back upon somethinglike the mind-stuff theory, for the molecular fact,being an element of the 'brain,' would seem naturally tocorrespond, not to the total thoughts, but to elements inthe thought.
What shall we do? Many would find relief at thispoint in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the'awe' which we should feel at having such a principle totake final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoicethat the finite and separatist view of things with which westarted had at last developed its contradictions, and was[Pg 179]about to lead us dialectically upwards to some 'highersynthesis' in which inconsistencies cease from troublingand logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity,but I can take no comfort in such devices for making aluxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritualchloroform. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnawthe file forever!
The most rational thing to do is to suspect that theremay be a third possibility, an alternative supposition whichwe have not considered. Now thereis an alternative supposition—asupposition moreover which has been frequentlymade in the history of philosophy, and which isfreer from logical objections than either of the views wehave ourselves discussed. It may be called thetheory ofpolyzoism or multiple monadism; and it conceives the matterthus:
Every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness,which no other cell knows anything about, all individualconsciousnesses being 'ejective' to each other. There is,however, among the cells one central or pontifical one towhichour consciousness is attached. But the events of all theother cells physically influence this arch-cell; and throughproducing their joint effects on it, these other cells may besaid to 'combine.' The arch-cell is, in fact, one of those'external media' without which we saw that no fusion orintegration of a number of things can occur. The physicalmodifications of the arch-cell thus form a sequence ofresults in the production whereof every other cell has ashare, so that, as one might say, every other cell is representedtherein. And similarly, the conscious correlates tothese physical modifications form a sequence of thoughtsor feelings, each one of which is, as to its substantivebeing, an integral and uncompounded psychic thing, buteach one of which may (in the exercise of itscognitivefunction) beaware ofthings many and complicated inproportion to the number of other cells that have helpedto modify the central cell.
By a conception of this sort, one incurs neither of the[Pg 180]internal contradictions which we found to beset the othertwo theories. One has no unintelligible self-combining ofpsychic units to account for on the one hand; and on theother hand, one need not treat as the physical counterpartof the stream of consciousness under observation, a 'totalbrain-activity' which is non-existent as a genuinely physicalfact. But, to offset these advantages, one has physiologicaldifficulties and improbabilities. There is no cellor group of cells in the brain of such anatomical or functionalpre-eminence as to appear to be the keystone or centreof gravity of the whole system. And even if there weresuch a cell, the theory of multiple monadism would, instrictness of thought, have no right to stop at it and treatit as a unit. The cell is no more a unit, materially considered,than the total brain is a unit. It is a compound ofmolecules, just as the brain is a compound of cells and fibres.And the molecules, according to the prevalent physical theories,are in turn compounds of atoms. The theory in question,therefore, if radically carried out, must set up for itselementary and irreducible psycho-physic couple, not thecell and its consciousness, but the primordial and eternalatom and its consciousness. We are back at Leibnitzianmonadism, and therewith leave physiology behind us anddive into regions inaccessible to experience and verification;and our doctrine, although not self-contradictory, becomesso remote and unreal as to be almost as bad as if it were.Speculative minds alone will take an interest in it; andmetaphysics, not psychology, will be responsible for itscareer. That the career may be a successful one must beadmitted as a possibility—a theory which Leibnitz, Herbart,and Lotze have taken under their protection musthave some sort of a destiny.
But is this my last word? By no means. Manyreaders have certainly been saying to themselves for thelast few pages: "Why on earth doesn't the poor man saythe Soul and have done with it?" Other readers, of anti-spiritualistictraining and prepossessions, advanced thinkers,or popular evolutionists, will perhaps be a little surprised[Pg 181]to find this much-despised word now sprung uponthem at the end of so physiological a train of thought. Butthe plain fact is that all the arguments for a 'pontifical cell'or an 'arch-monad' are also arguments for that well-knownspiritual agent in which scholastic psychology and common-sensehave always believed. And my only reason forbeating the bushes so, and not bringing it in earlier as apossible solution of our difficulties, has been that by thisprocedure I might perhaps force some of these materialisticminds to feel the more strongly the logical respectability ofthe spiritualistic position. The fact is that one cannotafford to despise any of these great traditional objects ofbelief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a greatdrift of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in theirdirection. If there be such entities as Souls in the universe,they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrencesthat go on in the nervous centres. To the state of the entirebrain at a given moment they may respond by inwardmodifications of their own. These changes of state may bepulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few or many,simple or complex. The soul would be thus a mediumupon which (to use our earlier phraseology) the manifoldbrain-processescombine their effects. Not needing to considerit as the 'inner aspect' of any arch-molecule or brain-cell,we escape that physiological improbability; and as itspulses of consciousness are unitary and integral affairs fromthe outset, we escape the absurdity of supposing feelingswhich exist separately and then 'fuse together' by themselves.The separateness is in the brain-world, on thistheory, and the unity in the soul-world; and the onlytrouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one ofunderstanding how one sort of world or existent thing canaffect or influence another at all. This trouble, however,since it also exists inside of both worlds, and involvesneither physical improbability nor logical contradiction, isrelatively small.
I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced insome mysterious way by the brain-states and responding tothem by conscious affections of its own, seems to me theline of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained.
If it does not strictlyexplain anything, it is at any rateless positively objectionable than either mind-stuff or amaterial-monad creed.The barephenomenon,however, theimmediately knownthing which on the mental side is in appositionwith the entire brain-process is the state of consciousnessand not the soul itself. Many of the stanchest believers inthe soul admit that we know it only as an inference fromexperiencing itsstates. InChapter X, accordingly, we mustreturn to its consideration again, andask ourselves whether,after all, the ascertainment of a blank unmediated correspondence,term for term, of the succession of states of consciousnesswith the succession of total brain-processes, be not the simplestpsycho-physic formula, and the last word of a psychologywhich contents itself with verifiable laws, and seeks only tobe clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses. Such a mere admissionof the empirical parallelism will there appear thewisest course. By keeping to it, our psychology will remainpositivistic and non-metaphysical; and although thisis certainly only a provisional halting-place, and thingsmust some day be more thoroughly thought out, we shallabide there in this book, and just as we have rejected mind-dust,we shall take no account of the soul. The spiritualisticreader may nevertheless believe in the soul if he will;whilst the positivistic one who wishes to give a tinge ofmystery to the expression of his positivism can continue tosay that nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed usof clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two thingshang indubitably together and determine each other's being,but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
[160] Psychol. § 62.
[161]Ibid. § 272.
[162] Fragments of Science, 5th ed., p. 420.
[163] Belfast Address, 'Nature,' August 20, 1874, p. 318. I cannot helpremarking that the disparity between motions and feelings on which theseauthors lay so much stress, is somewhat less absolute than at first sightit seems. There are categories common to the two worlds. Not only temporalsuccession (as Helmholtz admits, Physiol. Optik, p. 445), but suchattributes as intensity, volume, simplicity or complication, smooth or impededchange, rest or agitation, are habitually predicated of both physicalfacts and mental facts. Where such analogies obtain, the things do havesomething in common.
[164] Psychology, § 131
[165] 'Nature,' as above, 317-8.
[166] 'Nascent' is Mr. Spencer's great word. In showing how at a certainpoint consciousness must appear upon the evolving scene this author fairlyoutdoes himself in vagueness.
"In its higher forms, Instinct is probably accompanied by a rudimentaryconsciousness. There cannot be co-ordination of many stimuli withoutsome ganglion through which they are all brought into relation. In theprocess of bringing them into relation, this ganglion must be subject tothe influence of each—must undergo many changes. And the quick successionof changes in a ganglion, implying as it does perpetual experiencesof differences and likenesses, constitutes theraw material of consciousness.Theimplication is that as fast as Instinct is developed, some kind of consciousnessbecomes nascent." (Psychology, § 195.)
The words 'raw material' and 'implication' which I have italicizedare the words which do theevolving. They are supposed to have all therigor which the 'synthetic philosophy' requires. In the following passage,when 'impressions' pass through a common 'centre of communication'in succession (much as people might pass into a theatre through a turnstile)consciousness, non-existent until then, is supposed to result:
"Separate impressions are received by the senses—by different parts of thebody. If they go no further than the places at which they are received, theyare useless. Or if only some of them are brought into relation with one another,they are useless. That an effectual adjustment may be made, they mustbe all brought into relation with one another. But this implies some centreof communication common to them all, through which they severally pass;and as they cannot pass through it simultaneously, they must pass throughit in succession. So that as the external phenomena responded to becomegreater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidityof the changes to which this common centre of communication is subjectmust increase—there must result an unbroken series of these changes-theremust arise a consciousness.
"Hence the progress of the correspondence between the organism and itsenvironment necessitates a gradual reduction of the sensorial changes to asuccession; and by so doingevolves a distinct consciousness—a consciousnessthat becomes higher as the succession becomes more rapid and the correspondencemore complete." (Ibid. § 179.)
It is true that in the Fortnightly Review (vol. xiv, p. 716) Mr. Spencerdenies that he means by this passage to tell us anything about the origin ofconsciousness at all. It resembles, however, too many other places in hisPsychology (e.g. §§ 43, 110, 244) not to be taken as a serious attempt to explainhow consciousness must at a certain point be 'evolved.' That,when a critic calls his attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencershould say he never meant anything particular by them, is simply anexample of the scandalous vagueness with which this sort of 'chromo-philosophy'is carried on.
[167] His own words are: "Mistakes are made in the sense that he admitshaving been touched, when in reality it was radiant heat that affected hisskin. In our own before-mentioned experiments there was never any deceptionon the entire palmar side of the hand or on the face. On the backof the hand in one case in a series of 60 stimulations 4 mistakes occurred,in another case 2 mistakes in 45 stimulations. On the extensor side of theupper arm 3 deceptions out of 48 stimulations were noticed, and in the caseof another individual, 1 out of 31. In one case over the spine 3 deceptionsin a series of 11 excitations were observed; in another, 4 out of 19. Onthe lumbar spine 6 deceptions came among 29 stimulations, and again 4out of 7. There is certainly not yet enough material on which to rest acalculation of probabilities, but any one can easily convince himself thaton the back there is no question of even a moderately accurate discriminationbetween warmth and a light pressure so far as but small portions ofskin come into play. It has been as yet impossible to make correspondingexperiments with regard to sensibility to cold." (Lehrb. d. Anat. u.Physiol. d. Sinnesorgane (1862), p. 29.)
[168] Principles of Psychology, § 60.
[169] Oddly enough, Mr. Spencer seems quite unaware of thegeneral functionof the theory of elementary units of mind-stuff in the evolutionaryphilosophy. We have seen it to be absolutely indispensable, if that philosophyis to work, to postulate consciousness in the nebula,—-the simplestway being, of course, to suppose every atom animated. Mr. Spencer, however,will have it (e.g. First Principles, § 71) that consciousness is only theoccasional result of the 'transformation' of a certain amount of 'physicalforce' to which it is 'equivalent.' Presumably a brain must already be therebefore any such 'transformation' can take place; and so the argumentquoted in the text stands as a mere local detail, without general bearings.
[170] The compounding of colors may be dealt with in an identical way.Helmholtz has shown that if green light and red light fall simultaneouslyon the retina, we see the color yellow. The mind-stuff theory would interpretthis as a ease where the feeling green and the feeling red 'combine'into thetertium quid of feeling, yellow. What really occurs is nodoubt that a third kind of nerve-process is set up when the combined lightsimpinge on the retina,—not simply the process of red plus the process ofgreen, but something quite different from both or either. Of course, then,thereare no feelings, either of red or of green, present to the mind at all;but the feeling of yellow whichis there, answers as directly to the nerve-processwhich momentarily then exists, as the feelings of green and redwould answer to their respective nerve-processes did the latter happen to betaking place.
[171] Cf. Mill's Logic, book vi, chap. iv, § 3.
[172] I find in my students an almost invincible tendency to think that wecan immediately perceive that feelings do combine. "What!" they say,"is not the taste of lemonade composed of that of lemonplus that ofsugar?" This is taking the combining of objects for that of feelings.The physical lemonade contains both the lemon and the sugar, but itstaste does not contain their tastes, for if there are any two things whichare certainlynot present in the taste of lemonade, those are the lemon-souron the one hand and the sugar-sweet on the other. These tastes areabsent utterly. The entirely new taste which is presentresembles, it is true,both those tastes; but inChapter XIII we shall see that resemblance cannot always be held to involve partial identity.
[174] J. Royce, 'Mind,' vi, p. 376. Lotze has set forth the truth of this lawmore clearly and copiously than any other writer. Unfortunately he is toolengthy to quote. See his Microcosmus, bk. ii, ch. i, § 5; Metaphysik,§§ 242, 260; Outlines of Metaphysics, part ii, chap. i, §§ 3, 4, 5. Comparealso Reid's Intellectual Powers, essay v, chap. iii,ad fin.; Bowne's Metaphysics,pp. 361-76; St. J. Mivart: Nature and Thought, pp. 98-101; E.Gurney: 'Monism,' in 'Mind,' vi, 153; and the article by Prof. Royce,just quoted, on 'Mind-stuff and Reality.'
In defence of the mind-stuff view, see W. K. Clifford: 'Mind,' iii, 57 (reprintedin his 'Lectures and Essays,' ii, 71); G. T. Fechner, Psychophysik,Bd. ii, cap. xlv; H. Taine: on Intelligence, bk. iii; E. Haeckel:'Zellseelen u. Seelenzellen' in Gesammelte pop. Vorträge, Bd. i, p. 143; W.S. Duncan: Conscious Matter,passim; H. Zöllner: Natur d. Cometen, pp.320 ff.; Alfred Barratt: 'Physical Ethic' and 'Physical Metempiric,'passim;J. Soury: 'Hylozoismus,' in 'Kosmos,' V. Jahrg., Heft x, p. 241; A.Main: 'Mind,' i, 292, 431, 566; ii, 129, 402;Id. Revue Philos., ii, 86, 88,419; iii, 51, 502; iv, 402; F. W. Frankland: 'Mind,' vi, 116; Whittaker:'Mind,' vi, 498 (historical); Morton Prince: The Nature of Mind andHuman Automatism (1885); A. Riehl: Der philosophische Kriticismus, Bd.ii, Theil 2, 2ter Abschnitt, 2tes Cap. (1887). The clearest of all theseStatements is, as far as it goes, that of Prince.
[175] "Someone might say that although it is true that neither a blindman nor a deaf man by himself can compare sounds with colors, yetsince one hears and the other sees they might do so both together....But whether they are apart or close together makes no difference; not evenif they permanently keep house together; no, not if they were Siamesetwins, or more than Siamese twins, and were inseparably grown together,would it make the assumption any more possible. Only when sound andcolor are represented in the same reality is it thinkable that they shouldbe compared." (Brentano: Psychologie, p. 209.)
[176] The reader must observe that we are reasoning altogether about theLogic of the mind-stuff theory, about whether it canexist in the constitutionof higher mental states by viewing them asidentical with lower onessummed together. We say the two sorts of fact are not identical: a higherstateis not a lot of lower states; it is itself. When, however, a lot oflower states have come together, or when certain brain-conditions occurtogether which,if they occurred separately, would produce a lot of lowerstates, we have not for a moment pretended that a higher state may notemerge. In fact it does emerge under those conditions; and ourChapterIX will be mainly devoted to the proof of this fact. But such emergenceis that of a new psychic entity, and istoto cœlo different from such an'integration' of the lower states as the mind-stuff theory affirms.
It may seem strange to suppose that anyone should mistake criticism ofa certain theory about a fact for doubt of the fact itself. And yet theconfusion is made in high quarters enough to justify our remarks. Mr. J.Ward, in his article Psychology in the Encyclopædia Britannica, speakingof the hypothesis that "a series of feelings can be aware of itself asa series," says (p. 39): "Paradox is too mild a word for it, even contradictionwill hardly suffice." Whereupon, Professor Bain takes him thus to task:"As to 'a series of states being aware of itself,' I confess I see no insurmountabledifficulty. It may be a fact, or not a fact; it may be a veryclumsy expression for what it is applied to; but it is neither paradox norcontradiction. A series merely contradicts an individual, or it may betwo or more individuals as coexisting; but that is too general to excludethe possibility of self-knowledge. It certainly does not bring the propertyof self-knowledge into the foreground, which, however, is not the sameas denying it. An algebraic series might know itself, without any contradiction:the only thing against it is the want of evidence of the fact."('Mind,' xi, 459). Prof. Bain thinks, then, that all the bother is about thedifficulty of seeing how a series of feelings can have the knowledge ofitselfadded to it!!! As if anybody ever was troubled about that. That,notoriously enough, is a fact: our consciousness is a series of feelings towhich every now and then isadded a retrospective consciousness that theyhave come and gone. What Mr. Ward and I are troubled about is merelythe silliness of the mind-stuffists and associationists continuing to say thatthe 'series of states'is the 'awareness of itself;' that if the states be positedseverally, their collective consciousness iseo ipso given; and that we needno farther explanation, or 'evidence of the fact.'
[177] The writers about 'unconscious cerebration' seem sometimes to meanthat and sometimes unconscious thought. The arguments which followare culled from various quarters. The reader will find them most systematicallyurged by E. von Hartmann: Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol.i; and by E. Colsenet: La Vie Inconsciente de l'Esprit (1880). Consult alsoT. Laycock: Mind and Brain, vol. i, chap. v (1860); W. B. Carpenter:Mental Physiology, chap. xiii; F. P. Cobbe: Darwinism in Morals andother Essays, essay xi, Unconscious Cerebration (1872); F. Bowen: ModernPhilosophy, pp. 428-480; R. H. Hutton: Contemporary Review, vol.xxiv, p. 201; J. S. Mill: Exam. of Hamilton, chap. xv; G. H. Lewes:Problems of Life and Mind, 3d series, Prob. ii, chap. x, and also Prob.iii, chap. ii; D. G. Thompson: A System of Psychology, chap. xxxiii;J. M. Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, chap. iv.
[178] Nouveaux Essais, Avant-propos.
[179] J. S. Mill, Exam. of Hamilton, chap. xv.
[180] Cf. Dugald Stewart, Elements, chap. ii.
[181] J. E. Maude: 'The Unconscious in Education,' in 'Education,' vol.i, p. 401 (1882).
[182] Zur Lehre vor Lichtsinne (1878).
[183] Cf. Wundt: Ueber den Einfluss der Philosophie, etc.—Antrittsrede(1876), pp. 10-11;—Helmholtz: Die Thatsachen in der Wahrnehmung(1879), p. 27.
[184] Cf. Satz vom Grunde, pp. 59-65. Compare also F. Zöllner's Naturder Kometen, pp. 342 ff. and 425.
[185] Cf. the statements from Helmholtz to be found later inChapterXIII.
[186] The text was written before Professor Lipps's Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens(1883) came into my hands. In Chapter III of that book thenotion of unconscious thought is subjected to the clearest and most searchingcriticism which it has yet received. Some passages are so similar towhat I have myself written that I must quote them in a note. Afterproving that dimness and clearness, incompleteness and completeness donot pertain to a state of mindas such—since every state of mind must beexactly what it is, and nothing else—but only pertain to the way in whichstates of mind stand for objects, which they more or less dimly, moreor less clearly,represent; Lipps takes the case of those sensations whichattention is said to make more clear. "I perceive an object," he says,"now in clear daylight, and again at night. Call the content of the day-perceptiona, and that of the evening-perceptiona1. There will probablybe a considerable difference betweena anda1. The colors ofa will bevaried and intense, and will be sharply bounded by each other; those ofa1 will be less luminous, and less strongly contrasted, and will approacha common gray or brown, and merge more into each other. Both percepts,however, as such, are completely determinate and distinct from all others.The colors ofa1 appear before my eye neither more nor less decidedly darkand blurred than the colors ofa appear bright and sharply bounded. Butnow I know, or believe I know, that one and the same real Object A correspondsto botha anda1. I am convinced, moreover, thata represents Abetter than doesa1. Instead, however, of giving to my conviction this, itsonly correct, expression, and keeping the content of my consciousness andthe real object, the representation and what it means, distinct from eachother, I substitute the real object for the content of the consciousness,and talk of the experience as if it consisted in one and the same object(namely, the surreptitiously introduced real one), constituting twice overthe content of my consciousness, once in a clear and distinct, the othertime in an obscure and vague fashion. I talk now of a distincter and of aless distinctconsciousness of A, whereas I am only justified in talking oftwo consciousnesses,a anda1, equally distinctin se, but to which the supposedexternal object A corresponds with different degrees of distinctness."(P. 38-9.)
We have now finished the physiological preliminaries ofour subject and must in the remaining chapters study themental states themselves whose cerebral conditions andconcomitants we have been considering hitherto. Beyondthe brain, however, there is an outer world to which thebrain-states themselves 'correspond.' And it will be well,ere we advance farther, to say a word about the relation ofthe mind to this larger sphere of physical fact.
That is, the mind which the psychologist studies is themind of distinct individuals inhabiting definite portions ofa real space and of a real time. With any other sort ofmind, absolute Intelligence, Mind unattached to a particularbody, or Mind not subject to the course of time, the psychologistas such has nothing to do. 'Mind,' in his mouth, isonly a class name forminds. Fortunate will it be if hismore modest inquiry result in any generalizations whichthe philosopher devoted to absolute Intelligence as suchcan use.
To the psychologist, then, the minds he studies areobjects, in a world of other objects. Even when he introspectivelyanalyzes his own mind, and tells what he findsthere, he talks about it in an objective way. He says, forinstance, that under certain circumstances the color grayappears to him green, and calls the appearance an illusion.This implies that he compares two objects, a real colorseen under certain conditions, and a mental perceptionwhich he believes to represent it, and that he declares therelation between them to be of a certain kind. In makingthis critical judgment, the psychologist stands as much outsideof the perception which he criticises as he does of thecolor. Both are his objects. And if this is true of him when[Pg 184]he reflects on his own conscious states, how much truer is itwhen he treats of those of others! In German philosophysince Kant the wordErkenntnisstheorie, criticism of thefaculty of knowledge, plays a great part. Now the psychologistnecessarily becomes such anErkenntnisstheoretiker.But the knowledge he theorizes about is not the barefunction of knowledge which Kant criticises—he does notinquire into the possibility of knowledgeüberhaupt. Heassumes it to be possible, he does not doubt its presencein himself at the moment he speaks. The knowledge hecriticises is the knowledge of particular men about theparticular things that surround them. This he may, uponoccasion, in the light of hisown unquestioned knowledge,pronounce true or false, and trace the reasons by which ithas become one or the other.
It is highly important that this natural-science pointof view should be understood at the outset. Otherwisemore may be demanded of the psychologist than he oughtto be expected to perform.
A diagram will exhibit more emphatically what theassumptions of Psychology must be:
| 1. The Psychologist | 2. The Thought Studied | 3. The Thought's Object | 4. The Psychologist's Reality |
These four squares contain the irreducible data ofpsychology. No. 1, the psychologist, believes Nos. 2, 3,and 4, which together formhis total object, to be realities,and reports them and their mutual relations as truly as hecan without troubling himself with the puzzle of how hecan report them at all. About suchultimate puzzles he inthe main need trouble himself no more than the geometer,the chemist, or the botanist do, who make precisely thesame assumptions as he.[187]
Of certain fallacies to which the psychologist is exposedby reason of his peculiar point of view—that of being a[Pg 185]reporter of subjective as well as of objective facts, we mustpresently speak. But not until we have considered themethods he uses for ascertaining what the facts in questionare.
Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on firstand foremost and always. The word introspection needhardly be defined—it means, of course, the looking into ourown minds and reporting what we there discover.Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness. Sofar as I know, the existence of such states has never beendoubted by any critic, however sceptical in other respectshe may have been. That we havecogitations of some sort istheinconcussum in a world most of whose other facts haveat some time tottered in the breath of philosophic doubt.All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselvesthinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as aninward activity or passion, from all the objects with whichit may cognitively deal.I regard this belief as the mostfundamental of all the postulates of Psychology, and shall discardall curious inquiries about its certainty as too metaphysicalfor the scope of this book.
A Question of Nomenclature. We ought to have somegeneral term by which to designate all states of consciousnessmerely as such, and apart from their particularquality or cognitive function. Unfortunately mostof the terms in use have grave objections. 'Mentalstate,' 'state of consciousness,' 'conscious modification,' arecumbrous and have no kindred verbs. The same is trueof 'subjective condition.' 'Feeling' has the verb 'to feel,'both active and neuter, and such derivatives as 'feelingly,''felt,' 'feltness,' etc., which make it extremely convenient.But on the other hand it has specific meanings as well asits generic one, sometimes standing for pleasure and pain,and being sometimes a synonym of 'sensation' as opposedtothought; whereas we wish a term to cover sensation and[Pg 186]thought indifferently. Moreover, 'feeling' has acquired inthe hearts of platonizing thinkers a very opprobrious set ofimplications; and since one of the great obstacles to mutualunderstanding in philosophy is the use of words eulogisticallyand disparagingly, impartial terms ought always, ifpossible, to be preferred. The wordpsychosis has beenproposed by Mr. Huxley. It has the advantage of beingcorrelative toneurosis (the name applied by the same authorto the corresponding nerve-process), and is moreover technicaland devoid of partial implications. But it has noverb or other grammatical form allied to it. The expressions'affection of the soul,' 'modification of the ego,' areclumsy, like 'state of consciousness,' and they implicitlyassert theories which it is not well to embody in terminologybefore they have been openly discussed and approved.'Idea' is a good vague neutral word, and was by Lockeemployed in the broadest generic way; but notwithstandinghis authority it has not domesticated itself in the languageso as to cover bodily sensations, and it moreover has noverb. 'Thought' would be by far the best word to use ifit could be made to cover sensations. It has no opprobriousconnotation such as 'feeling' has, and it immediatelysuggests the omnipresence of cognition (or reference to anobject other than the mental state itself), which we shallsoon see to be of the mental life's essence. But can theexpression 'thought of a toothache' ever suggest to thereader the actual present pain itself? It is hardly possible;and we thus seem about to be forced back on somepair of terms like Hume's 'impression and idea,' or Hamilton's'presentation and representation,' or the ordinary'feeling and thought,' if we wish to cover the whole ground.
In this quandary we can make no definitive choice, butmust, according to the convenience of the context, usesometimes one, sometimes another of the synonyms thathave been mentioned.My own partiality is for eitherfeeling orthought. I shall probably often use both wordsin a wider sense than usual, and alternately startle twoclasses of readers by their unusual sound; but if the connectionmakes it clear that mental states at large, irrespective[Pg 187]of their kind, are meant, this will do no harm, and mayeven do some good.[188]
The inaccuracy of introspective observation has been madea subject of debate. It is important to gain some fixedideas on this point before we proceed.
The commonest spiritualistic opinion is that the SoulorSubject of the mental life is a metaphysical entity, inaccessibleto direct knowledge, and that the various mentalstates and operations of which we reflectively becomeaware are objects of an inner sense which does not lay holdof the real agent in itself, any more than sight or hearinggives us direct knowledge of matter in itself. From,this point of view introspection is, of course, incompetentto lay hold of anything more than the Soul'sphenomena.But even then the question remains, How well can it knowthe phenomena themselves?
Some authors take high ground here and claim for it asort of infallibility. Thus Ueberweg:
"When a mental image, as such, is the object of my apprehension,there is no meaning in seeking to distinguish its existence in my consciousness(in me) from its existence out of my consciousness (in itself);for the object apprehended is, in this case, one which does not evenexist, as the objects of external perception do, in itself outside of myconsciousness. It exists only within me."[189]
And Brentano:
"The phenomena inwardly apprehended are true in themselves.As they appear—of this the evidence with which they are apprehendedis a warrant—so they are in reality. Who, then, can deny that in thisa great superiority of Psychology over the physical sciences comes tolight?"
And again:
"No one can doubt whether the psychic condition he apprehends inhimselfbe, and beso, as he apprehends it. Whoever should doubt thiswould have reached thatfinished doubt which destroys itself in destroyingevery fixed point from which to make an attack upon knowledge."[190]
Others have gone to the opposite extreme, and maintainedthat we can have no introspective cognition of our[Pg 188]own minds at all. A deliverance of Auguste Comte to thiseffect has been so often quoted as to be almost classical;and some reference to it seems therefore indispensablehere.
Philosophers, says Comte,[191] have
"in these latter days imagined themselves able to distinguish, by avery singular subtlety, two sorts of observation of equal importance,one external, the other internal, the latter being solely destined for thestudy of intellectual phenomena.... I limit myself to pointing outthe principal consideration which proves clearly that this pretendeddirect contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion....It is in fact evident that, by an invincible necessity, the human mindcan observe directly all phenomena except its own proper states. Forby whom shall the observation of these be made? It is conceivablethat a man might observe himself with respect to thepassions thatanimate him, for the anatomical organs of passion are distinct fromthose whose function is observation. Though we have all made suchobservations on ourselves, they can never have much scientific value,and the best mode of knowing the passions will always be that of observingthem from without; for every strong state of passion ... isnecessarily incompatible with the state of observation. But, as forobserving in the same wayintellectual phenomena at the time of theiractual presence, that is a manifest impossibility. The thinker cannotdivide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observeshim reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, inthis case, identical, how could observation take place? This pretendedpsychological method is then radically null and void. On the onehand, they advise you to isolate yourself, as far as possible, from everyexternal sensation, especially every intellectual work,—for if you wereto busy yourself even with the simplest calculation, what would becomeofinternal observation?—on the other hand, after having with theutmost care attained this state of intellectual slumber, you must beginto contemplate the operations going on in your mind, when nothingthere takes place! Our descendants will doubtless see such pretensionssome day ridiculed upon the stage. The results of so strange a procedureharmonize entirely with its principle. For all the two thousandyears during which metaphysicians have thus cultivated psychology,they are not agreed about one intelligible and established proposition.'Internal observation' gives almost as many divergent results as thereare individuals who think they practise it."
Comte hardly could have known anything of the English,and nothing of the German, empirical psychology. The'results' which he had in mind when writing were probably[Pg 189]scholastic ones, such as principles of internal activity, thefaculties, the ego, theliberum arbitrium indifferentiæ, etc.John Mill, in replying to him,[192] says:
"It might have occurred to M. Comte that a fact may be studiedthrough the medium of memory, not at the very moment of our perceivingit, but the moment after: and this is really the mode in whichour best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired. Wereflect on what we have been doing when the act is past, but when itsimpression in the memory is still fresh. Unless in one of these ways,we could not have acquired the knowledge which nobody denies us tohave, of what passes in our minds. M. Comte would scarcely haveaffirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations. Weknow of our observings and our reasonings, either at the very time, orby memory the moment after; in either case, by direct knowledge, andnot (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely bytheir results. This simple fact destroys the whole of M. Comte's argument.Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe."
Where now does the truth lie? Our quotation fromMill is obviously the one which expresses the most ofpractical truth about the matter. Even the writers whoinsist upon the absolute veracity of our immediate innerapprehension of a conscious state have to contrast withthis the fallibility of ourmemory orobservation of it, amoment later. No one has emphasized more sharply thanBrentano himself the difference between the immediatefeltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent reflectiveact. But which mode of consciousness of it is thatwhich the psychologist must depend on? If tohave feelingsor thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babiesin the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones.But the psychologist must not onlyhave his mental statesin their absolute veritableness, he must report them andwrite about them, name them, classify and compare themand trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive theyare their own property; it is onlypost-mortem that they becomehis prey.[193] And as in the naming, classing, and knowing[Pg 190]of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why notalso here? Comte is quite right in laying stress on thefact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, mustbe already past. No subjective state, whilst present, is itsown object; its object is always something else. Thereare, it is true, cases in which we appear to be naming ourpresent feeling, and so to be experiencing and observingthe same inner fact at a single stroke, as when we say 'Ifeel tired,' 'I am angry,' etc. But these are illusory, anda little attention unmasks the illusion. The present consciousstate, when I say 'I feel tired,' is not the directstate of tire; when I say 'I feel angry,' it is not the directstate of anger. It is the state ofsaying-I-feel-tired, ofsaying-I-feel-angry,—entirely different matters, so differentthat the fatigue and anger apparently included in them areconsiderable modifications of the fatigue and anger directlyfelt the previous instant. The act of naming them hasmomentarily detracted from their force.[194]
The only sound grounds on which the infallible veracityof the introspective judgment might be maintained areempirical. If we had reason to think it has never yetdeceived us, we might continue to trust it. This is theground actually maintained by Herr Mohr.
"The illusions of our senses," says this author, "have underminedour belief in the reality of the outer world; but in the sphere of innerobservation our confidence is intact, for we have never found ourselvesto be in error about the reality of an act of thought or feeling. We[Pg 191]have never been misled into thinking we werenot in doubt or in angerwhen these conditions were really states of our consciousness."[195]
But sound as the reasoning here would be, were thepremises correct, I fear the latter cannot pass. Howeverit may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger,about weaker feelings, and about therelations to each otherof all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error anduncertainty so soon as we are called on to name and class,and not merely to feel. Who can be sure of the exactorderof his feelings when they are excessively rapid? Who canbe sure, in his sensible perception of a chair, how muchcomes from the eye and how much is supplied out of theprevious knowledge of the mind? Who can compare withprecision thequantities of disparate feelings even where thefeelings are very much alike? For instance, where an objectis felt now against the back and now against the cheek,which feeling is most extensive? Who can be sure thattwo given feelings are or are not exactly the same? Whocan tell which is briefer or longer than the other whenboth occupy but an instant of time? Who knows, of manyactions, for what motive they were done, or if for any motiveat all? Who can enumerate all the distinct ingredients ofsuch a complicated feeling asanger? and who can tell off-handwhether or no a perception ofdistance be a compoundor a simple state of mind? The whole mind-stuff controversywould stop if we could decide conclusively by introspectionthat what seem to us elementary feelings arereally elementary and not compound.
Mr. Sully, in his work on Illusions, has a chapter onthose of Introspection from which we might now quote.But, since the rest of this volume will be little more than acollection of illustrations of the difficulty of discovering bydirect introspection exactly what our feelings and theirrelations are, we need not anticipate our own future details, Ibut just state our general conclusion thatintrospection isdifficult and fallible; and that the difficulty is simply thatof all observation of whatever kind. Something is before[Pg 192]us; we do our best to tell what it is, but in spite of ourgood will we may go astray, and give a description moreapplicable to some other sort of thing. The only safeguardis in the finalconsensus of our farther knowledge about thething in question, later views correcting earlier ones, untilat last the harmony of a consistent system is reached.Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guaranteethe psychologist can give for the soundness of any particularpsychologic observation which he may report. Such asystem we ourselves must strive, as far as may be, to attain.
The English writers on psychology, and the school ofHerbart in Germany, have in the main contented themselveswith such results as the immediate introspection ofsingle individuals gave, and shown what a body of doctrinethey may make. The works of Locke, Hume, Reid, Hartley,Stewart, Brown, the Mills, will always be classics inthis line; and in Professor Bain's Treatises we have probablythe last word of what this method taken mainly byitself can do—the last monument of the youth of our science,still untechnical and generally intelligible, like the Chemistryof Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope wasused.
The Experimental Method. But psychology is passinginto a less simple phase. Within a few years what one maycall a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carriedon by experimental methods, asking of course everymoment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertaintyby operating on a large scale and taking statisticalmeans. This method taxes patience to the utmost, andcould hardly have arisen in a country whose nativescould bebored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner,Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot; and their successhas brought into the field an array of younger experimentalpsychologists, bent on studying theelements of themental life, dissecting them out from the gross results inwhich they are embedded, and as far as possible reducingthem to quantitative scales. The simple and open methodof attack having done what it can, the method of patience,starving out, and harassing to death is tried; the Mind[Pg 193]must submit to a regularsiege, in which minute advantagesgained night and day by the forces that hem her in mustsum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There islittle of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum,and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, notchivalry. What generous divination, and that superiorityin virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man thebest insight into nature, have failed to do, their spyingand scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diaboliccunning, will doubtless some day bring about.
No general description of the methods of experimentalpsychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with theinstances of their application, so we will waste no wordsupon the attempt.The principal fields of experimentationso far have been: 1) the connection of conscious stateswith their physical conditions, including the whole of brain-physiology,and the recent minutely cultivated physiologyof the sense-organs, together with what is technically knownas 'psycho-physics,' or the laws of correlation betweensensations and the outward stimuli by which they arearoused; 2) the analysis of space-perception into its sensationalelements; 3) the measurement of theduration of thesimplest mental processes; 4) that of theaccuracy of reproductionin the memory of sensible experiences and ofintervals of space and time; 5) that of the manner inwhich simple mental statesinfluence each other, call eachother up, or inhibit each other's reproduction; 6) that ofthenumber of facts which consciousness can simultaneouslydiscern; finally, 7) that of the elementary laws of oblivescenceand retention. It must be said that in some ofthese fields the results have as yet borne little theoreticfruit commensurate with the great labor expended in theiracquisition. But facts are facts, and if we only get enoughof them they are sure to combine. New ground will fromyear to year be broken, and theoretic results will grow.Meanwhile the experimental method has quite changed theface of the science so far as the latter is a record of merework done.
Thecomparative method, finally, supplements the introspective[Pg 194]and experimental methods. This method presupposesa normal psychology of introspection to be establishedin its main features. But where the origin of thesefeatures, or their dependence upon one another, is in question,it is of the utmost importance to trace the phenomenonconsidered through all its possible variations of typeand combination. So it has come to pass that instincts ofanimals are ransacked to throw light on our own; and thatthe reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages,infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, andeccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that specialtheory about some part of our own mental life. The historyof sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages,as types of mental product, are pressed into the same service.Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example ofcirculars of questions sent out by the hundred to thosesupposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and itwill be well for us in the next generation if such circularsbe not ranked among the common pests of life.Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge. Thereare great sources of error in the comparative method.The interpretation of the 'psychoses' of animals, savages,and infants is necessarily wild work, in which the personalequation of the investigator has things very muchits own way. A savage will be reported to have nomoral or religious feeling if his actions shock the observerunduly. A child will be assumed without self-consciousnessbecause he talks of himself in the third person,etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Comparativeobservations, to be definite, must usually be madeto test some pre-existing hypothesis; and the only thingthen is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to beas candid as you can.
The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence ofSpeech. Language was originally made by men who werenot psychologists, and most men to-day employ almostexclusively the vocabulary of outward things. The cardinalpassions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope,[Pg 195]and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectualactivity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, withthe broadest genera of æsthetic feeling, joy, sorrow,pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective orderwhich this vocabulary deigns to note by special words.The elementary qualities of sensation, bright, loud, red,blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used inboth an objective and a subjective sense. They stand forouter qualities and for the feelings which these arouse. Butthe objective sense is the original sense; and still to-daywe have to describe a large number of sensations by thename of the object from which they have most frequentlybeen got. An orange color, an odor of violets, a cheesytaste, a thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recallwhat I mean. This absence of a special vocabulary for subjectivefacts hinders the study of all but the very coarsestof them. Empiricist writers are very fond of emphasizingone great set of delusions which language inflicts on themind. Whenever we have made a word, they say, to denotea certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose asubstantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of whichthe word shall be the name. But thelack of a word quiteas often leads to the directly opposite error. We are thenprone to suppose that no entity can be there; and so wecome to overlook phenomena whose existence would bepatent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarlyrecognized in speech.[196] It is hard to focus our attention onthe nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness inthe descriptive parts of most psychologies.
But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from thedependence of psychology on common speech. Namingour thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assumethat as the objects are, so the thought must be. Thethought of several distinct things can only consist of severaldistinct bits of thought, or 'ideas;' that of an abstract oruniversal object can only be an abstract or universal idea.[Pg 196]As each object may come and go, be forgotten and thenthought of again, it is held that the thought of it has a preciselysimilar independence, self-identity, and mobility.The thought of the object's recurrent identity is regardedas the identity of its recurrent thought; and the perceptionsof multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severallyconceived to be brought about only through a multiplicity,a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions. The continuousflow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in itsplace an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, ispreached, for the existence of which no good introspectivegrounds can be brought forward, and out of which presentlygrow all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, theheritage of woe of students of the mind.
These words are meant to impeach the entire Englishpsychology derived from Locke and Hume, and the entireGerman psychology derived from Herbart, so far as theyboth treat 'ideas' as separate subjective entities that comeand go. Examples will soon make the matter clearer.Meanwhile our psychologic insight is vitiated by still othersnares.
'The Psychologist's Fallacy.' Thegreat snare of the psychologistis theconfusion of his own standpoint with that of themental fact about which he is making his report. I shallhereafter call this the 'psychologist's fallacy'par excellence.For some of the mischief, here too, language is to blame.The psychologist, as we remarked above (p. 183), stands outsideof the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and itsobject are objects for him. Now when it is acognitive state(percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no otherway of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc.,of thatobject. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-sameobject inhis way, gets easily led to suppose that thethought, which isof it, knows it in the same way in whichhe knows it, although this is often very far from being thecase.[197] The most fictitious puzzles have been introducedinto our science by this means. The so-called question ofpresentative or representative perception, of whether an[Pg 197]object is present to the thought that thinks it by a counterfeitimage of itself, or directly and without any interveningimage at all; the question of nominalism and conceptualism,of the shape in which things are present when onlya general notion of them is before the mind; are comparativelyeasy questions when once the psychologist's fallacyis eliminated from their treatment,—as we shall ere longsee (inChapter XII).
Another variety of the psychologist's fallacy is the assumptionthat the mental state studied must be conscious of itselfas the psychologist is conscious of it. The mental state isaware of itself only from within; it grasps what we call itsown content, and nothing more. The psychologist, on thecontrary, is aware of it from without, and knows its relationswith all sorts of other things. What the thought sees isonly its own object; what the psychologist sees is thethought's object, plus the thought itself, plus possibly allthe rest of the world. We must be very careful therefore,in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist's pointof view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that areonly there for ours. We must avoid substituting what weknow the consciousnessis, for what it is a consciousnessof,and counting its outward, and so to speak physical, relationswith other facts of the world, in among the objects of whichwe set it down as aware. Crude as such a confusion ofstandpoints seems to be when abstractly stated, it is neverthelessa snare into which no psychologist has kept himselfat all times from falling, and which forms almost the entirestock-in-trade of certain schools. We cannot be too watchfulagainst its subtly corrupting influence.
Summary. To sum up the chapter, Psychology assumesthat thoughts successively occur, and that they know objectsin a world which the psychologist also knows.These thoughtsare the subjective data of which he treats, and their relations totheir objects, to the brain, and to the rest of the world constitutethe subject-matter of psychologic science. Its methods areintrospection, experimentation, and comparison. But introspectionis no sure guide to truthsabout our mental states;and in particular the poverty of the psychological vocabulary[Pg 198]leads us to drop out certain states from our consideration,and to treat others as if they knew themselves andtheir objects as the psychologist knows both, which is adisastrous fallacy in the science.
[187] On the relation between Psychology and General Philosophy, see G.C. Robertson, 'Mind,' vol. viii, p. 1, and J. Ward,ibid. p. 153; J. Deweyibid. vol. ix, p. 1.
[188] Compare some remarks in Mill's Logic, bk. i, chap. iii, §§ 2, 3.
[189] Logic, § 40.
[190] Psychologie, bk. ii, chap. iii, §§ 1, 2.
[191] Cours de Philosophie Positive, i, 34-8.
[192] Auguste Comte and Positivism, 3d edition (1882), p. 64.
[193] Wundt says: "The first rule for utilizing inward observation consistsin taking, as far as possible, experiences that are accidental, unexpected,and not intentionally brought about....First it is best as far aspossible to rely onMemory and not on immediate Apprehension....Second, internal observation is better fitted to grasp clearly consciousstates, especially voluntary mental acts: such inner processes as are obscurelyconscious and involuntary will almost entirely elude it, becausethe effort to observe interferes with them, and because they seldom abidein memory." (Logik, ii, 432.)
[194] In cases like this, where the state outlasts the act of naming it, existsbefore it, and recurs when it is past, we probably run little practical riskof error when we talk as if the state knew itself. The state of feeling andthe state of naming the feeling are continuous, and the infallibility ofsuch prompt introspective judgments is probably great. But even here thecertainty of our knowledge ought not to be argued on thea priori groundthatpercipi andesse are in psychology the same. The states are reallytwo; the naming state and the named state are apart; 'percipi isesse' is notthe principle that applies.
[195] J. Mohr: Grundlage der Empirischen Psychologie (Leipzig, 1882),p. 47.
[196] In English we have not even the generic distinction between the-thing-thought-ofand the-thought-thinking-it, which in German is expressedby the opposition betweenGedachtes andGedanke, in Latin by that betweencogitatum andcogitatio.
[197] Compare B. P. Bowne's Metaphysics (1882), p. 408.
Since, for psychology, a mind is an object in a world ofother objects, its relation to those other objects must nextbe surveyed. First of all, to its
Minds, as we know them, are temporary existences.Whether my mind had a being prior to the birth of my body,whether it shall have one after the latter's decease, arequestions to be decided by my general philosophy or theologyrather than by what we call 'scientific facts'—I leaveout the facts of so-called spiritualism, as being still in dispute.Psychology, as a natural science, confines itself tothe present life, in which every mind appears yoked to abody through which its manifestations appear. In thepresent world, then, minds precede, succeed, and coexistwith each other in the common receptacle of time, and oftheircollective relations to the latter nothing more can besaid. The life of theindividual consciousness in time seems,however, to be an interrupted one, so that the question:
becomes one which must be discussed. Sleep, fainting,coma, epilepsy, and other 'unconscious' conditions are aptto break in upon and occupy large durations of what wenevertheless consider the mental history of a single man.And, the fact of interruption being admitted, is it notpossible that it may exist where we do not suspect it, andeven perhaps in an incessant and fine-grained form?
This might happen, and yet the subject himself neverknow it. We often take ether and have operations performedwithout a suspicion that our consciousness has suffered[Pg 200]a breach. The two ends join each other smoothlyover the gap; and only the sight of our wound assures usthat we must have been living through a time which forour immediate consciousness was non-existent. Even insleep this sometimes happens: We think we have had nonap, and it takes the clock to assure us that we are wrong.[198]We thus may live through a real outward time, a timeknown by the psychologist who studies us, and yet notfeel the time, or infer it from any inward sign. The questionis, how often does this happen? Is consciousnessreally discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing(from the psychologist's point of view)? and doesit only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogousto that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuousoutwardly as it inwardly seems?
It must be confessed that we can give no rigorousanswer to this question. Cartesians, who hold that theessence of the soul is to think, can of course solve ita priori, and explain the appearance of thoughtless intervalseither by lapses in our ordinary memory, or by thesinking of consciousness to a minimal state, in which perhapsall that it feels is a bare existence which leaves noparticulars behind to be recalled. If, however, one haveno doctrine about the soul or its essence, one is free to takethe appearances for what they seem to be, and to admitthat the mind, as well as the body, may go to sleep.
Locke was the first prominent champion of this latterview, and the pages in which he attacks the Cartesian beliefare as spirited as any in his Essay. "Every drowsy nodshakes their doctrine who teach that their soul is alwaysthinking." He will not believe that men so easily forget.M. Jouffroy and Sir W. Hamilton, attacking the question inthe same empirical way, are led to an opposite conclusion.Their reasons, briefly stated, are these:
In somnambulism, natural or induced, there is often agreat display of intellectual activity, followed by completeoblivion of all that has passed.[199]
On being suddenly awakened from a sleep, however profound,we always catch ourselves in the middle of a dream.Common dreams are often remembered for a few minutesafter waking, and then irretrievably lost.
Frequently, when awake and absent-minded, we arevisited by thoughts and images which the next instant wecannot recall.
Our insensibility to habitual noises, etc., whilst awake,proves that we can neglect to attend to that which we neverthelessfeel. Similarly in sleep, we grow inured, and sleepsoundly in presence of sensations of sound, cold, contact,etc., which at first prevented our complete repose. We havelearned to neglect them whilst asleep as we should whilstawake. The meresense-impressions are the same when thesleep is deep as when it is light; the difference must lie inajudgment on the part of the apparently slumbering mindthat they are not worth noticing.
This discrimination is equally shown by nurses of thesick and mothers of infants, who will sleep through muchnoise of an irrelevant sort, but waken at the slightest stirringof the patient or the babe. This last fact shows thesense-organ to be pervious for sounds.
Many people have a remarkable faculty of registeringwhen asleep the flight of time. They will habitually wakeup at the same minute day after day, or will wake punctuallyat an unusual hour determined upon overnight. Howcan this knowledge of the hour (more accurate often thananything the waking consciousness shows) be possiblewithout mental activity during the interval?
Such are what we may call the classical reasons for admittingthat the mind is active even when the person afterwardsignores the fact.[200] Of late years, or rather, one may[Pg 202]say, of late months, they have been reinforced by a lot ofcurious observations made on hysterical and hypnoticsubjects, which prove the existence of a highly developedconsciousness in places where it has hitherto not been suspectedat all. These observations throw such a novel lightupon human nature that I must give them in some detail.That at least four different and in a certain sense rival observersshould agree in the same conclusion justifies us inaccepting the conclusion as true.
One of the most constant symptoms in persons sufferingfrom hysteric disease in its extreme forms consists inalterations of the natural sensibility of various parts andorgans of the body. Usually the alteration is in the directionof defect, or anæsthesia. One or both eyes are blind,or color-blind, or there is hemianopsia (blindness to onehalf the field of view), or the field is contracted. Hearing,taste, smell may similarly disappear, in part or in totality.Still more striking are the cutaneous anæsthesias. The oldwitch-finders looking for the 'devil's seals' learned wellthe existence of those insensible patches on the skin oftheir victims, to which the minute physical examinationsof recent medicine have but recently attracted attentionagain. They may be scattered anywhere, but are veryapt to affect one side of the body. Not infrequently theyaffect an entire lateral half, from head to foot; and theinsensible skin of, say, the left side will then be foundseparated from the naturally sensitive skin of the right by aperfectly sharp line of demarcation down the middle of thefront and back. Sometimes, most remarkable of all, theentire skin, hands, feet, face, everything, and the mucousmembranes, muscles and joints so far as they can be explored,[Pg 203]becomecompletely insensible without the other vitalfunctions becoming gravely disturbed.
These hysterical anæsthesias can be made to disappearmore or less completely by various odd processes. It hasbeen recently found that magnets, plates of metal, or theelectrodes of a battery, placed against the skin, have thispeculiar power. And when one side is relieved in this way,the anæsthesia is often found to have transferred itself tothe opposite side, which until then was well. Whether thesestrange effects of magnets and metals be due to their directphysiological action, or to a prior effect on the patient'smind ('expectant attention' or 'suggestion') is still amooted question. A still better awakener of sensibility isthe hypnotic trance, into which many of these patients canbe very easily placed, and in which their lost sensibility notinfrequently becomes entirely restored. Such returns ofsensibility succeed the times of insensibility and alternatewith them. But Messrs. Pierre Janet[201] and A. Binet[202] haveshown that during the times of anæsthesia, and coexistingwith it,sensibility to the anæsthetic parts is also there, in theform of a secondary consciousness entirely cut off from theprimary or normal one, but susceptible of beingtapped andmade to testify to its existence in various odd ways.
Chief amongst these is what M. Janet calls 'the methodofdistraction.' These hysterics are apt to possess a verynarrow field of attention, and to be unable to think of morethan one thing at a time. When talking with any personthey forget everything else. "When Lucie talked directlywith any one," says M. Janet, "she ceased to be able to hearany other person. You may stand behind her, call her byname, shout abuse into her ears, without making her turnround; or place yourself before her, show her objects,touch her, etc., without attracting her notice. When finallyshe becomes aware of you, she thinks you have just comeinto the room again, and greets you accordingly. Thissingular forgetfulness makes her liable to tell all her secretsaloud, unrestrained by the presence of unsuitable auditors."
Now M. Janet found in several subjects like this that if hecame up behind them whilst they were plunged in conversationwith a third party, and addressed them in a whisper, tellingthem to raise their hand or perform other simple acts,they would obey the order given, although theirtalkingintelligence was quite unconscious of receiving it. Leadingthem from one thing to another, he made them reply bysigns to his whispered questions, and finally made themanswer in writing, if a pencil were placed in their hand.The primary consciousness meanwhile went on with theconversation, entirely unaware of these performances on thehand's part. The consciousness which presided over theselatter appeared in its turn to be quite as little disturbed bythe upper consciousness's concerns. Thisproof by 'automatic'writing, of a secondary consciousness's existence, isthe most cogent and striking one; but a crowd of other factsprove the same thing. If I run through them rapidly, thereader will probably be convinced.
The apparently anæsthetic hand of these subjects, forone thing,will often adapt itself discriminatingly to whateverobject may be put into it. With a pencil it will makewriting movements; into a pair of scissors it will put its fingersand will open and shut them, etc., etc. The primary consciousness,so to call it, is meanwhile unable to say whetheror noanything is in the hand, if the latter be hidden fromsight. "I put a pair of eyeglasses into Léonie's anæsthetichand, this hand opens it and raises it towards the nose, buthalf way thither it enters the field of vision of Léonie, whosees it and stops stupefied: 'Why,' says she, 'I have an eye-glassin my left hand!'" M. Binet found a very curious sortof connection between the apparently anæsthetic skin andthe mind in some Salpétrière-subjects. Things placed inthe hand were not felt, butthought of (apparently in visualterms) and in no wise referred by the subject to their startingpoint in the hand's sensation. A key, a knife, placed inthe hand occasionedideas of a key or a knife, but the handfelt nothing. Similarly the subjectthought of the number3, 6, etc., if the hand or finger was bent three or six timesby the operator, or if he stroked it three, six, etc., times.
In certain individuals there was found a still odder[Pg 205]phenomenon, which reminds one of that curious idiosyncrasyof 'colored hearing' of which a few cases have been latelydescribed with great care by foreign writers. These individuals,namely,saw the impression received by the hand,but could not feel it; and the thing seen appeared by nomeans associated with the hand, but more like an independentvision, which usually interested and surprised thepatient. Her hand being hidden by a screen, she wasordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visualimage which might project itself thereon. Numbers wouldthen come, corresponding to the number of times the insensiblemember was raised, touched, etc. Colored linesand figures would come, corresponding to similar onestraced on the palm; the hand itself or its fingers wouldcome when manipulated and finally objects placed in itwould come; but on the hand itself nothing would ever befelt. Of course simulation would not be hard here; butM. Binet disbelieves this (usually very shallow) explanationto be a probable one in cases in question.[203]
The usual way in which doctors measure the delicacyof our touch is by the compass-points. Two points arenormally felt as one whenever they are too close togetherfor discrimination; but what is 'too close' on one part ofthe skin may seem very far apart on another. In themiddle of the back or on the thigh, less than 3 inches maybe too close; on the finger-tip a tenth of an inch is farenough apart. Now, as tested in this way, with the appealmade to the primary consciousness, which talks throughthe mouth and seems to hold the field alone, a certain person'sskin may be entirely anæsthetic and not feel the compass-pointsat all; and yet this same skin will prove to havea perfectly normal sensibility if the appeal be made to thatother secondary or sub-consciousness, which expressesitself automatically by writing or by movements of the hand.M. Binet, M. Pierre Janet, and M. Jules Janet have all foundthis. The subject, whenever touched, would signify 'one[Pg 206]point' or 'two points,' as accurately as if she were a normalperson. She would signify it only by these movements;and of the movements themselves her primary self wouldbe as unconscious as of the facts they signified, for what thesubmerged consciousness makes the hand do automaticallyis unknown to the consciousness which uses the mouth.
Messrs. Bernheim and Pitres have also proved, by observationstoo complicated to be given in this spot,that the hysterical blindness is no real blindness at all.The eye of an hysteric which is totally blind when theother or seeing eye is shut, will do its share of vision perfectlywell whenboth eyes are open together. But evenwhere both eyes are semi-blind from hysterical disease,the method of automatic writing proves that their perceptionsexist, only cut off from communication with the upperconsciousness. M. Binet has found the hand of his patientsunconsciously writing down words which their eyes werevainly endeavoring to 'see,' i.e., to bring to the upper consciousness.Their submerged consciousness was of courseseeing them, or the hand could not have written as it did.Colors are similarly perceived by the sub-conscious self,which the hysterically color-blind eyes cannot bring to thenormal consciousness. Pricks, burns, and pinches on theanæsthetic skin, all unnoticed by the upper self, are recollectedto have been suffered, and complained of, as soonas the under self gets a chance to express itself by thepassage of the subject into hypnotic trance.
It must be admitted, therefore, thatin certain persons,at least,the total possible consciousness may be split intoparts which coexist but mutually ignore each other, andshare the objects of knowledge between them. More remarkablestill, they arecomplementary. Give an objectto one of the consciousnesses, and by that fact you removeit from the other or others. Barring a certain commonfund of information, like the command of language, etc.,what the upper self knows the under self is ignorant of,andvice versâ. M. Janet has proved this beautifully in hissubject Lucie. The following experiment will serve as thetype of the rest: In her trance he covered her lap withcards, each bearing a number. He then told her that on[Pg 207]waking she shouldnot see any card whose number was amultiple of three. This is the ordinary so-called 'post-hypnoticsuggestion,' now well known, and for which Luciewas a well-adapted subject. Accordingly, when she wasawakened and asked about the papers on her lap, shecounted and said she saw those only whose number wasnot a multiple of 3. To the 12, 18, 9, etc., she was blind.But thehand, when the sub-conscious self was interrogatedby the usual method of engrossing the upper self in anotherconversation, wrote that the only cards in Lucie's lap werethose numbered 12, 18, 9, etc., and on being asked to pickup all the cards which were there, picked up these and letthe others lie. Similarly when the sight of certain thingswas suggested to the sub-conscious Lucie, the normalLucie suddenly became partially or totally blind. "Whatis the matter? I can't see!" the normal personage suddenlycried out in the midst of her conversation, whenM. Janet whispered to the secondary personage to makeuse of her eyes. The anæsthesias, paralyses, contractionsand other irregularities from which hysterics suffer seemthen to be due to the fact that their secondary personagehas enriched itself by robbing the primary one of a functionwhich the latter ought to have retained. The curativeindication is evident: get at the secondary personage, byhypnotization or in whatever other way, and make hergiveup the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected partmay be. The normal self thereupon regains possession, sees,feels, or is able to move again. In this way M. Jules Janeteasily cured the well-known subject of the Salpétrière, Wit....,of all sorts of afflictions which, until he discovered thesecret of her deeper trance, it had been difficult to subdue."Cessez cette mauvaise plaisanterie," he said to the secondaryself—and the latter obeyed. The way in which thevarious personages share the stock of possible sensationsbetween them seems to be amusingly illustrated in thisyoung woman. When awake, her skin is insensible everywhereexcept on a zone about the arm where she habituallywears a gold bracelet. This zone has feeling; but in thedeepest trance, when all the rest of her body feels, this particularzone becomes absolutely anæsthetic.
Sometimes the mutual ignorance of the selves leads toincidents which are strange enough. The acts and movementsperformed by the sub-conscious self are withdrawnfrom the conscious one, and the subject will do all sorts ofincongruous things of which he remains quite unaware."I order Lucie [by the method ofdistraction] to make apied de nez, and her hands go forthwith to the end of hernose. Asked what she is doing, she replies that she isdoing nothing, and continues for a long time talking, withno apparent suspicion that her fingers are moving in frontof her nose. I make her walk about the room; she continuesto speak and believes herself sitting down."
M. Janet observed similar acts in a man in alcoholicdelirium. Whilst the doctor was questioning him, M. J.made him by whispered suggestion walk, sit, kneel, and evenlie down on his face on the floor, he all the while believinghimself to be standing beside his bed. Suchbizarreriessound incredible, until one has seen their like. Long ago,without understanding it, I myself saw a small example ofthe way in which a person's knowledge may be shared bythe two selves. A young woman who had been writingautomatically was sitting with a pencil in her hand, trying torecall at my request the name of a gentleman whom she hadonce seen. She could only recollect the first syllable. Herhand meanwhile, without her knowledge, wrote down thelast two syllables. In a perfectly healthy young man whocan write with the planchette, I lately found the hand tobe entirely anæsthetic during the writing act; I could prickit severely without the Subject knowing the fact. Thewritingon the planchette, however, accused me in strong termsof hurting the hand. Pricks on theother (non-writing)hand, meanwhile, which awakened strong protest from theyoung man's vocal organs, were denied to exist by the selfwhich made the planchette go.[204]
We get exactly similar results in the so-called post-hypnoticsuggestion. It is a familiar fact that certain subjects,when told during a trance to perform an act or to[Pg 209]experience an hallucination after waking, will when the timecomes, obey the command. How is the command registered?How is its performance so accurately timed?These problems were long a mystery, for the primary personalityremembers nothing of the trance or the suggestion,and will often trump up an improvised pretext for yieldingto the unaccountable impulse which possesses the man sosuddenly and which he cannot resist. Edmund Gurneywas the first to discover, by means of automatic writing, thatthe secondary self is awake, keeping its attention constantlyfixed on the command and watching for the signalof its execution. Certain trance-subjects who were alsoautomatic writers, when roused from trance and put to theplanchette,—not knowing then what they wrote, and havingtheir upper attention fully engrossed by reading aloud, talking,or solving problems in mental arithmetic,—would inscribethe orders which they had received, together withnotes relative to the time elapsed and the time yet to runbefore the execution.[205] It is therefore to no 'automatism'in the mechanical sense that such acts are due: a self presidesover them, a split-off, limited and buried, but yet afully conscious, self. More than this, the buried self oftencomes to the surface and drives out the other self whilstthe acts are performing. In other words, the subjectlapses into trance again when the moment arrives for execution,and has no subsequent recollection of the act whichhe has done. Gurney and Beaunis established this fact,which has since been verified on a large scale; and Gurneyalso showed that the patient becamesuggestible again duringthe brief time of the performance. M. Janet's observations,in their turn, well illustrate the phenomenon.
"I tell Lucie to keep her arms raised after she shall haveawakened. Hardly is she in the normal state, when up go her armsabove her head, but she pays no attention to them. She goes, comes,converses, holding her arms high in the air. If asked what her armsare doing, she is surprised at such a question, and says very sincerely:'My hands are doing nothing; they are just like yours.'... I command[Pg 210]her to weep, and when awake she really sobs, but continues inthe midst of her tears to talk of very gay matters. The sobbing over,there remained no trace of this grief, which seemed to have been quitesub-conscious."
The primary self often has to invent an hallucination bywhich to mask and hide from its own view the deeds whichthe other self is enacting. Léonie 3[206] writes real letterswhilst Léonie 1 believes that she is knitting; or Lucie 2really comes to the doctor's office, whilst Lucie 1 believesherself to be at home. This is a sort of delirium. Thealphabet, or the series of numbers, when handed over tothe attention of the secondary personage may for thetime be lost to the normal self. Whilst the hand writesthe alphabet, obediently to command, the 'subject,' toher great stupefaction, finds herself unable to recall it, etc.Few things are more curious than these relations of mutualexclusion, of which all gradations exist between the severalpartial consciousnesses.
How far this splitting up of the mind into separate consciousnessesmay exist in each one of us is a problem. M.Janet holds that it is only possible where there is abnormalweakness, and consequently a defect of unifying or co-ordinatingpower. An hysterical woman abandons part of herconsciousness because she is too weak nervously to holdit together. The abandoned part meanwhile may solidifyinto a secondary or sub-conscious self. In a perfectly soundsubject, on the other hand, what is dropped out of mind atone moment keeps coming back at the next. The wholefund of experiences and knowledges remains integrated, andno split-off portions of it can get organized stably enoughto form subordinate selves. The stability, monotony, andstupidity of these latter is often very striking. The post-hypnoticsub-consciousness seems to think of nothing butthe order which it last received; the cataleptic sub-consciousness,of nothing but the last position imprinted on thelimb. M. Janet could cause definitely circumscribed reddeningand tumefaction of the skin on two of his subjects,[Pg 211]by suggesting to them in hypnotism the hallucination of amustard-poultice of any special shape. "J'ai tout letemps pensé à votre sinapisme," says the subject, whenput back into trance after the suggestion has taken effect.A man N., whom M. Janet operated on at long intervals,was betweenwhiles tampered with by anotheroperator, and when put to sleep again by M. Janet, said hewas 'too far away to receive orders, being in Algiers.'The other operator, having suggested that hallucination,had forgotten to remove it before waking the subject fromhis trance, and the poor passive trance-personality hadstuck for weeks in the stagnant dream. Léonie's sub-consciousperformances having been illustrated to a caller, bya 'pied de nez' executed with her left hand in the courseof conversation, when, a year later, she meets him again,up goes the same hand to her nose again, without Léonie'snormal self suspecting the fact.
All these facts, taken together, form unquestionably thebeginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a newlight into the very abysses of our nature. It is for thatreason that I have cited them at such length in this earlychapter of the book. They prove one thing conclusively,namely, thatwe must never take a person's testimony, howeversincere, that he has felt nothing, as proof positive thatno feeling has been there. It may have been there as part ofthe consciousness of a 'secondary personage,' of whose experiencesthe primary one whom we are consulting cannaturally give no account. In hypnotic subjects (as weshall see in a later chapter) just as it is the easiest thing inthe world to paralyze a movement or member by simplesuggestion, so it is easy to produce what is called a systematizedanæsthesia by word of command. A systematizedanæsthesia means an insensibility, not to any one elementof things, but to some one concrete thing or class of things.The subject is made blind or deaf to a certain person in theroom and to no one else, and thereupon denies that that personis present, or has spoken, etc. M. P. Janet's Lucie, blindto some of the numbered cards in her lap (p. 207 above), isa case in point. Now when the object is simple, like a red[Pg 212]wafer or a black cross, the subject, although he denies thathe sees it when he looks straight at it, nevertheless gets a'negative after-image' of it when he looks away again,showing that theoptical impression of it has been received.Moreover reflection shows that such a subject mustdistinguishthe object from others like it in order to be blind toit. Make him blind to one person in the room, set allthe persons in a row, and tell him to count them. He willcount all but that one. But how can he tellwhich one notto count without recognizing who he is? In like manner,make a stroke on paper or blackboard, and tell him it isnot there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper orboard. Next (he not looking) surround the original strokewith other strokes exactly like it, and ask him what hesees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes, andomit the original one every time, no matter how numerousthe new strokes may be, or in what order they arearranged. Similarly, if the original single stroke to whichhe is blind bedoubled by a prism of some sixteen degreesplaced before one of his eyes (both being kept open), hewill say that he now seesone stroke, and point in the directionin which the image seen through the prism lies, ignoringstill the original stroke.
Obviously, then, he is not blind to thekind of stroke inthe least. He is blind only to one individual stroke of thatkind in a particular position on the board or paper—thatis to a particular complex object; and, paradoxical as itmay seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great accuracyfrom others like it, in order to remain blind to itwhen the others are brought near. He discriminates it, asa preliminary to not seeing it at all.
Again, when by a prism before one eye a previously invisibleline has been made visible to that eye, and the othereye is thereupon closed or screened,its closure makes nodifference; the line still remains visible. But if then theprism be removed, the line will disappear even to the eyewhich a moment ago saw it, and both eyes will revert totheir original blind state.
We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a blindnessof the eye itself, nor with a mere failure to notice, but[Pg 213]with something much more complex; namely, an activecounting out and positive exclusion of certain objects. Itis as when one 'cuts' an acquaintance, 'ignores' a claim,or 'refuses to be influenced' by a consideration. But theperceptive activity which works to this result is disconnectedfrom the consciousness which is personal, so tospeak, to the subject, and makes of the object concerningwhich the suggestion is made, its own private possessionand prey.[207]
The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stirringsof her babe, evidently has the babe-portion of her auditorysensibility systematically awake. Relatively to that,the rest of her mind is in a state of systematized anæsthesia.That department, split off and disconnected from the sleepingpart, can none the less wake the latter up in case ofneed. So that on the whole the quarrel between Descartesand Locke as to whether the mind ever sleeps is lessnear to solution than ever. Ona priori speculative groundsLocke's view that thought and feeling may at times whollydisappear seems the more plausible. As glands cease tosecrete and muscles to contract, so the brain should sometimescease to carry currents, and with this minimum of itsactivity might well coexist a minimum of consciousness.On the other hand, we see how deceptive are appearances,and are forced to admit that a part of consciousness maysever its connections with other parts and yet continue to be.On the whole it is best to abstain from a conclusion. Thescience of the near future will doubtless answer this questionmore wisely than we can now.
Let us turn now to consider the
This is the problem known in the history of philosophyas thequestion of the seat of the soul. It has givenrise to much literature, but we must ourselves treat it verybriefly. Everything depends on what we conceive the soulto be, an extended or an inextended entity. If the former,it may occupy a seat. If the latter, it may not; though ithas been thought that even then it might still have aposition.Much hair-splitting has arisen about the possibilityof an inextended thing nevertheless beingpresent throughouta certain amount of extension. We must distinguishthe kinds of presence. In some manner our consciousnessis 'present' to everything with which it is in relation. I amcognitively present to Orion whenever I perceive that constellation,but I am notdynamically present there, I workno effects. To my brain, however, I am dynamically present,inasmuch as my thoughts and feelings seem to react uponthe processes thereof. If, then, by the seat of the mind ismeant nothing more than the locality with which it standsin immediate dynamic relations, we are certain to beright in saying that its seat is somewhere in the cortex ofthe brain. Descartes, as is well known, thought that theinextended soul was immediately present to the pinealgland. Others, as Lotze in his earlier days, and W. Volkmann,think its position must be at some point of the structurelessmatrix of the anatomical brain-elements, at whichpoint they suppose that all nerve-currents may cross andcombine. The scholastic doctrine is that the soul is totallypresent, both in the whole and in each and every partof the body. This mode of presence is said to be due tothe soul's inextended nature and to its simplicity. Two extendedentities could only correspond in space with oneanother, part to part,—but not so does the soul, which hasno parts, correspond with the body. Sir Wm. Hamiltonand Professor Bowen defend something like this view. I.H. Fichte, Ulrici, and, among American philosophers, Mr.J. E. Walter,[208] maintain the soul to be a space-filling principle.[Pg 215]Fichte calls it the inner body, Ulrici likens it to afluid of non-molecular composition. These theories remindus of the 'theosophic' doctrines of the present day, andcarry us back to times when the soul as vehicle of consciousnesswas not discriminated, as it now is, from thevital principle presiding over the formation of the body.Plato gave head, breast, and abdomen to the immortal reason,the courage, and the appetites, as their seats respectively.Aristotle argues that the heart is the sole seat.Elsewhere we find the blood, the brain, the lungs, the liverthe kidneys even, in turn assigned as seat of the whole orpart of the soul.[209]
The truth is that if the thinking principle is extended weneither know its form nor its seat; whilst if unextended, itis absurd to speak of its having any space-relations at all.Space-relations we shall see hereafter to besensible things.The only objects that can have mutual relations of positionare objects that are perceived coexisting in the same feltspace. A thing not perceived at all, such as the inextendedsoul must be, cannot coexist with any perceived objects inthis way. No lines can be felt stretching from it to theother objects. It can form no terminus to any space-interval.It can therefore in no intelligible sense enjoy position.Its relations cannot be spatial, but must be exclusivelycognitive or dynamic, as we have seen. So far as they aredynamic, to talk of the soul being 'present' is only a figureof speech. Hamilton's doctrine that the soul is present tothe whole body is at any rate false: for cognitively its presenceextends far beyond the body, and dynamically it doesnot extend beyond the brain.[Pg 216][210]
are either relations toother minds, or tomaterial things. Thematerial things are either the mind'sown brain, on the onehand, oranything else, on the other. The relations of amind to its own brain are of a unique and utterly mysterioussort; we discussed them in the last two chapters, andcan add nothing to that account.
The mind's relations to other objects than the brain arecognitive and emotional relations exclusively, so far as weknow. Itknows them, and it inwardlywelcomes or rejectsthem, but it has no other dealings with them. When it seemstoact upon them, it only does so through the intermediaryof its own body, so that not it but the body is what acts onthem, and the brain must first act upon the body. Thesame is true when other things seem to act on it—they onlyact on the body, and through that on its brain.[211] All thatitcan dodirectly is to know other things, misknow orignore them, and to find that they interest it, in this fashionor in that.
Now therelation of knowing is the most mysterious thingin the world. If we ask how one thingcan know anotherwe are led into the heart ofErkenntnisstheorie and metaphysics.The psychologist, for his part, does not consider thematter so curiously as this. Finding a world before himwhich he cannot but believe thathe knows, and settinghimself to study his own past thoughts, or someone else'sthoughts, of what he believes to be that same world; hecannot but conclude that those other thoughts know it aftertheir fashion even as he knows it after his. Knowledge becomesfor him an ultimate relation that must be admitted,whether it be explained or not, just like difference or resemblance,which no one seeks to explain.
Were our topic Absolute Mind instead of being the concreteminds of individuals dwelling in the natural world,we could not tell whether that Mind had the function ofknowing or not, as knowing is commonly understood. We[Pg 217]might learn the complexion of its thoughts; but, as weshould have no realities outside of it to compare them with,—forif we had, the Mind would not be Absolute,—we couldnot criticise them, and find them either right or wrong; andwe should have to call them simply the thoughts, and nottheknowledge, of the Absolute Mind. Finite minds, however,can be judged in a different way, because the psychologisthimself can go bail for the independent reality of theobjects of which they think. He knows these to exist outsideas well as inside the minds in question; he thus knowswhether the minds think andknow, or only think; andthough his knowledge is of course that of a fallible mortal,there is nothing in the conditions that should make it morelikely to be wrong in this case than in any other.
Now by what tests does the psychologist decide whetherthe state of mind he is studying is a bit of knowledge, oronly a subjective fact not referring to anything outsideitself?
He uses the tests we all practically use. If the state ofmindresembles his own idea of a certain reality; or if withoutresembling his idea of it, it seems to imply that reality andrefer to it by operating upon it through the bodily organs;or even if it resembles and operates on some other realitythat implies, and leads up to, and terminates in, the firstone,—in either or all of these cases the psychologist admitsthat the state of mind takes cognizance, directly or remotely,distinctly or vaguely, truly or falsely, of the reality's natureand position in the world. If, on the other hand, themental state under examination neither resembles nor operateson any of the realities known to the psychologist, he callsit a subjective state pure and simple, possessed of no cognitiveworth. If, again, it resemble a reality or a set ofrealities as he knows them, but altogether fail to operateon them or modify their course by producing bodily motionswhich the psychologist sees, then the psychologist, like allof us, may be in doubt. Let the mental state, for example,occur during the sleep of its subject. Let the latter dreamof the death of a certain man, and let the man simultaneouslydie. Is the dream a mere coincidence, or a veritablecognition of the death? Such puzzling cases are[Pg 218]what the Societies for 'Psychical Research' are collectingand trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.
If the dream were the only one of the kind the subjectever had in his life, if the context of the death in the dreamdiffered in many particulars from the real death's context,and if the dream led to no action about the death, unquestionablywe should all call it a strange coincidence, andnaught besides. But if the death in the dream had a longcontext, agreeing point for point with every feature thatattended the real death; if the subject were constantlyhaving such dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awakinghe had a habit of acting immediately as if they were trueand so getting 'the start' of his more tardily informedneighbors,—we should probably all have to admit that hehad some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that hisdreams in an inscrutable way knew just those realitieswhich they figured, and that the word 'coincidence' failedto touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts anyone preserved would completely vanish if it should appearthat from the midst of his dream he had the power ofinterferingwith the course of the reality, and making the eventsin it turn this way or that, according as he dreamed theyshould. Then at least it would be certain that he and thepsychologist were dealing with thesame. It is by suchtests as these that we are convinced that the waking mindsof our fellows and our own minds know the same externalworld.
The psychologist's attitude towards cognition will be soimportant in the sequel that we must not leave it until it ismade perfectly clear.It is a thoroughgoing dualism. Itsupposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, andtreats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of itself orinto the other, neither in any wayis the other, neithermakes the other. They just stand face to face in a commonworld, and one simply knows, or is known unto, its counterpart.This singular relation is not to be expressed in anylower terms, or translated into any more intelligible name.Some sort ofsignal must be given by the thing to the mind'sbrain, or the knowing will not occur—we find as a matter[Pg 219]of fact that the mereexistence of a thing outside the brainis not a sufficient cause for our knowing it: it must strikethe brain in some way, as well as be there, to be known.But the brain being struck, the knowledge is constitutedby a new construction that occurs altogetherin the mind.The thing remains the same whether known or not.[212] Andwhen once there, the knowledge may remain there, whateverbecomes of the thing.
By the ancients, and by unreflecting people perhaps to-day,knowledge is explained as thepassage of somethingfrom without into the mind—the latter, so far, at least, asits sensible affections go, being passive and receptive.But even in mere sense-impression the duplication of theobject by an inner construction must take place. Consider,with Professor Bowne, what happens when two people conversetogether and know each other's mind.
"No thoughts leave the mind of one and cross into the mind of theother. When we speak of an exchange of thought, even the crudestmind knows that this is a mere figure of speech.... To perceiveanother's thought, we must construct his thought within ourselves;...this thought is our own and is strictly original with us. At the sametime we owe it to the other; and if it had not originated with him, itwould probably not have originated with us. But what has the otherdone?... This: by an entirely mysterious world-order, the speakeris enabled to produce a series of signs which are totally unlike [the]thought, but which, by virtue of the same mysterious order, act as aseries of incitements upon the hearer, so that he constructs withinhimself the corresponding mental state. The act of the speaker consistsin availing himself of the proper incitements. The act of the hearer isimmediately only the reaction of the soul against the incitement....All communion between finite minds is of this sort.... Probably noreflecting person would deny this conclusion, but when we say thatwhat is thus true of perception of another's thought is equally true ofthe perception of the outer world in general, many minds will bedisposed to question, and not a few will deny it outright. Yet there isno alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we mustconstruct it in thought, and that our knowledge of the universe is butthe unfolding of the mind's inner nature.... By describing the mindas a waxen tablet, and things as impressing themselves upon it, weseem to get great insight until we think to ask where this extendedtablet is, and how things stamp themselves on it, and how the perceptive[Pg 220]act would be explained even if they did.... The immediateantecedents of sensation and perception are a series of nervous changesin the brain. Whatever we know of the outer world is revealed onlyin and through these nervous changes. But these are totally unlikethe objects assumed to exist as their causes. If we might conceive themind as in the light, and in direct contact with its objects, theimagination at least would be comforted; but when we conceive themind as coming in contact with the outer world only in the darkchamber of the skull, and then not in contact with the objects perceived,but only with a series of nerve-changes of which, moreover, itknows nothing, it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talkof pictures, impressions, etc., ceases because of the lack of all theconditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear thatwe shall ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of lightand reality again. We begin with complete trust in physics and thesenses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervouslabyrinth, where the object is entirely displaced by a set of nervouschanges which are totally unlike anything but themselves. Finally,we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The object has gone completely,and knowledge has not yet appeared. Nervous signs are theraw material of all knowledge of the outer world according to the mostdecided realism. But in order to pass beyond these signs into aknowledge of the outer world, we must posit an interpreter who shallread back these signs into their objective meaning. But that interpreter,again, must implicitly contain the meaning of the universewithin itself; and these signs are really but excitations which cause thesoul to unfold what is within itself. Inasmuch as by common consentthe soul communicates with the outer world only through these signs,and never comes nearer to the object than such signs can bring it, itfollows that the principles of interpretation must be in the mind itself,and that the resulting construction is primarily only an expression of themind's own nature. All reaction is of this sort; it expresses the natureof the reacting agent, and knowledge comes under the same head,this fact makes it necessary for us either to admit a pre-establishedharmony between the laws and nature of thought and the laws andnature of things, or else to allow that the objects of perception, theuniverse as it appears, are purely phenomenal, being but the way inwhich the mind reacts against the ground of its sensations."[213]
The dualism of Object and Subject and their pre-establishedharmony are what the psychologist as such mustassume, whatever ulterior monistic philosophy he may, asan individual who has the right also to be a metaphysician,have in reserve. I hope that this general point is now[Pg 221]made clear, so that we may leave it, and descend to somedistinctions of detail.
There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practicallydistinguishable: we may call them respectivelyknowledgeof acquaintance andknowledge-about. Most languages expressthe distinction; thus,γνῶναι, εὶδέναι; noscere, scire;kennen, wissen; connaître, savoir.[214] I am acquainted withmany people and things, which I know very little about,except their presence in the places where I have met them.I know the color blue when I see it, and the flavor of apear when I taste it; I know an inch when I move myfinger through it; a second of time, when I feel it pass;an effort of attention when I make it; a difference betweentwo things when I notice it; butabout the inner nature ofthese facts or what makes them what they are, I can saynothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance with themto any one who has not already made it himself. I cannotdescribe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like,define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in justwhat respect distance is just what it is, and differs fromother forms of relation. At most, I can say to my friends,Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and theseobjects will probably come. All the elementary natures ofthe world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matterand mind, together with the kinds of relation that subsistbetween them, must either not be known at all, or knownin this dumb way of acquaintance withoutknowledge-about.In minds able to speak at all there is, it is true,some knowledgeabout everything. Things can at least be classed, andthe times of their appearance told. But in general, the lesswe analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we perceive,the less we know about it and the more our familiaritywith it is of the acquaintance-type. The two kindsof knowledge are, therefore, as the human mind practicallyexerts them, relative terms. That is, the same thoughtof a thing may be called knowledge-about it in comparisonwith a simpler thought, or acquaintance with it in comparison[Pg 222]with a thought of it that is more articulate and explicitstill.
The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its 'subject'stands for an object of acquaintance which, by the additionof the predicate, is to get something known about it. Wemay already know a good deal, when we hear the subjectnamed—its name may have rich connotations. But, knowwe much or little then, we know more still when the sentenceis done. We can relapse at will into a mere conditionof acquaintance with an object by scattering ourattention and staring at it in a vacuous trance-like way.We can ascend to knowledgeabout it by rallying our witsand proceeding to notice and analyze and think. What weare only acquainted with is onlypresent to our minds; wehave it, or the idea of it. But when we know about it, wedo more than merely have it; we seem, as we think over itsrelations, to subject it to a sort oftreatment and tooperateupon it with our thought. The wordsfeeling andthoughtgive voice to the antithesis. Through feelings we becomeacquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do weknow about them. Feelings are the germ and startingpoint of cognition, thoughts the developed tree. The minimumof grammatical subject, of objective presence, of realityknown about, the mere beginning of knowledge, must benamed by the word that says the least. Such a word is theinterjection, aslo! there! ecco! voilà! or the article ordemonstrative pronoun introducing the sentence, asthe, it,that. InChapter XII we shall see a little deeper into whatthis distinction, between the mere mental having or feelingof an object and the thinking of it, portends.
The mental states usually distinguished as feelings aretheemotions, and thesensations we get from skin, muscle,viscus, eye, ear, nose, and palate. The 'thoughts,' asrecognized in popular parlance, are theconceptions andjudgments. When we treat of these mental states in particularwe shall have to say a word about the cognitivefunction and value of each. It may perhaps be well tonotice now that our senses only give us acquaintance withfacts of body, and that of the mental states of other persons[Pg 223]we only have conceptual knowledge. Of our own paststates of mind we take cognizance in a peculiar way. Theyare 'objects of memory,' and appear to us endowed witha sort of warmth and intimacy that makes the perceptionof them seem more like a process of sensation than like athought.
[198] Messrs. Payton Spence (Journal of Spec. Phil., x, 338, xiv, 286)and M. M. Garver (Amer. Jour. of Science, 3d series, xx, 189) argue, theone from speculative, the other from experimental grounds, that, the physicalcondition of consciousness being neural vibration, the consciousnessmust itself be incessantly interrupted by unconsciousness—about fifty timesa second, according to Garver.
[199] That the appearance of mental activity here is real can be proved bysuggesting to the 'hypnotized' somnambulist that he shall remember whenhe awakes. He will then often do so.
[200] For more details, cf. Malebranche, Rech. de la Verité, bk. iii, chap.i; J. Locke, Essay conc. H. U., book iii, ch. i; C. Wolf, Psychol.rationalis, § 59; Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaph., lecture xvii;J. Bascom, Science of Mind, § 12; Th. Jouffroy, Mélanges Philos., 'duSommeil'; H. Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiol., p. 80; B. Brodie,Psychol. Researches, p. 147; E. M. Chesley, Journ. of Spec. Phil., vol. xi,p. 72; Th. Ribot, Maladies de la Personnalité, pp. 8-10; H. Lotze, Metaphysics,§ 533.
[201] L'Automatisme Psychologique, Paris, 1889,passim.
[202] See his articles in the Chicago Open Court, for July, August andNovember, 1889. Also in the Revue Philosophique for 1889 and '90.
[203] This whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself belowthe threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion associative effectstherein. The skin-sensations unfelt by the patient's primary consciousnessawaken nevertheless their usual visual associates therein.
[204] See Proceedings of American Soc. for Psych. Research, vol. i, p.548.
[205] Proceedings of the (London) Soc. for Psych. Research, May, 1887, p.268 ff.
[206] M. Janet designates by numbers the different personalities which thesubject may display.
[207] How to conceive of this state of mind is not easy. It would be muchsimpler to understand the process, if adding new strokes made the first onevisible. There would then be two different objects apperceived as totals,—paperwith one stroke, paper with many strokes; and, blind to the former,he would see all that was in the latter, because he would have apperceivedit as a different total in the first instance.
A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the newstrokes, instead of being mere repetitions of the original one, are lineswhich combine with it into a total object, say a human face. The subjectof the trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he hadpreviously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face.
[208] Perception of Space and Matter, 1879, part ii, chap. 3.
[209] For a very good condensed history of the various opinions, see W.Volkmann von Volkmar, Lehrbuch d. Psychologie, § 16, Anm. Completereferences to Sir W. Hamilton are given in J. E. Walter, Perception ofSpace and Matter, pp. 65-6.
[210] Most contemporary writers ignore the question of the soul's seat.Lotze is the only one who seems to have been much concerned about it,and his views have varied. Cf. Medicinische Psychol., § 10. Microcosmus,bk. iii, ch. 2. Metaphysic, bk. iii, ch. 5. Outlines of Psychol.,part ii, ch. 3. See also G. T. Fechner, Psychophysik, chap. xxxvii.
[211] I purposely ignore 'clairvoyance' and action upon distant things by'mediums,' as not yet matters of common consent.
[212] I disregardconsequences which may later come to the thing from thefact that it is known. The knowingper se in no wise affects the thing.
[213] B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, pp. 407-10. Cf. also Lotze: Logik,§§ 308, 326-7.
[214] Cf. John Grote: Exploratio Philosophica, p. 60; H. Helmholtz,Popular Scientific Lectures, London, p. 308-9.
We now begin our study of the mind from within. Mostbooks start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts,and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stagefrom those below it. But this is abandoning the empiricalmethod of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensationby itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of ateeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what wecall simple sensations are results of discriminative attention,pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishingwhat havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at theoutset apparently innocent suppositions, that neverthelesscontain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselveslater on, and are irremediable, being woven through thewhole texture of the work. The notion that sensations,being the simplest things, are the first things to take up inpsychology is one of these suppositions. The only thingwhich psychology has a right to postulate at the outset isthe fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken upand analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst theelements of the thinking, we shall be no worse off as respectsthem than if we had taken them for granted at thestart.
The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinkingof some sort goes on. I use the word thinking, in accordancewith what was said onp. 186, for every form of consciousnessindiscriminately. If we could say in English 'itthinks,' as we say 'it rains 'or 'it blows,' we should be[Pg 225]stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption.As we cannot, we must simply say thatthoughtgoes on.
How does it go on? We notice immediately five importantcharacters in the process, of which it shall be the dutyof the present chapter to treat in a general way:
1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2) Within each personal consciousness thought is alwayschanging.
3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensiblycontinuous.
4) It always appears to deal with objects independentof itself.
5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to theexclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses fromamong them, in a word—all the while.
In considering these five points successively, we shallhave to plungein medias res as regards our vocabulary, anduse psychological terms which can only be adequately definedin later chapters of the book. But every one knowswhat the terms mean in a rough way; and it is only in arough way that we are now to take them. This chapter islike a painter's first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, inwhich no niceties appear.
When I sayevery thought is part of a personal consciousness,'personal consciousness' is one of the terms inquestion. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks usto define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the mostdifficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must confrontin the next chapter; here a preliminary word will suffice.
In this room—this lecture-room, say—there are a multitudeof thoughts, yours and mine, some of which coheremutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itselfand reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-together.They are neither: no one of them is separate,[Pg 226]but each belongs with certain others and with none beside.My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and yourthought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere inthe room there be a mere thought, which is nobody'sthought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have noexperience of its like. The only states of consciousnessthat we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses,minds, selves, concrete particular I's andyou's.
Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself.There is no giving or bartering between them. No thoughteven comes into directsight of a thought in another personalconsciousness than its own. Absolute insulation,irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementarypsychic fact were notthought orthis thought orthatthought, butmy thought, every thought beingowned. Neithercontemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity ofquality and content are able to fuse thoughts togetherwhich are sundered by this barrier of belonging to differentpersonal minds. The breaches between such thoughtsare the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone willrecognize this to be true, so long as the existence ofsomethingcorresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all thatis insisted on, without any particular view of its naturebeing implied. On these terms the personal self ratherthan the thought might be treated as the immediate datumin psychology. The universal conscious fact is not 'feelingsand thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.'[216] Nopsychology, at any rate, can question theexistence of personalselves. The worst a psychology can do is so tointerpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of theirworth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas, says somewherein a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement that, misledby certain peculiarities which they display, we 'end bypersonifying' the procession which they make,—such personificationbeing regarded by him as a great philosophicblunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if thenotion of personality meant something essentially different[Pg 227]from anything to be found in the mental procession. But ifthat procession be itself the very 'original' of the notion ofpersonality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It isalready personified. There are no marks of personality tobe gatheredaliunde, and then found lacking in the train ofthought. It has them all already; so that to whateverfarther analysis we may subject that form of personal selfhoodunder which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain,true that the thoughts which psychology studies do continuallytend to appear as parts of personal selves.
I say 'tend to appear' rather than 'appear,' on accountof those facts of sub-conscious personality, automatic writing,etc., of which we studied a few in the last chapter.The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to exist inhysterical anæsthetics, in recipients of post-hypnotic suggestion,etc., themselves are parts ofsecondary personalselves. These selves are for the most part very stupid andcontracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from communicationwith the regular and normal self of the individual;but still they form conscious unities, have continuous memories,speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, oradopt names that are suggested; and, in short, are entirelyworthy of that title of secondary personalities which is nowcommonly given them. According to M. Janet these secondarypersonalities are always abnormal, and result from thesplitting of what ought to be a single complete self into twoparts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the otherappears on the surface as the only self the man or womanhas. For our present purpose it is unimportant whetherthis account of the origin of secondary selves is applicableto all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is trueof a large number of them. Now although thesize of asecondary self thus formed will depend on the number ofthoughts that are thus split-off from the main consciousness,theform of it tends to personality, and the laterthoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones andadopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual momentof inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondarypersonalities in his anæsthetic somnambulist Lucie. Hefound that when this young woman's attention was absorbed[Pg 228]in conversation with a third party, her anæsthetic handwould write simple answers to questions whispered to her byhimself. "Do you hear?" he asked. "No," was the unconsciouslywritten reply. "But to answer you must hear.""Yes, quite so." "Then how do you manage?" "I don'tknow." "There must be some one who hears me." "Yes.""Who?" "Someone other than Lucie." "Ah! another person.Shall we give her a name?" "No." "Yes, it willbe more convenient." "Well, Adrienne, then." "Once baptized,the subconscious personage," M. Janet continues,"grows more definitely outlined and displays better herpsychological characters. In particular she shows us thatshe is conscious of the feelings excluded from the consciousnessof the primary or normal personage. She it is whotells us that I am pinching the arm or touching the littlefinger in which Lucie for so long has had no tactile sensations."[217]
In other cases the adoption of the name by the secondaryself is more spontaneous. I have seen a number ofincipient automatic writers and mediums as yet imperfectly'developed,' who immediately and of their own accordwrite and speak in the name of departed spirits. Thesemay be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday, or real personsformerly known to the subject, or altogether imaginarybeings. Without prejudicing the question of real'spirit-control' in the more developed sorts of trance-utterance,I incline to think that these (often deplorablyunintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work of aninferior fraction of the subject's own natural mind, set freefrom control by the rest, and working after a set patternfixed by the prejudices of the social environment. In aspiritualistic community we get optimistic messages, whilstin an ignorant Catholic village the secondary personagecalls itself by the name of a demon, and proffers blasphemiesand obscenities, instead of telling us how happy itis in the summer-land.[Pg 229][218]
Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudimentary,are still organized selves with a memory, habits,and sense of their own identity, M. Janet thinks that thefacts of catalepsy in hysteric patients drive us to supposethat there are thoughts quite unorganized and impersonal.A patient in cataleptic trance (which can be produced artificiallyin certain hypnotized subjects) is without memoryon waking, and seems insensible and unconscious as longas the cataleptic condition lasts. If, however, one raisesthe arm of such a subject it stays in that position, and thewhole body can thus be moulded like wax under the handsof the operator, retaining for a considerable time whateverattitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm,for example, is anæsthetic, the same thing may happen.The anæsthetic arm may remain passively in positions whichit is made to assume; or if the hand be taken and made tohold a pencil and trace a certain letter, it will continuetracing that letter indefinitely on the paper. These acts,until recently, were supposed to be accompanied by noconsciousness at all: they were physiological reflexes. M.Janet considers with much more plausibility that feelingescorts them. The feeling is probably merely that of theposition or movement of the limb, and it produces no morethan its natural effects when it discharges into the motorcentres which keep the position maintained, or the movementincessantly renewed.[219] Such thoughts as these, says M.Janet, "are known byno one, for disaggregated sensationsreduced to a state of mental dust are not synthetized inany personality."[220] He admits, however, that these verysame unutterably stupid thoughts tend to develop memory,—thecataleptic ere long moves her arm at a bare hint; sothat they form no important exception to the law that allthought tends to assume the form of personal consciousness.
I do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind hasany duration—even if true, that would be hard to establish.[Pg 230]The change which I have more particularly in view is thatwhich takes place in sensible intervals of time; and the resulton which I wish to lay stress is this, thatno state once gonecan recur and be identical with what it was before. Let usbegin with Mr. Shadworth Hodgson's description:
"I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, orsensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when Ilook at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of,or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is asequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep perfectlystill, and try not to contribute anything of my own will; but whetherI think or do not think, whether I perceive external things or not, Ialways have a succession of different feelings. Anything else that I mayhave also, of a more special character, comes in as parts of this succession,Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to beconscious at all.... The chain of consciousness is a sequence ofdifferents."[221]
Such a description as this can awaken no possible protestfrom any one. We all recognize as different greatclasses of our conscious states. Now we are seeing, nowhearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, nowexpecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred otherways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. Butall these are complex states. The aim of science is alwaysto reduce complexity to simplicity; and in psychologicalscience we have the celebrated 'theory ofideas' which,admitting the great difference among each other of whatmay be called concrete conditions of mind, seeks to showhow this is all the resultant effect of variations in thecombinationof certain simple elements of consciousness thatalways remain the same. These mental atoms or moleculesare what Locke called 'simple ideas.' Some of Locke'ssuccessors made out that the only simple ideas were thesensations strictly so called. Which ideas the simple onesmay be does not, however, now concern us. It is enoughthat certain philosophers have thought they could seeunder the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind elementaryfacts ofany sort that remained unchanged amid theflow.
And the view of these philosophers has been called littleinto question, for our common experience seems at firstsight to corroborate it entirely. Are not the sensations weget from the same object, for example, always the same?Does not the same piano-key, struck with the same force,make us hear in the same way? Does not the same grassgive us the same feeling of green, the same sky the samefeeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sensationno matter how many times we put our nose to thesame flask of cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysicalsophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close attentionto the matter shows thatthere is no proof that thesame bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.
What is got twice is the sameobject. We hear the samenote over and over again; we see the samequality of green,or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the samespecies of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physicaland ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in,seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought,and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas'of them are the same ideas. When we come, some timelater, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterateis our habit of not attending to sensations as subjectivefacts, but of simply using them as stepping-stones topass over to the recognition of the realities whose presencethey reveal. The grass out of the window now looks to meof the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet apainter would have to paint one part of it dark brown,another part bright yellow, to give its real, sensational effect.We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way in whichthe same things look and sound and smell at different distancesand under different circumstances. The samenessof thethings is what we are concerned to ascertain; andany sensations that assure us of that will probably be consideredin a rough way to be the same with each other.This is what makes off-hand testimony about the subjectiveidentity of different sensations well-nigh worthless as aproof of the fact. The entire history of Sensation is a commentaryon our inability to tell whether two sensationsreceived apart are exactly alike. What appeals to our[Pg 232]attention far more than the absolute quality or quantity ofa given sensation is itsratio to whatever other sensationswe may have at the same time. When everything is darka somewhat less dark sensation makes us see an objectwhite. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble paintedin a picture representing an architectural view by moonlightis, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousandtimes brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.[222]
Such a difference as this could never have beensensiblylearned; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect considerations.There are facts which make us believe thatour sensibility is altering all the time, so that the sameobject cannot easily give us the same sensation over again.The eye's sensibility to light is at its maximum when theeye is first exposed, and blunts itself with surprising rapidity.A long night's sleep will make it see things twice asbrightly on wakening, as simple rest by closure will makeit see them later in the day.[223] We feel things differentlyaccording as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, freshor tired; differently at night and in the morning, differentlyin summer and in winter, and above all things differently inchildhood, manhood, and old age. Yet we never doubt thatour feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensiblequalities and the same sensible things occupying it. Thedifference of the sensibility is shown best by the differenceof our emotion about the things from one age to another, orwhen we are in different organic moods. What was brightand exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. Thebird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky issad.
To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, followingthe mutations of our capacity for feeling, are alwaysundergoing an essential change, must be added anotherpresumption, based on what must happen in the brain.Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. Foran identical sensation to recur it would have to occur thesecond timein an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly[Pg 233]speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodifiedfeeling an impossibility; for to every brain-modification,however small, must correspond a change of equalamount in the feeling which the brain subserves.
All this would be true if even sensations came to us pureand single and not combined into 'things.' Even then weshould have to confess that, however we might in ordinaryconversation speak of getting the same sensation again, wenever in strict theoretic accuracy could do so; and thatwhatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elementaryfeeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus,that we never descend twice into the same stream.
But if the assumption of 'simple ideas of sensation'recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to bebaseless, how much more baseless is the assumption ofimmutability in the larger masses of our thought!
For there it is obvious and palpable that our state ofmind is never precisely the same. Every thought we haveof a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears aresemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the samefact. When the identical fact recurs, wemust think of itin a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle,apprehend it in different relations from those in which itlast appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it isthe thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffusedwith the consciousness of all that dim context. Often weare ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successiveviews of the same thing. We wonder how we evercould have opined as we did last month about a certainmatter. We have outgrown the possibility of that state ofmind, we know not how. From one year to another we seethings in new lights. What was unreal has grown real,and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used tocare the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women,once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, hownow so dull and common! the young girls that brought anaura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences;pictures so empty; and as for the books, whatwas there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or inJohn Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more[Pg 234]zestful than ever is the work, the work; and fuller anddeeper the import of common duties and of common goods.
But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrantscale exists on every scale, down to the imperceptibletransition from one hour's outlook to that of the next. Experienceis remoulding us every moment, and our mentalreaction on every given thing is really a resultant of ourexperience of the whole world up to that date. The analogiesof brain-physiology must again be appealed to tocorroborate our view.
Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that,whilst we think, our brain changes, and that, like the auroraborealis, its whole internal equilibrium shifts with everypulse of change. The precise nature of the shifting at agiven moment is a product of many factors. The accidentalstate of local nutrition or blood-supply may be amongthem. But just as one of them certainly is the influence ofoutward objects on the sense-organs during the moment,so is another certainly the very special susceptibility inwhich the organ has been left at that moment by all ithas gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partlydetermined by the nature of this entire past succession.Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must besomewhat different. Each present brain-state is a recordin which the eye of Omniscience might read all the foregonehistory of its owner. It is out of the question, then,that any total brain-state should identically recur. Somethinglike it may recur; but to supposeit to recur wouldbe equivalent to the absurd admission that all the statesthat had intervened between its two appearances had beenpure nonentities, and that the organ after their passagewas exactly as it was before. And (to consider shorterperiods) just as, in the senses, an impression feels very differentlyaccording to what has preceded it; as one colorsucceeding another is modified by the contrast, silencesounds delicious after noise, and a note, when the scale issung up, sounds unlike itself when the scale is sung down;as the presence of certain lines in a figure changes the apparentform of the other lines, and as in music the wholeæsthetic effect comes from the manner in which one set of[Pg 235]sounds alters our feeling of another; so, in thought, wemust admit that those portions of the brain that have justbeen maximally excited retain a kind of soreness which isa condition of our present consciousness, a codeterminantof how and what we now shall feel.[224]
Ever some tracts are waning in tension, some waxing,whilst others actively discharge. The states of tensionhave as positive an influence as any in determining thetotal condition, and in deciding what thepsychosis shall be.All we know of submaximal nerve-irritations, and of thesummation of apparently ineffective stimuli, tends to showthatno changes in the brain are physiologically ineffective,and that presumably none are bare of psychological result.But as the brain-tension shifts from one relative state ofequilibrium to another, like the gyrations of a kaleidoscope,now rapid and now slow, is it likely that its faithfulpsychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, and thatit cannot match each one of the organ's irradiations by ashifting inward iridescence of its own? But if it can dothis, its inward iridescences must be infinite, for the brain-redistributionsare in infinite variety. If so coarse a thingas a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years andnever reduplicate its inward condition, how much moremust this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain?
I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regardingthe mind's changes is the only true manner, difficult asit may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems obscureabout it, it will grow clearer as we advance. Meanwhile,if it be true, it is certainly also true that no two'ideas' are ever exactly the same, which is the propositionwe started to prove. The proposition is more importanttheoretically than it at first sight seems. For it makes it[Pg 236]already impossible for us to follow obediently in the footprintsof either the Lockian or the Herbartian school,schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Germanyand among ourselves. No doubt it is oftenconvenientto formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sortof way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as ifthey were all built out of unchanging simple ideas. It isconvenient often to treat curves as if they were composedof small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as ifthey were fluids. But in the one case as in the other wemust never forget that we are talking symbolically, andthat there is nothing in nature to answer to our words.Apermanently existing 'idea' or 'Vorstellung' which makes itsappearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodicalintervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.
What makes it convenient to use the mythological formulasis the whole organization of speech, which, as wasremarked a while ago, was not made by psychologists, butby men who were as a rule only interested in the facts theirmental states revealed. They only spoke of their states asideas of this or of that thing. What wonder, then, that thethought is most easily conceived under the law of the thingwhose name it bears! If the thing is composed of parts,then we suppose that the thought of the thing must becomposed of the thoughts of the parts. If one part of thething have appeared in the same thing or in other things onformer occasions, why then we must be having even now thevery same 'idea' of that part which was there on those occasions.If the thing is simple, its thought is simple. If itis multitudinous, it must require a multitude of thoughtsto think it. If a succession, only a succession of thoughtscan know it. If permanent, its thought is permanent. Andso onad libitum. What after all is so natural as to assumethat one object, called by one name, should be known byone affection of the mind? But, if language must thus influenceus, the agglutinative languages, and even Greek andLatin with their declensions, would be the better guides.Names did not appear in them inalterable, but changedtheir shape to suit the context in which they lay. It musthave been easier then than now to conceive of the same[Pg 237]object as being thought of at different times in non-identicalconscious states.
This, too, will grow clearer as we proceed. Meanwhilea necessary consequence of the belief in permanent self-identicalpsychic facts that absent themselves and recurperiodically is the Humian doctrine that our thought iscomposed of separate independent parts and is not a sensiblycontinuous stream. That this doctrine entirely misrepresentsthe natural appearances is what I next shall tryto show.
I can only define 'continuous' as that which is withoutbreach, crack, or division. I have already said thatthe breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatestbreach in nature. The only breaches that can well beconceived to occur within the limits of a single mind wouldeither beinterruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousnesswent out altogether to come into existence againat a later moment; or they would be breaks in thequality,or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment thatfollowed had no connection whatever with the one thatwent before. The proposition that within each personalconsciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:
1. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousnessafter it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousnessbefore it, as another part of the same self;
2. That the changes from one moment to another in thequality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.
The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be takenfirst. And first of all a word about time-gaps of which theconsciousness may not be itself aware.
Onpage 200 we saw that such time-gaps existed, andthat they might be more numerous than is usually supposed.If the consciousness is not aware of them, it cannot feelthem as interruptions. In the unconsciousness producedby nitrous oxide and other anæsthetics, in that of epilepsyand fainting, the broken edges of the sentient life may[Pg 238]meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of spaceof the opposite margins of the 'blind spot' meet andmerge over that objective interruption to the sensitivenessof the eye. Such consciousness as this, whatever it be forthe onlooking psychologist, is for itself unbroken. Itfeelsunbroken; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit as long asthat day lasts, in the sense in which the hours themselvesare units, as having all their parts next each other, with nointrusive alien substance between. To expect the consciousnessto feel the interruptions of its objective continuityas gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel agap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel agap of darkness because it does not see. So much for thegaps that are unfelt.
With the felt gaps the case is different. On waking fromsleep, we usually know that we have been unconscious,and we often have an accurate judgment of how long. Thejudgment here is certainly an inference from sensible signs,and its ease is due to long practice in the particular field.[225]The result of it, however, is that the consciousness is,foritself, not what it was in the former case, but interruptedand discontinuous, in the mere sense of the words. Butin the other sense of continuity, the sense of the parts beinginwardly connected and belonging together because theyare parts of a common whole, the consciousness remainssensibly continuous and one. What now is the commonwhole? The natural name for it ismyself, I, orme.
When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, andrecognize that they have been asleep, each one of themmentally reaches back and makes connection with butoneof the two streams of thought which were broken by thesleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried inthe ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarlyburied mate, across no matter how much intervening earth;so Peter's present instantly finds out Peter's past, and neverby mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul's thoughtin turn is as little liable to go astray. The past thought ofPeter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may[Pg 239]have aknowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul'slast drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but itis an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which hehas of his own last states. Heremembers his own states,whilst he onlyconceives Paul's. Remembrance is like directfeeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacyto which no object of mere conception ever attains. Thisquality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is whatPeter'spresent thought also possesses for itself. So sureas this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anythingelse that comes with the same warmth and intimacy andimmediacy, me and mine. What the qualities calledwarmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to bematter for future consideration. But whatever past feelingsappear with those qualities must be admitted to receivethe greeting of the present mental state, to be ownedby it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a commonself. This community of self is what the time-gapcannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, althoughnot ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itselfas continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself choppedup in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describeit fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. Itis nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' arethe metaphors by which it is most naturally described.Intalking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, ofconsciousness, or of subjective life.
But now there appears, even within the limits of thesame self, and between thoughts all of which alike havethis same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing andseparateness among the parts, of which this statementseems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that areproduced by suddencontrasts in the quality of the successivesegments of the stream of thought If the words 'chain'and 'train' had no natural fitness in them, how came suchwords to be used at all? Does not a loud explosion rendthe consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain?Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new object,[Pg 240]or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensiblyfelt as such, which cuts the conscious stream across at themoment at which it appears? Do not such interruptionssmite us every hour of our lives, and have we the right, intheir presence, still to call our consciousness a continuousstream?
This objection is based partly on a confusion and partlyon a superficial introspective view.
The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, takenas subjective facts, and the things of which they are aware.It is natural to make this confusion, but easy to avoid itwhen once put on one's guard. The things are discreteand discontinuous; they do pass before us in a train orchain, making often explosive appearances and rendingeach other in twain. But their comings and goings andcontrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinksthem than they break the time and the space in which theylie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and wemay be so stunned and confused for a moment by the shockas to give no instant account to ourselves of what has happened.But that very confusion is a mental state, and astate that passes us straight over from the silence to thesound. The transition between the thought of one objectand the thought of another is no more a break in thethoughtthan a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is apart of theconsciousness as much as the joint is a part of thebamboo.
The superficial introspective view is the overlooking,even when the things are contrasted with each other mostviolently, of the large amount of affinity that may still remainbetween the thoughts by whose means they arecognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself theawareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; forwhat we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunderpure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.[226]Our feeling of the same objective thunder, comingin this way, is quite different from what it would be[Pg 241]were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. Thethunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence;but thefeeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silenceas just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actualconcrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to thepresent as not to have an inkling of anything that went before.Here, again, language works against our perceptionof the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after itsthing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else.What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for,with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought tobe named after all of them, but it never is. Some of themare always things known a moment ago more clearly; othersare things to be known more clearly a moment hence.[227] Ourown bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the thingsof whichsome awareness, however inattentive, invariablyaccompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know. We[Pg 242]think; and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seatof the thinking. If the thinking beour thinking, it mustbe suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmthand intimacy that make it come as ours. Whether thewarmth and intimacy be anything more than the feeling ofthe same old body always there, is a matter for the nextchapter to decide.Whatever the content of the ego may be,it is habitually feltwith everything else by us humans,and must form aliaison between all the things of which webecome successively aware.[228]
On this gradualness in the changes of our mental contentthe principles of nerve-action can throw some morelight. When studying, inChapter III, the summation ofnervous activities, we saw that no state of the brain can besupposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, theinertia of the old state will still be there and modify theresult accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our ignorance,what in each instance the modifications ought to be.The commonest modifications in sense-perception areknown as the phenomena of contrast. In æsthetics theyare the feelings of delight or displeasure which certainparticular orders in a series of impressions give. Inthought, strictly and narrowly so called, they are unquestionablythat consciousness of thewhence and thewhitherthat always accompanies its flows. If recently the brain-tracta was vividly excited, and thenb, and now vividlyc,the total present consciousness is not produced simply byc's excitement, but also by the dying vibrations ofa andbas well. If we want to represent the brain-process wemust write it thus:abc—three different processes coexisting,and correlated with them a thought which is no oneof the three thoughts which they would have produced hadeach of them occurred alone. But whatever this fourththought may exactly be, it seems impossible that it shouldnot be somethinglike each of the three other thoughtswhose tracts are concerned in its production, though in afast-waning phase.
It all goes back to what we said in another connectiononly a few pages ago (p. 233). As the total neurosis changes,so does the total psychosis change. But as the changes ofneurosis are never absolutely discontinuous, so must thesuccessive psychoses shade gradually into each other,although theirrate of change may be much faster at onemoment than at the next.
This difference in the rate of change lies at the basis ofa difference of subjective states of which we ought immediatelyto speak. When the rate is slow we are aware of theobject of our thought in a comparatively restful and stableway. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation,a transitionfrom it, orbetween it and something else. Aswe take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream ofour consciousness, what strikes us first is this differentpace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made ofan alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm oflanguage expresses this, where every thought is expressedin a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. Theresting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginationsof some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can beheld before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplatedwithout changing; the places of flight are filled withthoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the mostpart obtain between the matters contemplated in theperiods of comparative rest.
Let us call the resting-places the 'substantive parts,' andthe places of flight the 'transitive parts,' of the stream ofthought. It then appears that the main end of ourthinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantivepart than the one from which we have just beendislodged. And we may say that the main use of thetransitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusionto another.
Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitiveparts for what they really are. If they are but flightsto a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before theconclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilstif we wait till the conclusionbe reached, it so exceeds them[Pg 244]in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallowsthem up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thoughtacross in the middle and get a look at its section, and hewill see how difficult the introspective observation of thetransitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlongthat it almost always brings us up at the conclusion beforewe can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough andwe do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snow-flakecrystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystalbut a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relationmoving to its term, we find we have caught some substantivething, usually the last word we were pronouncing, staticallytaken, and with its function, tendency, and particularmeaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attemptat introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizinga spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn upthe gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.And the challenge toproduce these psychoses, which issure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyonewho contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno'streatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking themto point out in what place an arrowis when it moves, heargues the falsity of their thesis from their inability tomake to so preposterous a question an immediate reply.
The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful.If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought'sstream be so hard, then the great blunder to which allschools are liable must be the failure to register them, andthe undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of thestream. Were we not ourselves a moment since in dangerof ignoring any feeling transitive between the silence andthe thunder, and of treating their boundary as a sort ofbreak in the mind? Now such ignoring as this has historicallyworked in two ways. One set of thinkers have beenled by it toSensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on anycoarse feelings corresponding to the innumerable relationsand forms of connection between the facts of the world,finding nonamed subjective modifications mirroring suchrelations, they have for the most part denied that feelingsof relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone[Pg 245]so far as to deny the reality of most relationsout of themind as well as in it. Substantive psychoses, sensationsand their copies and derivatives, juxtaposed like dominoesin a game, but really separate, everything else verbal illusion,—suchis the upshot of this view.[229] TheIntellectualists,on the other hand, unable to give up the reality ofrelationsextra mentem, but equally unable to point to anydistinct substantive feelings in which they were known, havemade the same admission that the feelings do not exist.But they have drawn an opposite conclusion. The relationsmust be known, they say, in something that is nofeeling, no mental modification continuous and consubstantialwith the subjective tissue out of which sensationsand other substantive states are made. They are known,these relations, by something that lies on an entirelydifferent plane, by anactus purus of Thought, Intellect, orReason, all written with capitals and considered to meansomething unutterably superior to any fact of sensibilitywhatever.
But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalistsare wrong. If there be such things as feelingsat all,then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerumnaturâ, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to whichthese relations are known. There is not a conjunction or apreposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form,or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not expresssome shading or other of relation which we at some momentactually feel to exist between the larger objects of ourthought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relationsthat appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is thestream of consciousness that matches each of them by aninward coloring of its own. In either case the relationsare numberless, and no existing language is capable of doingjustice to all their shades.
We ought to say a feeling ofand, a feeling ofif, a feelingofbut, and a feeling ofby, quite as readily as we say a feeling[Pg 246]ofblue or a feeling ofcold. Yet we do not: so inveteratehas our habit become of recognizing the existence ofthe substantive parts alone, that language almost refusesto lend itself to any other use. The Empiricists have alwaysdwelt on its influence in making us suppose thatwhere we have a separate name, a separate thing mustneeds be there to correspond with it; and they have rightlydenied the existence of the mob of abstract entities,principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidencethan this could be brought up. But they have said nothingof that obverse error, of which we said a word in ChapterVII, (seep. 195), of supposing that where there isno nameno entity can exist. Alldumb or anonymous psychic stateshave, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, ifrecognized at all, have been named after the substantiveperception they led to, as thoughts 'about' this object or'about' that, the stolid wordabout engulfing all their delicateidiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus thegreater and greater accentuation and isolation of the substantiveparts have continually gone on.
Once more take a look at the brain. We believe thebrain to be an organ whose internal equilibrium is alwaysin a state of change,—the change affecting every part. Thepulses of change are doubtless more violent in one placethan in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time thanat that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate, althoughthe figures are always rearranging themselves, thereare instants during which the transformation seems minuteand interstitial and almost absent, followed by others whenit shoots with magical rapidity, relatively stable forms thusalternating with forms we should not distinguish if seenagain; so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement mustresult in some forms of tension lingering relatively long,whilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousnesscorresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, ifthe rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness evercease? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with itone kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrangementbring another kind of consciousness as peculiar asthe rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses,[Pg 247]if of simple objects, we call 'sensations' or 'images,' accordingas they are vivid or faint; if of complex objects,we call them 'percepts' when vivid, 'concepts' or'thoughts' when faint. For the swift consciousnesses wehave only those names of 'transitive states,' or 'feelings ofrelation,' which we have used.[230] As the brain-changes[Pg 248]are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt intoeach other like dissolving views. Properly they are butone protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
So much for the transitive states. But there are otherunnamed states or qualities of states that are just as important[Pg 250]and just as cognitive as they, and just as muchunrecognized by the traditional sensationalist and intellectualistphilosophies of mind. The first fails to find themat all, the second finds theircognitive function, but deniesthat anything in the way offeeling has a share in bringingit about. Examples will make clear what these inarticulatepsychoses, due to waxing and waning excitements ofthe brain, are like.[231]
Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait!''Hark!' 'Look!' Our consciousness is thrown into[Pg 251]three quite different attitudes of expectancy, although nodefinite object is before it in any one of the three cases.Leaving out different actual bodily attitudes, and leavingout the reverberating images of the three words, whichare of course diverse, probably no one will deny the existenceof a residual conscious affection, a sense of the directionfrom which an impression is about to come, althoughno positive impression is yet there. Meanwhile we haveno names for the psychoses in question but the nameshark, look, and wait.
Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The stateof our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein;but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. Asort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a givendirection, making us at moments tingle with the sense ofour closeness, and then letting us sink back without thelonged-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, thissingularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negatethem. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of oneword does not feel like the gap of another, all empty ofcontent as both might seem necessarily to be when describedas gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding,my consciousness is far removed from what it is when Ivainly try to recall the name of Bowles. Here some ingeniouspersons will say: "Howcan the two consciousnessesbe different when the terms which might make them differentare not there? All that is there, so long as the effortto recall is vain, is the bare effort itself. How should thatdiffer in the two cases? You are making it seem to differby prematurely filling it out with the different names,although these, by the hypothesis, have not yet come.Stick to the two efforts as they are, without naming themafter facts not yet existent, and you'll be quite unable todesignate any point in which they differ." Designate, trulyenough. We can only designate the difference by borrowingthe names of objects not yet in the mind. Which is tosay that our psychological vocabulary is wholly inadequateto name the differences that exist, even such strong differencesas these. But namelessness is compatible withexistence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of[Pg 252]emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name,but all different from each other. The ordinary way is toassume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, andso the same state. But the feeling of an absence istoto cœloother than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feeling.The rhythm of a lost word may be there without asound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of somethingwhich is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully,without growing more distinct. Every one mustknow the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of someforgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, strivingto be filled out with words.
Again, what is the strange difference between an experiencetasted for the first time and the same experiencerecognized as familiar, as having been enjoyed before,though we cannot name it or say where or when? A tune,an odor, a flavor sometimes carry this inarticulate feelingof their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that weare fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. Butstrong and characteristic as this psychosis is—it probablyis due to the submaximal excitement of wide-spreadingassociational brain-tracts—the only name we have for allits shadings is 'sense of familiarity.'
When we read such phrases as 'naught but,' 'eitherone or the other,' 'a isb, but,' 'although it is, nevertheless,''it is an excluded middle, there is notertium quid,'and a host of other verbal skeletons of logical relation, is ittrue that there is nothing more in our minds than thewords themselves as they pass? What then is the meaningof the words which we think we understand as we read?What makes that meaning different in one phrase fromwhat it is in the other? 'Who?' 'When?' 'Where?'Is the difference of felt meaning in these interrogativesnothing more than their difference of sound? And is itnot (just like the difference of sound itself) known andunderstood in an affection of consciousness correlative toit, though so impalpable to direct examination? Is notthe same true of such negatives as 'no,' 'never,' 'notyet'?
The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing[Pg 253]butsigns of direction in thought, of which direction wenevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, thoughno definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever.Sensorial images are stable psychic facts; we can holdthem still and look at them as long as we like. These bareimages of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychictransitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to beglimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead fromone set of images to another. As they pass, we feel boththe waxing and the waning images in a way altogetherpeculiar and a way quite different from the way of theirfull presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direction,the full presence comes and the feeling of direction islost. The blank verbal scheme of the logical movementgives us the fleeting sense of the movement as we read it,quite as well as does a rational sentence awakening definiteimaginations by its words.
What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one'smeaning which we have, when in vulgar phrase we say we'twig' it? Surely an altogether specific affection of ourmind. And has the reader never asked himself what kindof a mental fact is hisintention of saying a thing before hehas said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinctfrom all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state ofconsciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists ofdefinite sensorial images, either of words or of things?Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things comeinto the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination isthere no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, itwelcomes them successively and calls them right if theyagree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if theydo not. It has therefore a nature of its own of the mostpositive sort, and yet what can we say about it withoutusing words that belong to the later mental facts thatreplace it? The intentionto-say-so-and-so is the only nameit can receive. One may admit that a good third of ourpsychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspectiveviews of schemes of thought not yet articulate. Howcomes it about that a man reading something aloud for thefirst time is able immediately to emphasize all his words[Pg 254]aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of atleast the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense isfused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifiesits emphasis in his mind so as to make him give itthe proper accent as he utters it? Emphasis of this kindis almost altogether a matter of grammatical construction.If we read 'no more' we expect presently to come upon a'than'; if we read 'however' at the outset of a sentenceit is a 'yet,' a 'still,' or a 'nevertheless,' that we expect.A noun in a certain position demands a verb in a certainmood and number, in another position it expects a relativepronoun. Adjectives call for nouns, verbs for adverbs,etc., etc. And this foreboding of the coming grammaticalscheme combined with each successive uttered word is sopractically accurate that a reader incapable of understandingfour ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can neverthelessread it with the most delicately modulated expression ofintelligence.
Some will interpret these facts by calling them all casesin which certain images, by laws of association, awakenothers so very rapidly that we think afterwards we felt theverytendencies of the nascent images to arise, before they wereactually there. For this school the only possible materialsof consciousness are images of a perfectly definite nature.Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside psychologistrather than for the subject of the observation. Thetendency is thus apsychical zero; only itsresults are felt.
Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples toshow, is that 'tendencies' are not only descriptions fromwithout, but that they are among theobjects of the stream,which is thus aware of them from within, and must bedescribed as in very large measure constituted offeelings oftendency, often so vague that we are unable to name themat all. It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to itsproper place in our mental life which I am so anxious topress on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have,as we shall see in Chapter XVIII, made one step in advancein exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeleythat we can have no images but of perfectly definite things.Another is made in the overthrow of the equally ridiculous[Pg 255]notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealedto our knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not.But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough.What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditionalpsychology form but the very smallest part of ourminds as they actually live. The traditional psychologytalks like one who should say a river consists of nothingbut pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and othermoulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the potsall actually standing in the stream, still between them thefree water would continue to flow. It is just this free waterof consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed inthe free water that flows round it. With it goes the senseof its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whenceit came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.The significance, the value, of the image is all in this haloor penumbra that surrounds and escorts it,—or rather thatis fused into one with it and has become bone of its boneand flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of thesamething it was before, but making it an image of thatthing newly taken and freshly understood.
What is that shadowy scheme of the 'form' of anopera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and onwhich we pass judgment when the actual thing is done?What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical system?Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemesof relation between terms, which hardly even as verbalimages enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process.[232] Weall of us have this permanent consciousness of whither ourthought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling[Pg 256]of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen.This field of view of consciousness varies very much inextent, depending largely on the degree of mental freshnessor fatigue. When very fresh, our minds carry an immensehorizon with them. The present image shoots its perspectivefar before it, irradiating in advance the regions in whichlie the thoughts as yet unborn. Under ordinary conditionsthe halo of felt relations is much more circumscribed. Andin states of extreme brain-fag the horizon is narrowedalmost to the passing word,—the associative machinery,however, providing for the next word turning up in orderlysequence, until at last the tired thinker is led to some kindof a conclusion. At certain moments he may find himselfdoubting whether his thoughts have not come to a full stop;but the vague sense of aplus ultra makes him ever struggleon towards a more definite expression of what it may be;whilst the slowness of his utterance shows how difficult,under such conditions, the labor of thinking must be.
The awareness that ourdefinite thought has come to astop is an entirely different thing from the awareness thatour thought is definitively completed. The expression ofthe latter state of mind is the falling inflection which betokensthat the sentence is ended, and silence. The expressionof the former state is 'hemming and hawing,' orelse such phrases as 'et cetera,' or 'and so forth.' Butnotice that every part of the sentence to be left incompletefeels differently as it passes, by reason of the premonitionwe have that we shall be unable to end it. The 'and soforth' casts its shadow back, and is as integral a part ofthe object of the thought as the distinctest of imageswould be.
Again, when we use a common noun, such asman, in auniversal sense, as signifying all possible men, we are fullyaware of this intention on our part, and distinguish it carefullyfrom our intention when we mean a certain group ofmen, or a solitary individual before us. In the chapter onConception we shall see how important this difference ofintention is. It casts its influence over the whole of thesentence, both before and after the spot in which the wordman is used.
Nothing is easier than to symbolize all these facts interms of brain-action. Just as the echo of thewhence, thesense of the starting point of our thought, is probablydue to the dying excitement of processes but a momentsince vividly aroused; so the sense of the whither, the foretasteof the terminus, must be due to the waxing excitementof tracts or processes which, a moment hence, will bethe cerebral correlatives of some thing which a momenthence will be vividly present to the thought. Representedby a curve, the neurosis underlying consciousness must atany moment be like this:
Each point of the horizontal line stands for somebrain-tract or process. The height of the curve abovethe line stands for the intensity of the process. All theprocesses arepresent, in the intensities shown by thecurve. But those before the latter's apexwere more intensea moment ago; those after itwill be more intense amoment hence. If I recitea, b, c, d, e, f, g, at the momentof utteringd, neithera, b, c, nore, f, g, are out of myconsciousness altogether, but both, after their respectivefashions, 'mix their dim lights' with the stronger one ofthed, because their neuroses are both awake in somedegree.
There is a common class of mistakes which shows howbrain-processes begin to be excited before the thoughtsattached to them aredue—due, that is, in substantive andvivid form. I mean those mistakes of speech or writingby which, in Dr. Carpenter's words, "we mispronounce ormisspell a word, by introducing into it a letter or syllableof some other, whose turn is shortly to come; or, it may be,the whole of the anticipated word is substituted for the one[Pg 258]which ought to have been expressed."[233] In these casesone of two things must have happened: either some localaccident of nutritionblocks the process that isdue, so thatother processes discharge that ought as yet to be but nascentlyaroused; or some opposite local accidentfurthersthelatter processes and makes them explode before theirtime. In the chapter on Association of Ideas, numerousinstances will come before us of the actual effect on consciousnessof neuroses not yet maximally aroused.
It is just like the 'overtones' in music. Different instrumentsgive the 'same note,' but each in a differentvoice, because each gives more than that note, namely, variousupper harmonics of it which differ from one instrumentto another. They are not separately heard by the ear;they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, andalter it; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-processesat every moment blend with and suffuse and alterthe psychic effect of the processes which are at their culminatingpoint.
Let us use the wordspsychic overtone, suffusion, orfringe,to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon ourthought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects butdimly perceived.[234]
If we then consider thecognitive function of different[Pg 259]states of mind, we may feel assured that the difference betweenthose that are mere 'acquaintance,' and those thatare 'knowledges-about' (seep. 221) is reducible almostentirely to the absence or presence of psychic fringes orovertones. Knowledgeabout a thing is knowledge of itsrelations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the bareimpression which it makes. Of most of its relations we areonly aware in the penumbral nascent way of a 'fringe' ofunarticulated affinities about it. And, before passing to thenext topic in order, I must say a little of this sense ofaffinity, as itself one of the most interesting features of thesubjective stream.
In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic orsubject about which all the members of the thought revolve.Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannotyet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase, but which, inthe manner described some time back, influences us in anintensely active and determinate psychic way. Whatevermay be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feeltheir relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is ourthoughts' destiny. Some bring us nearer to that consummation.Some the gap negates as quite irrelevant. Eachswims in a felt fringe of relations of which the aforesaidgap is the term. Or instead of a definite gap we maymerely carry a mood of interest about with us. Then,however vague the mood, it will still act in the same way,throwing a mantle of felt affinity over such representations,entering the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with thefeeling of tediousness or discord all those with which ithas no concern.
Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly feltin the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony anddiscord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. Whenthe sense of furtherance is there, we are 'all right;' withthe sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed,and cast about us for other thoughts. Nowany thoughtthe quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,'is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind ofthought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel itto have a place in the scheme of relations in which the interesting[Pg 260]topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make ofit a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas.
For the important thing about a train of thought is itsconclusion. That is themeaning, or, as we say, the topic ofthe thought. That is what abides when all its other membershave faded from memory. Usually this conclusion isa word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitudeor resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill apre-existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentallystumbled on in revery. In either case it stands out fromthe other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiarinterest attaching to it. This interestarrests it, makes asort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon itand makes us treat it in a substantive way.
The parts of the stream that precede these substantiveconclusions are but the means of the latter's attainment.And, provided the same conclusion be reached, the meansmay be as mutable as we like, for the 'meaning' of the streamof thought will be the same. What difference does it makewhat the means are? "Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'onait l'ivresse?" The relative unimportance of the meansappears from the fact that when the conclusion is there, wehave always forgotten most of the steps preceding its attainment.When we have uttered a proposition, we are rarelyable a moment afterwards to recall our exact words, thoughwe can express it in different words easily enough. Thepractical upshot of a book we read remains with us, thoughwe may not recall one of its sentences.
The only paradox would seem to lie in supposing thatthe fringe of felt affinity and discord can be the same intwo heterogeneous sets of images. Take a train of wordspassing through the mind and leading to a certain conclusionon the one hand, and on the other hand an almostwordless set of tactile, visual and other fancies leading tothe same conclusion. Can the halo, fringe, or scheme inwhich we feel the words to lie be the same as that in whichwe feel the images to lie? Does not the discrepancy ofterms involve a discrepancy of felt relations among them?
If the terms be takenquâ mere sensations, it assuredlydoes. For instance, the words may rhyme with each[Pg 261]other,—the visual images can have no such affinity asthat.Butquâ thoughts,quâ sensationsunderstood, the words havecontracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnanceor affinity with each other and with the conclusion, whichrun exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactileand other ideas. The most important element of thesefringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord,of a right or wrong direction in the thought. Dr. Campbellhas, so far as I know, made the best analysis of thisfact, and his words, often quoted, deserve to be quoted again.The chapter is entitled "What is the cause that nonsenseso often escapes being detected, both by the writer and bythe reader?" The author, in answering this question, makes(inter alia) the following remarks:[235]
"That connection [he says] or relation which comes gradually to subsistamong the different words of a language, in the minds of those whospeak it,... is merely consequent on this, that those words areemployed as signs of connected or related things. It is an axiom ingeometry that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.It may, in like manner, be admitted as an axiom in psychology thatideas associated by the same idea will associate one another. Hence itwill happen that if, from experiencing the connection of two things,there results, as infallibly there will result, an association between theideas or notions annexed to them, as each idea will moreover be associatedby its sign, there will likewise be an association between the ideasof the signs. Hence the sounds considered as signs will be conceived tohave a connection analogous to that which subsisteth among the thingssignified; I say, the sounds considered as signs; for this way of consideringthem constantly attends us in speaking, writing, hearing, andreading. When we purposely abstract from it, and regard them merelyas sounds, we are instantly sensible that they are quite unconnected, andhave no other relation than what ariseth from similitude of tone oraccent. But to consider them in this manner commonly results fromprevious design, and requires a kind of effort which is not exerted in theordinary use of speech. In ordinary use they are regarded solely assigns, or, rather, they are confounded with the things they signify; theconsequence of which is that, in the manner just now explained, we comeinsensibly to conceive a connection among them of a very different sortfrom that of which sounds are naturally susceptible.
"Now this conception, habit, or tendency of the mind, call it whichyou please, is considerably strengthened by the frequent use of languageand by the structure of it. Language is the sole channel through which[Pg 262]we communicate our knowledge and discoveries to others, and throughwhich the knowledge and discoveries of others are communicated to us.By reiterated recourse to this medium, it necessarily happens thatwhen things are related to each other, the words signifying thosethings are more commonly brought together in discourse. Hence thewords and names by themselves, by customary vicinity, contract in thefancy a relation additional to that which they derive purely from beingthe symbols of related things. Farther, this tendency is strengthenedby the structure of language. All languages whatever, even the mostbarbarous, as far as hath yet appeared, are of a regular and analogicalmake. The consequence is that similar relations in things will be expressedsimilarly; that is, by similar inflections, derivations, compositions,arrangement of words, or juxtaposition of particles, according tothe genius or grammatical form of the particular tongue. Now as, bythe habitual use of a language (even though it were quite irregular),the signs would insensibly become connected in the imagination whereverthe things signified are connected in nature, so, by the regularstructure of a language, this connection among the signs is conceivedas analogous to that which subsisteth among their archetypes."
If we know English and French and begin a sentence inFrench, all the later words that come are French; we hardlyever drop into English. And this affinity of the Frenchwords for each other is not something merely operating mechanicallyas a brain-law, it is something we feel at the time.Our understanding of a French sentence heard never fallsto so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words linguisticallybelong together. Our attention can hardly sowander that if an English word be suddenly introduced weshall not start at the change. Such a vague sense as thisof the words belonging together is the very minimum offringe that can accompany them, if 'thought' at all.Usually the vague perception that all the words we hearbelong to the same language and to the same special vocabularyin that language, and that the grammatical sequenceis familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission thatwhat we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign wordbe introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from anincongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as 'rat-trap'or 'plumber's bill' in a philosophical discourse, thesentence detonates, as it were, we receive a shock from theincongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling ofrationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a[Pg 263]positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or senseof discord, between the terms of thought.
So delicate and incessant is this recognition by themind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned togetherthat the slightest misreading, such as 'casualty' for'causality,' or 'perpetual' for 'perceptual,' will be correctedby a listener whose attention is so relaxed that hegets no idea of themeaning of the sentence at all.
Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary,and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences withabsolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith andpass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, reshufflingthe same collection of cant phrases, and the wholegenus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter'sflourishes give illustrations of this. "The birds filled thetree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist,cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading oncein a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. Itwas probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter,and read uncritically by many readers. An entirevolume of 784 pages lately published in Boston[236] is composedof stuff like this passage picked out at random:
"The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outletsat the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of thenuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitageup to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmospheredby like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes,—thosesensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms,—theydescend, and become assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organism."[237]
There are every year works published whose contentsshow them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, thebook quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning toend. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just whatsort of feeling of rational relation between the words mayhave appeared to the author's mind. The border linebetween objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw;that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible.Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense—eventhe wildest words in a dream—if one only does notdoubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer passagesin Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationalityincluded in them be anything more than the fact that thewords all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strungtogether on a scheme of predication and relation,—immediacy,self-relation, and what not,—which has habituallyrecurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that thesubjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences wasstrong in the writer as he penned them, or even that somereaders by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.
To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certaingrammatical expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part ofour impression that a sentence has a meaning and isdominated by the Unity of one Thought. Nonsense ingrammatical form sounds half rational; sense with grammaticalsequence upset sounds nonsensical; e.g., "Elba theNapoleon English faith had banished broken to be Saintbecause Helena at." Finally, there is about each word thepsychic 'overtone' of feeling that it brings us nearer to aforefelt conclusion. Suffuse all the words of a sentence,as they pass, with these three fringes or haloes of relation,let the conclusion seem worth arriving at, and all willadmit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughlycontinuous, unified, and rational thought.[Pg 265][238]
Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as aword, but as having ameaning. The 'meaning' of a wordtaken thus dynamically in a sentence may be quite differentfrom its meaning when taken statically or without context.The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the barefringe we have described, of felt suitability or unfitness tothe context and conclusion. The static meaning, when theword is concrete, as 'table,' 'Boston,' consists of sensoryimages awakened; when it is abstract, as 'criminal legislation,''fallacy,' the meaning consists of other words aroused,forming the so-called 'definition.'
Hegel's celebrated dictum that pure being is identicalwith pure nothing results from his taking the words statically,or without the fringe they wear in a context. Takenin isolation, they agree in the single point of awakening nosensorial images. But taken dynamically, or as significant,—asthought,—their fringes of relation, their affinities andrepugnances, their function and meaning, are felt andunderstood to be absolutely opposed.
Such considerations as these remove all appearance ofparadox from those cases of extremely deficient visual imageryof whose existence Mr. Galton has made us aware (seebelow). An exceptionally intelligent friend informs me thathe can frame no image whatever of the appearance of hisbreakfast-table. When asked how he then remembers it atall, he says he simple 'knows' that it seated four people, andwas covered with a white cloth on which were a butter-dish,a coffee-pot, radishes, and so forth. The mind-stuffof which this 'knowing' is made seems to be verbal imagesexclusively. But if the words 'coffee,' 'bacon,' 'muffins,'and 'eggs' lead a man to speak to his cook, to pay hisbills, and to take measures for the morrow's meal exactly asvisual and gustatory memories would, why are they not,[Pg 266]for all practical intents and purposes, as good a kind ofmaterial in which to think? In fact, we may suspect themto be for most purposes better than terms with a richerimaginative coloring. The scheme of relationship and theconclusion being the essential things in thinking, that kindof mind-stuff which is handiest will be the best for thepurpose. Now words, uttered or unexpressed, are thehandiest mental elements we have. Not only are they veryrapidly revivable, but they are revivable as actual sensationsmore easily than any other items of our experience.Did they not possess some such advantage asthis, it would hardly be the case that the older men are andthe more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, theyhave lost their visualizing power and depend on words.This was ascertained by Mr. Galton to be the case withmembers of the Royal Society. The present writer observesit in his own person most distinctly.
On the other hand, a deaf and dumb man can weavehis tactile and visual images into a system of thought quiteas effective and rational as that of a word-user.Thequestion whether thought is possible without language hasbeen a favorite topic of discussion among philosophers.Some interesting reminiscences of his childhood by Mr.Ballard, a deaf-mute instructor in the National College atWashington, show it to be perfectly possible. A fewparagraphs may be quoted here.
"In consequence of the loss of my hearing in infancy, I was debarredfrom enjoying the advantages which children in the full possessionof their senses derive from the exercises of the common primaryschool, from the every-day talk of their school-fellows and playmates,and from the conversation of their parents and other grown-up persons.
"I could convey my thoughts and feelings to my parents andbrothers by natural signs or pantomime, and I could understand whatthey said to me by the same medium; our intercourse being, however,confined to the daily routine of home affairs and hardly going beyondthe circle of my own observation....
"My father adopted a course which he thought would, in somemeasure, compensate me for the loss of my hearing. It was that oftaking me with him when business required him to ride abroad; andhe took me more frequently than he did my brothers; giving, as thereason for his apparent partiality, that they could acquire information[Pg 267]through the ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintancewith affairs of the outside world....
"I have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching thedifferent scenes we passed through, observing the various phases ofnature, both animate and inanimate; though we did not, owing to myinfirmity, engage in conversation. It was during those delightful rides,some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments ofwritten language, that I began to ask myself the question:How camethe world into being? When this question occurred to my mind, I setmyself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was awakened asto what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon theearth, and of vegetable life as well, and also the cause of the existenceof the earth, sun, moon, and stars.
"I remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large oldstump which we happened to pass in one of our rides, I asked myself,'Is it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose outof that stump? But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble magnificenttree, and how came that tree? Why, it came only by beginningto grow out of the ground just like those little trees now coming up.'And I dismissed from my mind, as an absurd idea, the connectionbetween the origin of man and a decaying old stump....
"I have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me thequestion as to the origin of things. I had before this time gained ideasof the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of animals, andof the production of plants from seeds. The question that occurred tomy mind was: whence came the first man, the first animal, and thefirst plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which there was noman, no animal, no plant; since I knew they all had a beginning andan end.
"It is impossible to state the exact order in which these differentquestions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun, moon,etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowedupon man and the earth; perhaps because I put man and beast in thesame class, since I believed that man would be annihilated and there wasno resurrection beyond the grave,—though I am told by my mother that,in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who lookedto me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make me understand thathe would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man andbeast derived their being from the same source, and were to be laiddown in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering the bruteanimal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level,man and the earth were the two things on which my mind dwelledmost.
"I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the descentfrom parent to child and the propagation of animals. I wasnearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was educated;[Pg 268]and I remember distinctly that it was at least two years beforethis time that I began to ask myself the question as to the origin of theuniverse. My age was then about eight, not over nine years.
"Of the form of the earth, I had no idea in my childhood, exceptthat, from a look at a map of the hemispheres, I inferred there weretwo immense disks of matter lying near each other. I also believed thesun and moon to be round, flat plates of illuminating matter; and forthose luminaries I entertained a sort of reverence on account of theirpower of lighting and heating the earth. I thought from their comingup and going down, travelling across the sky in so regular a mannerthat there must be a certain something having power to govern theircourse. I believed the sun went into a hole at the west and came outof another at the east, travelling through a great tube in the earth, describingthe same curve as it seemed to describe in the sky. The starsseemed to me to be tiny lights studded in the sky.
"The source from which the universe came was the question aboutwhich my mind revolved in a vain struggle to grasp it, or rather tofight the way up to attain to a satisfactory answer. When I had occupiedmyself with this subject a considerable time, I perceived that it was amatter much greater than my mind could comprehend; and I rememberwell that I became so appalled at its mystery and so bewildered atmy inability to grapple with it that I laid the subject aside and out ofmy mind, glad to escape being, as it were, drawn into a vortex of inextricableconfusion. Though I felt relieved at this escape, yet I could notresist the desire to know the truth; and I returned to the subject; butas before, I left it, after thinking it over for some time. In this state ofperplexity, I hoped all the time to get at the truth, still believing thatthe more I gave thought to the subject, the more my mind would penetratethe mystery. Thus I was tossed like a shuttlecock, returning tothe subject and recoiling from it, till I came to school.
"I remember that my mother once told me about a being up above,pointing her finger towards the sky and with a solemn look on her countenance.I do not recall the circumstance which led to this communication.When she mentioned the mysterious being up in the sky, I waseager to take hold of the subject, and plied her with questions concerningthe form and appearance of this unknown being, asking if it wasthe sun, moon, or one of the stars. I knew she meant that there was aliving one somewhere up in the sky; but when I realized that she couldnot answer my questions, I gave it up in despair, feeling sorrowful thatI could not obtain a definite idea of the mysterious living one up in thesky.
"One day, while we were haying in a field, there was a series of heavythunder-claps. I asked one of my brothers where they came from. Hepointed to the sky and made a zigzag motion with his finger, signifyinglightning. I imagined there was a great man somewhere in the bluevault, who made a loud noise with his voice out of it; and each time I[Pg 269]heard[239] a thunder-clap I was frightened, and looked up at the sky, fearinghe was speaking a threatening word."[240]
Here we may pause. The reader sees by this time thatit makes little or no difference in what sort of mind-stuff, inwhat quality of imagery, his thinking goes on. The onlyimagesintrinsically important are the halting-places, thesubstantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought.Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of relationare everything, and the terms related almost naught.These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos,suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the samein very different systems of imagery. A diagram may helpto accentuate this indifference of the mental means wherethe end is the same. LetA be some experience fromwhich a number of thinkers start. LetZ be the practicalconclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to theconclusion by one line, another by another; one follows acourse of English, another ofGerman, verbal imagery.With one, visual images predominate;with another, tactile.Some trains are tingedwith emotions, others not;some are very abridged, syntheticand rapid, others, hesitatingand broken into many steps. But when the penultimateterms of all the trains, however differinginter se,finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say and rightlysay, that all the thinkers have had substantially the samethought. It would probably astound each of them beyond[Pg 270]measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find howdifferent the scenery there was from that in his own.
Thought is in fact a kind of Algebra, as Berkeley long agosaid, "in which, though a particular quantity be marked byeach letter, yet to proceed right, it is not requisite that inevery step each letter suggest to your thoughts that particularquantity it was appointed to stand for." Mr. Leweshas developed this algebra-analogy so well that I mustquote his words:
"The leading characteristic of algebra is that of operation on relations.This also is the leading characteristic of Thought. Algebra cannotexist without values, nor Thought without Feelings. The operationsare so many blank forms till the values are assigned. Words are vacantsounds, ideas are blank forms, unless they symbolize images andsensations which are their values. Nevertheless it is rigorously true,and of the greatest importance, that analysts carry on very extensiveoperations with blank forms, never pausing to supply the symbols withvalues until the calculation is completed; and ordinary men, no lessthan philosophers, carry on long trains of thought without pausing totranslate their ideas (words) into images.... Suppose some one froma distance shouts 'a lion!' At once the man starts in alarm....To the man the word is not only an ... expression of all that he hasseen and heard of lions, capable of recalling various experiences, but isalso capable of taking its place in a connected series of thoughts withoutrecalling any of those experiences, without reviving an image, howeverfaint, of the lion—simply as a sign of a certain relation included in thecomplex so named. Like an algebraic symbol it may be operated onwithout conveying other significance than an abstract relation: it is asign of Danger, related to fear with all its motor sequences. Its logicalposition suffices.... Ideas aresubstitutions which require a secondaryprocess when what is symbolized by them is translated into the imagesand experiences it replaces; and this secondary process is frequently notperformed at all, generally only performed to a very small extent. Letanyone closely examine what has passed in his mind when he has constructeda chain of reasoning, and he will be surprised at the fewnessand faintness of the images which have accompanied the ideas. Supposeyou inform me that 'the blood rushed violently from the man'sheart, quickening his pulse at the sight of his enemy.' Of the many latentimages in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and inmine? Probably two—the man and his enemy—and these images werefaint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, andsight, were either not revived at all, or were passing shadows. Hadany such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retardingthe logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbolshad substitutedrelations for thesevalues.... There are no images of[Pg 271]two things and three things, when I say 'two and three equal five;'there are simply familiar symbols having precise relations.... Theverbal symbol 'horse,' which stands for all our experiences of horses,serves all the purposes of Thought, without recalling one of the imagesclustered in the perception of horses, just as the sight of a horse's formserves all the purposes ofrecognition without recalling the sound of itsneighing or its tramp, its qualities as an animal of draught, and soforth."[241]
It need only be added that as the Algebrist, though thesequence of his terms is fixed by their relations rather thanby their several values, must give a real value to thefinal onehe reaches; so the thinker in words must let his concludingword or phrase be translated into its full sensible-image-value,under penalty of the thought being left unrealizedand pale.
This is all I have to say about the sensible continuityand unity of our thought as contrasted with the apparentdiscreteness of the words, images, and other means bywhich it seems to be carried on. Between all their substantiveelements there is 'transitive' consciousness, andthe words and images are 'fringed,' and not as discrete asto a careless view they seem. Let us advance now to thenext head in our description of Thought's stream.
For Absolute Idealism, the infinite Thought and its objectsare one. The Objects are, through being thought;the eternal Mind is, through thinking them. Were ahuman thought alone in the world there would be noreason for any other assumption regarding it. Whateverit might have before it would be its vision, would be there,inits 'there,' or then, inits 'then'; and the question wouldnever arise whether an extra-mental duplicate of it existed ornot. The reason why we all believe that the objects of ourthoughts have a duplicate existence outside, is that therearemany human thoughts, each with thesame objects, as[Pg 272]we cannot help supposing. The judgment thatmy thoughthas the same object ashis thought is what makes thepsychologist call my thought cognitive of an outer reality.The judgment that my own past thought and my own presentthought are of the same object is what makesme takethe object out of either and project it by a sort of triangulationinto an independent position, from which it mayappear to both.Sameness in a multiplicity of objectiveappearances is thus the basis of our belief in realitiesoutside of thought.[242] InChapter XII we shall have to takeup the judgment of sameness again.
To show that the question of reality being extra-mentalor not is not likely to arise in the absence of repeated experiencesof thesame, take the example of an altogetherunprecedented experience, such as a new taste in the throat.Is it a subjective quality of feeling, or an objective qualityfelt? You do not even ask the question at this point. Itis simplythat taste. But if a doctor hears you describe it,and says: "Ha! Now you know whatheartburn is," thenit becomes a quality already existentextra mentem tuam,which you in turn have come upon and learned. The firstspaces, times, things, qualities, experienced by the childprobably appear, like the first heartburn, in this absoluteway, as simplebeings, neither in nor out of thought. Butlater, by having other thoughts than this present one, andmaking repeated judgments of sameness among their objects,he corroborates in himself the notion of realities,past and distant as well as present, which realities no onesingle thought either possesses or engenders, but which allmay contemplate and know. This, as was stated in the lastchapter, is thepsychological point of view, the relativelyuncritical non-idealistic point of view of all natural science,beyond which this book cannot go. A mind which hasbecome conscious of its own cognitive function, plays whatwe have called 'the psychologist' upon itself. It not onlyknows the things that appear before it; it knows that it[Pg 273]knows them. This stage of reflective condition is, more orless explicitly, our habitual adult state of mind.
It cannot, however, be regarded as primitive. The consciousnessof objects must come first. We seem to lapseinto this primordial condition when consciousness is reducedto a minimum by the inhalation of anæsthetics orduring a faint. Many persons testify that at a certain stageof the anæsthetic process objects are still cognized whilstthe thought of self is lost. Professor Herzen says:[243]
"During the syncope there is absolute psychic annihilation, the absenceof all consciousness; then at the beginning of coming to, one hasat a certain moment a vague, limitless, infinite feeling—a sense ofexistencein general without the least trace of distinction between the me andthe not-me."
Dr. Shoemaker of Philadelphia describes during thedeepest conscious stage of ether-intoxication a vision of
"two endless parallel lines in swift longitudinal motion ... on a uniformmisty background ... together with a constant sound or whirr,not loud but distinct ... which seemed to be connected with the parallellines.... These phenomena occupied the whole field. There werepresent no dreams or visions in any way connected with human affairs,no ideas or impressions akin to anything in past experience, no emotions,of course no idea of personality. There was no conception as towhat being it was that was regarding the two lines, or that there existedany such thing as such a being; the lines and waves were all."[244]
Similarly a friend of Mr. Herbert Spencer, quoted byhim in 'Mind' (vol iii, p. 556), speaks of "an undisturbedempty quiet everywhere except that a stupid presence laylike a heavy intrusionsomewhere—a blotch on the calm."This sense of objectivity and lapse of subjectivity, evenwhen the object is almost indefinable, is, it seems to me, asomewhat familiar phase in chloroformization, though inmy own case it is too deep a phase for any articulate after-memoryto remain. I only know that as it vanishes Iseem to wake to a sense of my own existence as somethingadditional to what had previously been there.[Pg 274][245]
Many philosophers, however, hold that the reflectiveconsciousness of the self is essential to the cognitive functionof thought. They hold that a thought, in order to knowa thing at all, must expressly distinguish between the thingand its own self.[246] This is a perfectly wanton assumption,and not the faintest shadow of reason exists for supposingit true. As well might I contend that I cannot dreamwithout dreaming that I dream, swear without swearingthat I swear, deny without denying that I deny, as maintainthat I cannot know without knowing that I know. Imay have either acquaintance-with, or knowledge-about,an object O without think about myself at all. It sufficesfor this that I think O, and that it exist. If, in additionto thinking O, I also think that I exist and that I know O,well and good; I then know one more thing, a fact about O,of which I previously was unmindful. That, however, doesnot prevent me from having already known O a good deal.Oper se, or Oplus P, are as good objects of knowledge asOplus me is. The philosophers in question simply substituteone particular object for all others, and call itthe objectpar excellence. It is a case of the 'psychologist's fallacy'(seep. 197).They know the object to be one thing[Pg 275]and the thought another; and they forthwith foist theirown knowledge into that of the thought of which they pretendto give a true account. To conclude, then,thought may,but need not, in knowing, discriminate between its object anditself.
We have been using the word Object.Something mustnow be said about the proper use of the term Object in Psychology.
In popular parlance the word object is commonly takenwithout reference to the act of knowledge, and treated assynonymous with individual subject of existence. Thusif anyone ask what is the mind's object when you say'Columbus discovered America in 1492,' most people willreply 'Columbus,' or 'America,' or, at most, 'the discoveryof America.' They will name a substantive kernel or nucleusof the consciousness, and say the thought is 'about'that,—as indeed it is,—and they will call that your thought's'object.' Really that is usually only the grammaticalobject, or more likely the grammatical subject, of your sentence.It is at most your 'fractional object;' or you may callit the 'topic' of your thought, or the 'subject of your discourse.'But theObject of your thought is really its entirecontent or deliverance, neither more nor less. It is a vicioususe of speech to take out a substantive kernel from its contentand call that its object; and it is an equally vicious useof speech to add a substantive kernel not articulately includedin its content, and to call that its object. Yet eitherone of these two sins we commit, whenever we content ourselveswith saying that a given thought is simply 'about' acertain topic, or that that topic is its 'object.' The object ofmy thought in the previous sentence, for example, is strictlyspeaking neither Columbus, nor America, nor its discovery.It is nothing short of the entire sentence, 'Columbus-discovered-America-in-1492.'And if we wish to speak of itsubstantively, we must make a substantive of it by writingit out thus with hyphens between all its words. Nothingbut this can possibly name its delicate idiosyncrasy. Andif we wish tofeel that idiosyncrasy we must reproduce thethought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and the[Pg 276]whole sentence bathed in that original halo of obscure relations,which, like an horizon, then spread about its meaning.
Our psychological duty is to cling as closely as possibleto the actual constitution of the thought we are studying.We may err as much by excess as by defect. If the kernelor 'topic,' Columbus, is in one way less than the thought'sobject, so in another way it may be more. That is, whennamed by the psychologist, it may mean much more thanactually is present to the thought of which he is reporter.Thus, for example, suppose you should go on to think:'He was a daring genius!' An ordinary psychologist wouldnot hesitate to say that the object of your thought was still'Columbus.' True, your thought isabout Columbus. It'terminates' in Columbus, leads from and to the directidea of Columbus. But for the moment it is not fully andimmediately Columbus, it is only 'he,' or rather 'he-was-a-daring-genius;'which, though it may be an unimportantdifference for conversational purposes, is, for introspectivepsychology, as great a difference as there can be.
The object of every thought, then, is neither more norless than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thoughtthinks it, however complicated the matter, and howeversymbolic the manner of the thinking may be. It is needlessto say that memory can seldom accurately reproducesuch an object, when once it has passed from before themind. It either makes too little or too much of it. Itsbest plan is to repeat the verbal sentence, if there wasone, in which the object was expressed. But for inarticulatethoughts there is not even this resource, and introspectionmust confess that the task exceeds her powers.The mass of our thinking vanishes for ever, beyond hopeof recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few of thecrumbs that fall from the feast.
The next point to make clear is that,however complex theobject may be, the thought of it is one undivided state of consciousness.As Thomas Brown says:[247]
"I have already spoken too often to require again to caution youagainst the mistake into which, I confess, that the terms which the[Pg 277]poverty of our language obliges us to use might of themselves verynaturally lead you; the mistake of supposing that the most complexstates of mind are not truly, in their very essence, as much one andindivisible as those which we term simple—the complexity and seemingcoexistence which they involve being relative to our feeling[248] only,not to their own absolute nature. I trust I need not repeat to youthat, in itself, every notion, however seemingly complex, is, and mustbe, truly simple—being one state or affection, of one simple substance,mind. Our conception of a whole army, for example, is as truly thisone mind existing in this one state, as our conception of any of theindividuals that compose an army. Our notion of the abstract numbers,eight, four, two, is as truly one feeling of the mind as our notionof simple unity."
The ordinary associationist-psychology supposes, incontrast with this, that whenever an object of thought containsmany elements, the thought itself must be made upof just as many ideas, one idea for each element, and allfused together in appearance, but really separate.[249] Theenemies of this psychology find (as we have already seen)little trouble in showing that such a bundle of separateideas would never form one thought at all, and they contendthat an Ego must be added to the bundle to give itunity, and bring the various ideas into relation with eachother.[250] We will not discuss the ego just yet, but it is obviousthat if things are to be thought in relation, they mustbe thought together, and in onesomething, be that somethingego, psychosis, state of consciousness, or whatever youplease. If not thought with each other, things are notthought in relation at all. Now most believers in the egomake the same mistake as the associationists and sensationistswhom they oppose. Both agree that the elementsof the subjective stream are discrete and separate and constitutewhat Kant calls a 'manifold.' But while the associationists[Pg 278]think that a 'manifold' can form a single knowledge,the egoists deny this, and say that the knowledgecomes only when the manifold is subjected to the synthetizingactivity of an ego. Both make an identical initialhypothesis; but the egoist, finding it won't express thefacts, adds another hypothesis to correct it. Now I do notwish just yet to 'commit myself' about the existence or non-existenceof the ego, but I do contend that we need notinvoke it for this particular reason—namely, because themanifold of ideas has to be reduced to unity.There is nomanifold of coexisting ideas; the notion of such a thing isa chimera.Whatever things are thought in relation arethought from the outset in a unity, in a single pulse of subjectivity,a single psychosis, feeling, or state of mind.
The reason why this fact is so strangely garbled in thebooks seems to be what on an earlier page (seep. 196 ff.) Icalled the psychologist's fallacy. We have the inveteratehabit, whenever we try introspectively to describe one ofour thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in itself andtalking of something else. We describe the things thatappear to the thought, and we describe other thoughtsabout those things—as if these and the original thoughtwere the same. If, for example, the thought be 'the packof cards is on the table,' we say, "Well, isn't it a thought ofthe pack of cards? Isn't it of the cards as included in thepack? Isn't it of the table? And of the legs of the tableas well? The table has legs—how can you think the tablewithout virtually thinking its legs? Hasn't our thoughtthen, all these parts—one part for the pack and another forthe table? And within the pack-part a part for each card,as within the table-part a part for each leg? And isn'teach of these parts an idea? And can our thought, then,be anything but an assemblage or pack of ideas, eachanswering to some element of what it knows?"
Now not one of these assumptions is true. The thoughttaken as an example is, in the first place, not of 'a pack ofcards.' It is of 'the-pack-of-cards-is-on-the-table,' an entirelydifferent subjective phenomenon, whose Object impliesthe pack, and every one of the cards in it, but whose consciousconstitution bears very little resemblance to that of the[Pg 279]thought of the packper se. What a thoughtis, and what itmay be developed into, or explained to stand for, and beequivalent to, are two things, not one.[251]
An analysis of what passes through the mind as we utterthe phrasethe pack of cards is on the table will, I hope, makethis clear, and may at the same time condense into a concreteexample a good deal of what has gone before.
It takes time to utter the phrase. Let the horizontalline in Fig. 29 represent time. Every part of it will thenstand for a fraction, every point for an instant, of the time.Of course the thought hastime-parts. The part 2-3 of it,though continuous with 1-2, is yet a different part from 1-2.Now I say of these time-parts that we cannot take any oneof them so short that it will not after some fashion or otherbe a thought of the whole object 'the pack of cards is onthe table.' They melt into each other like dissolving views,and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feelsthe total object in a unitary undivided way. This is whatI mean by denying that in the thought any parts can befound corresponding to the object's parts. Time-parts arenot such parts.
Now let the vertical dimensions of the figure stand forthe objects or contents of the thoughts. A line vertical toany point of the horizontal, as1-1', will then symbolize theobject in the mind at the instant 1; a space above the horizontal,as 1-1'-2'-2, will symbolize all that passes throughthe mind during the time 1-2 whose line it covers. Theentire diagram from 0 to 0' represents a finite length ofthought's stream.
Can we now define the psychic constitution of each verticalsection of this segment? We can, though in a veryrough way. Immediately after 0, even before we haveopened our mouths to speak, the entire thought is present toour mind in the form of an intention to utter that sentence.This intention, though it has no simple name, and thoughit is a transitive state immediately displaced by the firstword, is yet a perfectly determinate phase of thought,unlike anything else (seep. 253). Again, immediatelybefore 0', after the last word of the sentence is spoken, allwill admit that we again think its entire content as weinwardly realize its completed deliverance. All verticalsections made through any other parts of the diagram willbe respectively filled with other ways of feeling the sentence'smeaning. Through 2, for example, the cards willbe the part of the object most emphatically present to themind; through 4, the table. The stream is made higher inthe drawing at its end than at its beginning, because thefinal way of feeling the content is fuller and richer than theinitial way. As Joubert says, "we only know just what wemeant to say, after we have said it." And as M. V. Eggerremarks, "before speaking, one barely knows what one intendsto say, but afterwards one is filled with admirationand surprise at having said and thought it so well."
This latter author seems to me to have kept at muchcloser quarters with the facts than any other analyst of consciousness.[252]But even he does not quite hit the mark, for,as I understand him, he thinks that each word as it occupiesthe minddisplaces the rest of the thought's content.He distinguishes the 'idea' (what I have called the total[Pg 281]object or meaning) from the consciousness of the words,calling the former a very feeble state, and contrasting itwith the liveliness of the words, even when these are onlysilently rehearsed. "The feeling," he says, "of the wordsmakes ten or twenty times more noise in our consciousnessthan the sense of the phrase, which for consciousness is avery slight matter."[253] And having distinguished these twothings, he goes on to separate them in time, saying that theidea may either precede or follow the words, but that it isa 'pure illusion' to suppose them simultaneous.[254] Now Ibelieve that in all cases where the words areunderstood, thetotal idea may be and usually is present not only beforeand after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst eachseparate word is uttered.[255] It is the overtone, halo, or fringeof the word,as spoken in that sentence. It is never absent;no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousnessas a mere noise. We feel its meaning as it passes; andalthough our object differs from one moment to another asto its verbal kernel or nucleus, yet it issimilar throughoutthe entire segment of the stream. The same object isknown everywhere, now from the point of view, if we mayso call it, of this word, now from the point of view of that.And in our feeling of each word there chimes an echo orforetaste of every other. The consciousness of the 'Idea'[Pg 282]and that of the words are thus consubstantial. Theyare made of the same 'mind-stuff,' and form an unbrokenstream. Annihilate a mind at any instant, cutits thought through whilst yet uncompleted, and examinethe object present to the cross-section thus suddenlymade; you will find, not the bald word in process of utterance,but that word suffused with the whole idea. Theword may be so loud, as M. Egger would say, that wecannottell just how its suffusion, as such, feels, or how itdiffers from the suffusion of the next word. But it doesdiffer; and we maybe sure that, could we see into the brain,we should find the same processes active through the entiresentence in different degrees, each one in turn becomingmaximally excited and then yielding the momentary verbal'kernel,' to the thought's content, at other times being onlysub-excited, and then combining with the other sub-excitedprocesses to give the overtone or fringe.[256]
We may illustrate this by a fartherdevelopment of the diagram onp. 279.Let the objective content of any verticalsection through the stream berepresented no longer by a line, but bya plane figure, highest opposite whatever part of the objectis most prominent in consciousnessat the moment when the section ismade. This part, in verbal thought,will usually be some word. A seriesof sections 1-1', taken at the moments1, 2, 3, would then look like this:horizontal breadth stands for the entire objectin each of the figures; the heightof the curve above each part ofthat object marks the relativeprominence of that part in thethought. At the moment symbolizedby the first figurepack is theprominent part; in the third figure it istable, etc.
We can easily add all these plane sections together tomake a solid, one of whose solid dimensions will representtime, whilst a cut across this at right angles will give thethought's content at the moment when the cut is made.Let it be the thought, 'I am the same I that I was yesterday.'If at the fourth moment of time we annihilate the thinker andexamine how the last pulsation of his consciousness wasmade, we find that it was an awareness of the whole contentwithsame most prominent, and the other parts of the thingknown relatively less distinct. With each prolongation ofthe scheme in the time-direction, the summit of the curveof section would come further towards the end of the sentence.If we make a solid wooden frame with the sentencewritten on its front, and the time-scale on one of its sides,if we spread flatly a sheet of India rubber over its top, onwhich rectangular co-ordinates are painted, and slide asmooth ball under the rubber in the direction from 0 to'yesterday,' the bulging of the membrane along this diagonalat successive moments will symbolize the changing of thethought's content in a way plain enough, after what hasbeen said, to call for no more explanation. Or to expressit in cerebral terms, it will show the relative intensities, atsuccessive moments, of the several nerve-processes towhich the various parts of the thought-object correspond.
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attentionis to be drawn in this first rough description of its streamis that
The phenomena of selective attention and of deliberativewill are of course patent examples of this choosingactivity. But few of us are aware how incessantly it is atwork in operations not ordinarily called by these names.Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perceptionwe have. We find it quite impossible to disperse ourattention impartially over a number of impressions. Amonotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken upinto rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the differentaccent which we place on different strokes. Thesimplest of these rhythms is the double one, tick-tóck, tick-tóck,tick-tóck. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceivedin rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures.The ubiquity of the distinctions,this andthat, here andthere, now andthen, in our minds is the result of our layingthe same selective emphasis on parts of place and time.
But we do far more than emphasize things, and unitesome, and keep others apart. We actuallyignore most of thethings before us. Let me briefly show how this goes on.
To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses themselvesbut organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaosof movements, of which physics teaches us that the outerworld consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fallwithin certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, butignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. Itthus accentuates particular movements in a manner forwhich objectively there seems no valid ground; for, asLange says, there is no reason whatever to think that thegap in Nature between the highest sound-waves and thelowest heat-waves is an abrupt break like that of our sensations;or that the difference between violet and ultra-violetrays has anything like the objective importance subjectivelyrepresented by that between light and darkness.Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarmingcontinuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our sensesmake for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that,[Pg 285]a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes,of picturesque light and shade.
If the sensations we receive from a given organ havetheir causes thus picked out for us by the conformation ofthe organ's termination, Attention, on the other hand, outof all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones asworthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. Helmholtz'swork on Optics is little more than a study of thosevisual sensations of which common men never becomeaware—blind spots,muscæ volitantes, after-images, irradiation,chromatic fringes, marginal changes of color, doubleimages, astigmatism, movements of accommodation andconvergence, retinal rivalry, and more besides. We do noteven know without special training on which of our eyes animage falls. So habitually ignorant are most men of thisthat one may be blind for years of a single eye and neverknow the fact.
Helmholtz says that we notice only those sensationswhich are signs to us ofthings. But what are things? Nothing,as we shall abundantly see, but special groups of sensiblequalities, which happen practically or æsthetically tointerest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, andwhich we exalt to this exclusive status of independence anddignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a particulardust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individualthing, and just as much or as little deserves an individualname, as my own body does.
And then, among the sensations we get from each separatething, what happens? The mind selects again. Itchooses certain of the sensations to represent the thingmosttruly, and considers the rest as its appearances, modifiedby the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-topis namedsquare, after but one of an infinite number ofretinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them beingsensations of two acute and two obtuse angles; but I callthe latterperspective views, and the four right angles thetrue form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness;into the table's essence, for æsthetic reasons of my own.In like manner, the real form of the circle is deemed to bethe sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicular[Pg 286]to its centre—all its other sensations are signs of thissensation. The real sound of the cannon is the sensationit makes when the ear is close by. The real color of thebrick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarelyat it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not inthe gloom; under other circumstances it gives us othercolor-sensations which are but signs of this—we then seeit looks pinker or blacker than it really is. The readerknows no object which he does not represent to himself bypreference as in some typical attitude, of some normal size,at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint,etc., etc. But all these essential characteristics, which togetherform for us the genuine objectivity of the thing andare contrasted with what we call the subjective sensationsit may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations likethe latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decideswhat particular sensation shall be held more real and validthan all the rest.
Thus perception involves a twofold choice. Out of allpresent sensations, we notice mainly such as are significantof absent ones; and out of all the absent associates whichthese suggest, we again pick out a very few to stand for theobjective realitypar excellence. We could have no moreexquisite example of selective industry.
That industry goes on to deal with the things thus givenin perception. A man's empirical thought depends on thethings he has experienced, but what these shall be is to alarge extent determined by his habits of attention. A thingmay be present to him a thousand times, but if he persistentlyfails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience.We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by thethousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they sayanything distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only oncein a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the memory.Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bringhome only picturesque impressions—costumes and colors,parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and statues.To another all this will be non-existent; and distancesand prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door-and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take[Pg 287]their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres,restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside; whilstthe fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his ownsubjective broodings as to tell little more than a few namesof places through which he passed. Each has selected, outof the same mass of presented objects, those which suitedhis private interest and has made his experience thereby.
If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects,we ask how the mind proceedsrationally to connect them,we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a futurechapter we shall see that all Reasoning depends on theability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenonreasoned about, into parts, and to pick out fromamong these the particular one which, in our given emergency,may lead to the proper conclusion. Another predicamentwill need another conclusion, and require anotherelement to be picked out. The man of genius is he whowill always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring itout with the right element—'reason' if the emergency betheoretical, 'means' if it be practical—transfixed upon it.I here confine myself to this brief statement, but it maysuffice to show that Reasoning is but another form of theselective activity of the mind.
If now we pass to its æsthetic department, our law isstill more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items,rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonizewith each other and with the main purpose of his work.That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,' as M.Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiorityover works of nature, is wholly due toelimination. Anynatural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough topounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, andsuppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonizewith this.
Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics,where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has noethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of severalall equally possible. To sustain the arguments for thegood course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our[Pg 288]longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchinglyon the arduous path, these are characteristic ethicalenergies. But more than these; for these but deal withthe means of compassing interests already felt by the manto be supreme. The ethical energypar excellence has to gofarther and choose whichinterest out of several, equallycoercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of theutmost pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career.When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose thatprofession? accept that office, or marry this fortune?—hischoice really lies between one of several equally possiblefuture Characters. What he shallbecome is fixed by theconduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces hisdeterminism by the argument that with a given fixed characteronly one reaction is possible under given circumstances,forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciouslyseems to be in question is the complexion of thecharacter itself. The problem with the man is less whatact he shall now choose to do, than what being he shallnow resolve to become.
Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mindis at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities.Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with eachother, the selection of some, and the suppression of the restby the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. Thehighest and most elaborated mental products are filteredfrom the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out ofthe mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass inturn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simplermaterial, and so on. The mind, in short, works on thedata it receives very much as a sculptor works on his blockof stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity.But there were a thousand different ones beside it, andthe sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this onefrom the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoeverdifferent our several views of it may be, all lay embeddedin the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the merematter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may,if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that[Pg 289]black and jointless continuity of space and moving cloudsof swarming atoms which science calls the only real world.But all the while the worldwe feel and live in will be thatwhich our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokesof choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, bysimply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Othersculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds,other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressivechaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded,alike real to those who may abstract them. How differentmust be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish,or crab!
But in my mind and your mind the rejected portions andthe selected portions of the original world-stuff are to agreat extent the same. The human race as a whole largelyagrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not.And among the noticed parts we select in much the sameway for accentuation and preference or subordination anddislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary casein which no two men ever are known to choose alike. Onegreat splitting of the whole universe into two halves ismade by each of us; and for each of us almost all of theinterest attaches to one of the halves; but we all drawthe line of division between them in a different place.When I say that we all call the two halves by the same;names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively,it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogetherunique kind of interest which each human mindfeels in those parts of creation which it can callme orminemay be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychologicalfact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor'sme as in his own. The neighbor's me falls togetherwith all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against whichhis ownme stands out in startling relief. Even the troddenworm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own sufferingself with the whole remaining universe, though he haveno clear conception either of himself or of what the universemay be. He is for me a mere part of the world;[Pg 290]for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizesthe Kosmos in a different place.
Descending now to finer work than this first generalsketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psychologyof this fact of self-consciousness to which we havethus once more been led.
[215] A good deal of this chapter is reprinted from an article 'On someOmissions of Introspective Psychology' which appeared in 'Mind' forJanuary 1884.
[216] B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, p. 362.
[217] L'Automatisme Psychologique, p. 318.
[218] Cf. A. Constans: Relation sur une Épidémie d'hystéro-démonopathieen 1861. 2me ed. Paris, 1863.—Chiap e Franzolin: L'Epidemia d'istero-demonopatiein Verzegnis. Reggio, 1879.—See also J. Kerner's littlework: Nachricht von dem Vorkommen des Besessenseins. 1836.
[219] For the Physiology of this compare the chapter on the Will.
[220]Loc. cit. p. 316.
[221] The Philosophy of Reflection, i, 248, 290.
[222] Populäre Wissenschaftliche Vorträge, Drittes Heft (1876). p. 72.
[223] Fick, in L. Hermann's Handb. d. Physiol., Bd. iii, Th. i, p. 225.
[224] It need of course not follow, because a total brain-state does not recur,that nopoint of the brain can ever be twice in the same condition.That would be as improbable a consequence as that in the sea a wave-crestshould never come twice at the same point of space. What can hardlycome twice is an identicalcombination of wave-forms all with their crestsand hollows reoccupying identical places. For such a total combinationas this is the analogue of the brain-state to which our actual consciousnessat any moment is due.
[225] The accurate registration of the 'how long' is still a little mysterious.
[226] Cf. Brentano; Psychologie, vol. i, pp. 219-20. Altogether thischapter of Brentano's on the Unity of Consciousness is as good as anythingwith which I am acquainted.
[227] Honor to whom honor is due! The most explicit acknowledgment Ihave anywhere found of all this is in a buried and forgotten paper by theRev. Jas. Wills, on 'Accidental Association,' in the Transactions of theRoyal Irish Academy, vol xxi, part i (1846). Mr. Wills writes:
"At every instant of conscious thought there is a certain sum of perceptions,or reflections, or both together, present, and together constitutingone whole state of apprehension. Of this some definite portion may be farmore distinct than all the rest; and the rest be in consequence proportionallyvague, even to the limit of obliteration. But still, within thislimit, the most dim shade of perception enters into, and in some infinitesimaldegree modifies, the whole existing state. This state will thus be insome way modified by any sensation or emotion, or act of distinct attention,that may give prominence to any part of it; so that the actual result iscapable of the utmost variation, according to the person or the occasion....To any portion of the entire scope here described there may be aspecial direction of the attention, and this special direction is recognizedas strictly what isrecognized as the idea present to the mind. This idea isevidently not commensurate with the entire state of apprehension, andmuch perplexity has arisen from not observing this fact. However deeplywe may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, any considerablealteration of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; themost abstruse demonstration in this room would not prevent a listener,however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights. Ourmental states have always anessential unity, such that each state of apprehension,however variously compounded, is a single whole, of which everycomponent is, therefore, strictly apprehended (so far as it is apprehended)as a part. Such is the elementary basis from which all our intellectualoperations commence."
[228] Compare the charming passage in Taine on Intelligence (N. Y. ed.),i, 83-4.
[229] E.g.: "The stream of thought is not a continuous current, but a seriesof distinct ideas, more or less rapid in their succession; the rapidity beingmeasurable by the number that pass through the mind in a given time."(Bain: E. and W., p. 29.)
[230] Few writers have admitted that we cognize relations through feeling.The intellectualists have explicitly denied the possibility of such a thing—e.g.,Prof. T. H. Green ('Mind,' vol. vii, p. 28): "No feeling, as suchor as felt, is [of?] a relation.... Even a relation between feelings is notitself a feeling or felt." On the other hand, the sensationists have eithersmuggled in the cognition without giving any account of it, or have deniedthe relations to be cognized, or even to exist, at all. A few honorable exceptions,however, deserve to be named among the sensationists. Destuttde Tracy, Laromiguière, Cardaillac, Brown, and finally Spencer, have explicitlycontended for feelings of relation, consubstantial with our feelingsor thoughts of the terms 'between' which they obtain. Thus Destutt deTracy says (Éléments d'Idéologie, T. Ier, chap. iv): "The faculty ofjudgment is itself a sort of sensibility, for it is the faculty of feeling therelations among our ideas; and to feel relations is to feel." Laromiguièrewrites (Leçons de Philosophie, IIme Partie, 3me Leçon):
"There is no one whose intelligence does not embrace simultaneouslymany ideas, more or less distinct, more or less confused. Now, when wehave many ideas at once, a peculiar feeling arises in us: we feel, amongthese ideas, resemblances, differences, relations. Let us call this mode offeeling, common to us all, the feeling of relation, or relation-feeling(sentiment-rapport). One sees immediately that these relation-feelings, resultingfrom the propinquity of ideas, must be infinitely more numerousthan the sensation-feelings (sentiments-sensations) or the feelings we haveof the action of our faculties. The slightest knowledge of the mathematicaltheory of combinations will prove this....Ideas of relation originatein feelings of relation. They are the effect of our comparing them andreasoning about them."
Similarly, de Cardaillac (Études Élémentaires de Philosophie, Section i,chap. vii):
"By a natural consequence, we are led to suppose that at the same timethat we have several sensations or several ideas in the mind, we feel the relationswhich exist between these sensations, and the relations which exist betweenthese ideas.... If the feeling of relations exists in us,... it isnecessarily the most varied and the most fertile of all human feelings:1°, the most varied, because, relations being more numerous than beings,the feelings of relation must be in the same proportion more numerousthan the sensations whose presence gives rise to their formation; 2°, themost fertile, for the relative ideas of which the feeling-of-relation is thesource ... are more important than absolute ideas, if such exist.... Ifwe interrogate common speech, we find the feeling of relation expressedthere in a thousand different ways. If it is easy to seize a relation, we saythat it issensible, to distinguish it from one which, because its terms aretoo remote, cannot be as quickly perceived. A sensible difference, or resemblance....What is taste in the arts, in intellectual productions?What but the feeling of those relations among the parts which constitutestheir merit?... Did we not feel relations we should never attain to trueknowledge,... for almost all our knowledge is of relations.... Wenever have an isolated sensation;... we are therefore never without thefeeling of relation.... Anobject strikes our senses; we see in it only asensation.... The relative is so near the absolute, the relation-feeling sonear the sensation-feeling, the two are so intimately fused in the compositionof the object, that the relation appears to us as part of the sensationitself. It is doubtless to this sort of fusion between sensations and feelingsof relation that the silence of metaphysicians as to the latter is due; andit is for the same reason that they have obstinately persisted in asking fromsensation alone those ideas of relation which it was powerless to give."
Dr. Thomas Brown writes (Lectures, xlv,init.): "There is an extensiveorder of our feelings which involve this notion of relation, and whichconsist indeed in the mere perception of a relation of some sort....Whether the relation be of two or of many external objects, or of two ormany affections of the mind, the feeling of this relation ... is what I terma relative suggestion; that phrase being the simplest which it is possible toemploy, for expressing, without any theory, the mere fact of the rise ofcertain feelings of relation, after certain other feelings which precedethem; and therefore, as involving no particular theory, and simply expressiveof an undoubted fact.... That the feelings of relation are statesof the mind essentially different from our simple perceptions, or conceptionsof the objects,... that they are not what Condillac termstransformedsensations, I proved in a former lecture, when I combated the excessivesimplification of that ingenious but not very accurate philosopher.There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, onperceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the interventionof any other mental process, sensible of their relation in certainrespects, as truly as there is an original tendency or susceptibility by which,when external objects are present and have produced a certain affection ofour sensorial organ, we are instantly affected with the primary elementaryfeelings of perception; and, I may add, that as our sensations or perceptionsare of various species, so are there various species of relations;—thenumber of relations, indeed, even of external things, being almost infinite,while the number of perceptions is, necessarily, limited by that of the objectswhich have the power of producing some affection of our organs ofsensation.... Without that susceptibility of the mind by which it hasthe feeling of relation, our consciousness would be as truly limited to asingle point, as our body would become, were it possible to fetter it to asingle atom."
Mr. Spencer is even more explicit. His philosophy is crude in that heseems to suppose that it is only in transitive states that outward relationsare known; whereas in truth space-relations, relations of contrast, etc., arefelt along with their terms, in substantive states as well as in transitivestates, as we shall abundantly see. Nevertheless Mr. Spencer's passage isso clear that it also deserves to be quoted in full (Principles of Psychology,§ 65):
"The proximate components of Mind are of two broadly-contrastedkinds—Feelings and the relations between feelings. Among the membersof each group there exist multitudinous unlikenesses, many of which areextremely strong; but such unlikenesses are small compared with thosewhich distinguish members of the one group from members of the other.Let us, in the first place, consider what are the characters which all Feelingshave in common, and what are the characters which all Relationsbetween feelings have in common.
"Each feeling, as we here define it, is any portion of consciousnesswhich occupies a place sufficiently large to give it a perceivable individuality;which has its individuality marked off from adjacent portions ofconsciousness by qualitative contrasts; and which, when introspectivelycontemplated, appears to be homogeneous. These are the essentials.Obviously if, under introspection, a state of consciousness is decomposableinto unlike parts that exist either simultaneously or successively, it is notone feeling but two or more. Obviously if it is indistinguishable from anadjacent portion of consciousness, it forms one with that portion—is notan individual feeling, but part of one. And obviously if it does notoccupy in consciousness an appreciable area, or an appreciable duration, itcannot be known as a feeling.
"A Relation between feelings is, on the contrary, characterized byoccupying no appreciable part of consciousness. Take away the terms itunites, and it disappears along with them; having no independent place,no individuality of its own. It is true that, under an ultimate analysis,what we call a relation proves to be itself a kind of feeling—the momentaryfeeling accompanying the transition from one conspicuous feeling toan adjacent conspicuous feeling. And it is true that, notwithstanding itsextreme brevity, its qualitative character is appreciable; for relations are(as we shall hereafter see) distinguishable from one another only by theunlikenesses of the feelings which accompany the momentary transitions.Each relational feeling may, in fact, be regarded as one of those nervousshocks which we suspect to be the units of composition of feelings; and,though instantaneous, it is known as of greater or less strength, and astaking place with greater or less facility. But the contrast between theserelational feelings and what we ordinarily call feelings is so strong thatwe must class them apart. Their extreme brevity, their small variety, andtheir dependence on the terms they unite, differentiate them in an unmistakableway.
"Perhaps it will be well to recognize more fully the truth that this distinctioncannot be absolute. Besides admitting that, as an element ofconsciousness, a relation is a momentary feeling, we must also admit thatjust as a relation can have no existence apart from the feelings which formits terms, so a feeling can exist only by relations to other feelings whichlimit it in space or time or both. Strictly speaking, neither a feeling nora relation is an independent element of consciousness: there is throughouta dependence such that the appreciable areas of consciousness occupied byfeelings can no more possess individualities apart from the relations whichlink them, than these relations can possess individualities apart from thefeelings they link. The essential distinction between the two, then,appears to be that whereas a relational feeling is a portion of consciousnessinseparable into parts, a feeling, ordinarily so called, is a portion of consciousnessthat admits imaginary division into like parts which are relatedto one another in sequence or coexistence. A feeling proper is eithermade up of like parts that occupy time, or it is made up of like parts thatoccupy space, or both. In any case, a feeling proper is an aggregate ofrelated like parts, while a relational feeling is undecomposable. And thisis exactly the contrast between the two which must result if, as we haveinferred, feelings are composed of units of feelings, or shocks."
[231] M. Paulhan (Revue Philosophique, xx, 455-6), after speaking of thefaint mental images of objects and emotions, says: "We find other vaguerstates still, upon which attention seldom rests, except in persons who bynature or profession are addicted to internal observation. It is even difficultto name them precisely, for they are little known and not classed;but we may cite as an example of them that peculiar impression which wefeel when, strongly preoccupied by a certain subject, we nevertheless areengaged with, and have our attention almost completely absorbed by, mattersquite disconnected therewithal. We do not then exactly think of theobject of our preoccupation; we do not represent it in a clear manner; andyet our mind is not as it would be without this preoccupation. Its object,absent from consciousness, is nevertheless represented there by a peculiarunmistakable impression, which often persists long and is a strong feeling,although so obscure for our intelligence." "A mental sign of the kind isthe unfavorable disposition left in our mind towards an individual by painfulincidents erewhile experienced and now perhaps forgotten. The signremains, but is not understood; its definite meaning is lost." (P. 458.)
[232] Mozart describes thus his manner of composing: First bits and crumbsof the piece come and gradually join together in his mind; then the soulgetting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, "and Ispread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in myhead, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at asingle glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsomehuman being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all asa succession—the way it must come later—but all at once, as it were. Ifis a rare feast! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautifulstrong dream. But the best of all is thehearing of it all at once."
[233] Mental Physiology, § 236. Dr. Carpenter's explanation differs materiallyfrom that given in the text.
[234] Cf. also S. Stricker: Vorlesungen über allg. u. exp. Pathologie (1879),pp. 462-3, 501, 547; Romanes: Origin of Human Faculty, p. 82. It is sohard to make one's self clear that I may advert to a misunderstanding ofmy views by the late Prof. Thos. Maguire of Dublin (Lectures on Philosophy,1885). This author considers that by the 'fringe' I mean some sortof psychic material by which sensations in themselves separate are madeto cohere together, and wittily says that I ought to "see that uniting sensationsby their 'fringes' is more vague than to construct the universe outof oysters by platting their beards" (p. 211). But the fringe, as I use theword, means nothing like this; it is part of theobject cognized,—substantivequalities andthings appearing to the mind in afringe of relations. Some parts—thetransitive parts—of our stream of thought cognize the relations ratherthan the things; but both the transitive and the substantive parts form onecontinuous stream, with no discrete 'sensations' in it such as Prof. Maguiresupposes, and supposes me to suppose, to be there.
[235] George Campbell: Philosophy of Rhetoric, book ii, chap. vii.
[236] Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, by 'Jean Story' (1879).
[237] M. G. Tarde, quoting (in Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1885), p.226) some nonsense-verses from a dream, says they show "how prosodicforms may subsist in a mind from which logical rules are effaced....I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of finding two words whichrhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first presenteditself with other words which, added, gave the right number of syllables,and yet I was ignorant of the sense of the words.... Thus we have theextraordinary fact that the words called each other up, without calling uptheir sense.... Even when awake, it is more difficult to ascend to themeaning of a word than to pass from one word to another; or to put itotherwise,it is harder to be a thinker than to be a rhetorician, and on thewhole nothing is commoner than trains of words not understood."
[238] We think it odd that young children should listen with such raptattention to the reading of stories expressed in words half of which theydo not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. Buttheir thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both of usmake flying leaps over large portions of the sentences uttered and we giveattention only to substantive starting points, turning points, and conclusionshere and there. All the rest, 'substantive' and separately intelligibleas it maypotentially be, actually serves only as so much transitive material.It isinternodal consciousness, giving us the sense of continuity, but havingno significance apart from its mere gap-filling function. The childrenprobably feel no gap when through a lot of unintelligible words they areswiftly carried to a familiar and intelligible terminus.
[239] Not literallyheard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceiveshocks and jars that can be felt, even when so slight as to be unnoticed bythose who can hear.
[240] Quoted by Samuel Porter: 'Is Thought possible without Language?'in Princeton Review, 57th year, pp. 108-12 (Jan. 1881?). Cf. also W. W.Ireland: The Blot upon the Brain (1886), Paper x, part ii; G. J. Romanes:Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 81-83, and references therein made. Prof.Max Müller gives a very complete history of this controversy in pp. 30-64 ofhis 'Science of Thought' (1887). His own view is that Thought and Speechare inseparable; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of symbolismor even mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the wordlesssummary glimpses which we have of systems of relation and direction.
[241] Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem iv, chapter 5. Comparealso Victor Egger: La Parole Intérieure (Paris, 1881), chap. vi.
[242] If but one person sees an apparition we consider it his private hallucination.If more than one, we begin to think it may be a real externalpresence.
[243] Revue Philosophique, vol. xxi, p. 671.
[244] Quoted from the Therapeutic Gazette, by the N. Y. Semi-weeklyEvening Post for Nov. 2, 1886.
[245] In half-stunned states self-consciousness may lapse. A friend writesme: "We were driving back from —— in a wagonette. The door flewopen and X., alias 'Baldy,' fell out on the road. We pulled up at once,and then he said, 'Did anybody fall out?' or 'Who fell out?'—I don'texactly remember the words. When told that Baldy fell out, he said, 'DidBaldy fall out? Poor Baldy!'"
[246] Kant originated this view. I subjoin a few English statements of it.J. Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysic, Proposition i: "Along with whateverany intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition of itsknowledge, have some knowledge of itself." Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions,p. 47: "We know, and we know that we know,—these propositions,logically distinct, are really identical; each implies the other.... So trueis the scholastic brocard:non sentimus nisi sentiamus nos sentire." H. L.Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 58: "Whatever variety of materials may existwithin reach of my mind, I can become conscious of them only by recognizingthem as mine.... Relation to the conscious self is thus the permanentand universal feature which every state of consciousness as such mustexhibit." T. H. Green, Introduction to Hume, p. 12: "A consciousnessby the man ... of himself, in negative relation to the thing that is hisobject, and this consciousness must be taken to go along with the perceptiveact itself. Not less than this indeed can be involved in any act that isto be the beginning of knowledge at all. It is the minimum of possiblethought or intelligence."
[247] Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Lecture 45.
[248] Instead of sayingto our feeling only, he should have said, to theobjectonly.
[249] "There can be no difficulty in admitting that association does formthe ideas of an indefinite number of individuals into one complex idea;because it is an acknowledged fact. Have we not the idea of an army?And is not that precisely the ideas of an indefinite number of men formedinto one idea?" (Jas. Mill's Analysis of the Human Mind (J. S. Mill'sEdition), vol. i, p. 264.)
[250] For their arguments, see above.
[251] I know there are readers whom nothing can convince that the thoughtof a complex object has not as many parts as are discriminated in the objectitself. Well, then, let the word parts pass. Only observe that theseparts are not the separate 'ideas' of traditional psychology. No one ofthem can live out of that particular thought, any more than my head canlive off of my particular shoulders. In a sense a soap-bubble has parts; it isa sum of juxtaposed spherical triangles. But these triangles are not separaterealities; neither are the 'parts' of the thought separate realities.Touch the bubble and the triangles are no more. Dismiss the thoughtand out go its parts. You can no more make a new thought out of 'ideas'that have once served than you can make a new bubble out of old trianglesEach bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity,sui generis.
[252] In his work, La Parole Intérieure (Paris, 1881), especially chaptersvi and vii.
[253] Page 301.
[254] Page 218. To prove this point, M. Egger appeals to the fact that weoften hear some one speak whilst our mind is preoccupied, but do not understandhim until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly 'realize'what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning of a sentence in anunfamiliar tongue, where the words are present to us long before the ideais taken in. In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea.The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to expressourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual field of intellectualinvention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M.Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former classthere is some sort of a verbal suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea,when it is grasped—we hear the echo of the words as we catch their meaning.And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases theidea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. Innormal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there.
[255] A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardlyarticulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds thatthe meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sentencesare finished.
[256] The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) to the doctrineset forth here is in O. Liebmaun's Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, pp.427-438.
Let us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation,and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form, advancingfrom the study of the empirical, as the Germanscall it, to that of the pure, Ego.
The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he istempted to call by the name ofme. But it is clear thatbetween what a man callsme and what he simply callsmine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act aboutcertain things that are ours very much as we feel and actabout ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of ourhands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arousethe same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or aretheyus? Certainly men have been ready to disown theirvery bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or evenas prisons of clay from which they should some day be gladto escape.
We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuatingmaterial. The same object being sometimes treated as apart of me, at other times as simply mine, and then againas if I had nothing to do with it at all.In its widestpossible sense, however,a man's Self is the sum total of allthat hecancall his, not only his body and his psychic powers,but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, hisancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his landsand horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these thingsgive him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, hefeels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feelscast down,—not necessarily in the same degree for each[Pg 292]thing, but in much the same way for all. Understandingthe Self in this widest sense, we may begin by dividing thehistory of it into three parts, relating respectively to—
1. Its constituents;
2. The feelings and emotions they arouse,—Self-feelings;
3. The actions to which they prompt,—Self-seeking andSelf-preservation.
1.The constituents of the Self may be divided into twoclasses, those which make up respectively—
(a) The material Self;
(b) The social Self;
(c) The spiritual Self; and
(d) The pure Ego.
(a) The body is the innermost part ofthe material Selfin each of us; and certain parts of the body seem moreintimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next.The old saying that the human person is composed ofthree parts—soul, body and clothes—is more than a joke.We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves withthem that there are few of us who, if asked to choosebetween having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetuallyshabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemishedform always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a momentbefore making a decisive reply.[257] Next, our immediatefamily is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, ourwife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of ourflesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they areinsulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood intheir place. Our home comes next. Its scenes are partof our life; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings ofaffection; and we do not easily forgive the stranger who,in visiting it, finds fault with its arrangements or treats itwith contempt. All these different things are the objectsof instinctive preferences coupled with the most importantpractical interests of life. We all have a blind impulseto watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of[Pg 293]an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babes,and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we maylive in and 'improve.'
An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property;and the collections thus made become, with differentdegrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. Theparts of our wealth most intimately ours are those whichare saturated with our labor. There are few men whowould not feel personally annihilated if a life-long constructionof their hands or brains—say an entomologicalcollection or an extensive work in manuscript—weresuddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towardshis gold, and although it is true that a part of our depressionat the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that wemust now go without certain goods that we expected thepossessions to bring in their train, yet in every case thereremains, over and above this, a sense of the shrinkage ofour personality, a partial conversion of ourselves tonothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon byitself. We are all at once assimilated to the tramps andpoor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time removedfarther than ever away from the happy sons ofearth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full-blownlustihood that wealth and power can give, andbefore whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing toanti-snobbish first principles, we cannot escape an emotion,open or sneaking, of respect and dread.
(b)A man's Social Self is the recognition which he getsfrom his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, likingto be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensityto get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by ourkind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised,were such a thing physically possible, than that one shouldbe turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticedby all the members thereof. If no one turned round whenwe entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what wedid, but if every person we met 'cut us dead,' and acted asif we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotentdespair would ere long well up in us, from which the[Pg 294]cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these wouldmake us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we hadnot sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attentionat all.
Properly speaking,a man has as many social selves asthere are individuals who recognize him and carry an imageof him in their mind. To wound any one of these hisimages is to wound him.[258] But as the individuals whocarry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practicallysay that he has as many different social selves asthere are distinctgroups of persons about whose opinionhe cares. He generally shows a different side of himselfto each of these different groups. Many a youth who isdemure enough before his parents and teachers, swearsand swaggers like a pirate among his 'tough' young friends.We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions,to our customers as to the laborers we employ,to our own masters and employers as to our intimatefriends. From this there results what practically is adivision of the man into several selves; and this may be adiscordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set ofhis acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it maybe a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where onetender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisonersunder his command.
The most peculiar social self which one is apt to haveis in the mind of the person one is in love with. Thegood or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intenseelation and dejection—unreasonable enough as measuredby every other standard than that of the organic feeling ofthe individual. To his own consciousness heis not, so longas this particular social self fails to get recognition, andwhen it is recognized his contentment passes all bounds.
A man'sfame, good or bad, and hishonor or dishonor,are names for one of his social selves. The particularsocial self of a man called his honor is usually the resultof one of those splittings of which we have spoken. It ishis image in the eyes of his own 'set,' which exalts or condemns[Pg 295]him as he conforms or not to certain requirementsthat may not be made of one in another walk of life. Thusa layman may abandon a city infected with cholera; but apriest or a doctor would think such an act incompatiblewith his honor. A soldier's honor requires him to fight orto die under circumstances where another man can apologizeor run away with no stain upon his social self. Ajudge, a statesman, are in like manner debarred by thehonor of their cloth from entering into pecuniary relationsperfectly honorable to persons in private life. Nothing iscommoner than to hear people discriminate between theirdifferent selves of this sort: "As a man I pity you, but asan official I must show you no mercy; as a politician Iregard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him;" etc.,etc. What may be called 'club-opinion' is one of the verystrongest forces in life.[259] The thief must not steal fromother thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts,though he pay no other debts in the world. The code ofhonor of fashionable society has throughout history beenfull of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason forfollowing either of which is that so we best serve one of[Pg 296]our social selves. You must not lie in general, but youmay lie as much as you please if asked about your relationswith a lady; you must accept a challenge from an equal,but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him toscorn: these are examples of what is meant.
(c) By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to theEmpirical Me, I mean a man's inner or subjective being, hispsychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely; not thebare principle of personal Unity, or 'pure' Ego, whichremains still to be discussed. These psychic dispositionsare the most enduring and intimate part of the self, thatwhich we most verily seem to be. We take a purer self-satisfactionwhen we think of our ability to argue and discriminate,of our moral sensibility and conscience, of ourindomitable will, than when we survey any of our otherpossessions. Only when these are altered is a man said tobealienatus a se.
Now this spiritual self may be considered in variousways. We may divide it into faculties, as just instanced,isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselveswith either in turn. This is anabstract way of dealing withconsciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, aplurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneouslyfound; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then thespiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of ourpersonal consciousness, or the present 'segment' or 'section'of that stream, according as we take a broader or anarrower view—both the stream and the section being concreteexistences in time, and each being a unity after itsown peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly orconcretely, our considering the spiritual self at all is areflective process, is the result of our abandoning the outward-lookingpoint of view, and of our having become ableto think of subjectivity as such,to think ourselves as thinkers.
This attention to thought as such, and the identificationof ourselves with it rather than with any of the objectswhich it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects arather mysterious operation, of which we need here onlysay that as a matter of fact it exists; and that in everyone,at an early age, the distinction between thought as such,[Pg 297]and what it is 'of' or 'about,' has become familiar to themind. The deeper grounds for this discrimination maypossibly be hard to find; but superficial grounds are plentyand near at hand. Almost anyone will tell us that thoughtis a different sort of existence from things, because manysorts of thought are of no things—e.g., pleasures, pains,and emotions; others are of non-existent things—errorsand fictions; others again of existent things, but in a formthat is symbolic and does not resemble them—abstractideas and concepts; whilst in the thoughts that do resemblethe things they are 'of' (percepts, sensations), we canfeel, alongside of the thing known, the thought of it goingon as an altogether separate act and operation in the mind.
Now this subjective life of ours, distinguished as suchso clearly from the objects known by its means, may, asaforesaid, be taken by us in a concrete or in an abstractway. Of the concrete way I will say nothing just now, exceptthat the actual 'section' of the stream will ere long,in our discussion of the nature of the principle ofunity inconsciousness, play a very important part. The abstractway claims our attention first. If the stream as a whole isidentified with the Self far more than any outward thing, acertain portion of the stream abstracted from the rest is soidentified in an altogether peculiar degree, and is felt by allmen as a sort of innermost centre within the circle, of sanctuarywithin the citadel, constituted by the subjective lifeas a whole. Compared with this element of the stream,the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transientexternal possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned,whilst that which disowns them remains. Now,what isthis self of all the other selves?
Probably all men would describe it in much the sameway up to a certain point. They would call it theactiveelement in all consciousness; saying that whatever qualitiesa man's feelings may possess, or whatever content histhought may include, there is a spiritual something inhim which seems togo out to meet these qualities andcontents, whilst they seem tocome in to be received by it.It is what welcomes or rejects. It presides over the perceptionof sensations, and by giving or withholding its[Pg 298]assent it influences the movements they tend to arouse.It is the home of interest,—not the pleasant or the painful,not even pleasure or pain, as such, but that within us towhich pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak.It is the source of effort and attention, and the place fromwhich appear to emanate the fiats of the will. A physiologistwho should reflect upon it in his own person couldhardly help, I should think, connecting it more or lessvaguely with the process by which ideas or incoming sensationsare 'reflected' or pass over into outward acts. Notnecessarily that it shouldbe this process or the mere feelingof this process, but that it should be in some close wayrelated to this process; for it plays a part analogous to it inthe psychic life, being a sort of junction at which sensoryideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed, andforming a kind of link between the two. Being more incessantlythere than any other single element of the mentallife, the other elements end by seeming to accrete round itand to belong to it. It become opposed to them as the permanentis opposed to the changing and inconstant.
One may, I think, without fear of being upset by anyfuture Galtonian circulars, believe that all men must singleout from the rest of what they call themselves some centralprinciple of which each would recognize the foregoing to bea fair general description,—accurate enough, at any rate, todenote what is meant, and keep it unconfused with otherthings. The moment, however, they came to closer quarterswith it, trying to define more accurately its precise nature,we should find opinions beginning to diverge. Some wouldsay that it is a simple active substance, the soul, of whichthey are thus conscious; others, that it is nothing but afiction, the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I; andbetween these extremes of opinion all sorts of intermediarieswould be found.
Later we must ourselves discuss them all, and sufficientto that day will be the evil thereof.Now, let us try tosettle for ourselves as definitely as we can, just how thiscentral nucleus of the Self mayfeel, no matter whether it bea spiritual substance or only a delusive word.
For this central part of the Self isfelt. It may be all that[Pg 299]Transcendentalists say it is, and all that Empiricists say itis into the bargain, but it is at any rate nomere ens rationis,cognized only in an intellectual way, and nomere summationof memories ormere sound of a word in our ears. It is somethingwith which we also have direct sensible acquaintance,and which is as fully present at any moment of consciousnessin which itis present, as in a whole lifetime of suchmoments. When, just now, it was called an abstraction,that did not mean that, like some general notion, it couldnot be presented in a particular experience. It only meantthat in the stream of consciousness it never was found allalone. But when it is found, it isfelt; just as the body isfelt, the feeling of which is also an abstraction, because neveris the body felt all alone, but always together with otherthings.Now can we tell more precisely in what the feeling ofthis central active self consists,—not necessarily as yet whatthe active selfis, as a being or principle, but what wefeelwhen we become aware of its existence?
I think I can in my own case; and as what I say willbe likely to meet with opposition if generalized (as indeedit may be in part inapplicable to other individuals), I hadbetter continue in the first person, leaving my description,to be accepted by those to whose introspection it may commenditself as true, and confessing my inability to meet thedemands of others, if others there be.
First of all, I am aware of a constant play of furtherancesand hindrances in my thinking, of checks and releases, tendencieswhich run with desire, and tendencies which run theother way. Among the matters I think of, some range themselveson the side of the thought's interests, whilst othersplay an unfriendly part thereto. The mutual inconsistenciesand agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, whichobtain amongst these objective matters reverberate backwardsand produce what seem to be incessant reactions ofmy spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appropriatingor disowning, striving with or against, saying yesor no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that centralnucleus which I just tried to describe in terms that all menmight use.
But when I forsake such general descriptions and grapple[Pg 300]with particulars, coming to the closest possible quarterswith the facts,it is difficult for me to detect in the activity anypurely spiritual element at all. Whenever my introspectiveglance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one ofthese manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feeldistinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking placewithin the head. Omitting for a moment what is obscure inthese introspective results, let me try to state those particularswhich to my own consciousness seem indubitable anddistinct.
In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, negating,making an effort, are felt as movements of somethingin the head. In many cases it is possible to describethese movements quite exactly. In attending to either anidea or a sensation belonging to a particular sense-sphere,the movement is the adjustment of the sense-organ, felt asit occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, for example,without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, convergences,divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs.The direction in which the object is conceived to lie determinesthe character of these movements, the feeling ofwhich becomes, for my consciousness, identified with themanner in which I make myself ready to receive the visiblething. My brain appears to me as if all shot across withlines of direction, of which I have become conscious as myattention has shifted from one sense-organ to another, inpassing to successive outer things, or in following trains ofvarying sense-ideas.
When I try to remember or reflect, the movements inquestion, instead of being directed towards the periphery,seem to come from the periphery inwards and feel like asort ofwithdrawal from the outer world. As far as I candetect, these feelings are due to an actual rolling outwardsand upwards of the eyeballs, such as I believe occurs inme in sleep, and is the exact opposite of their action in fixatinga physical thing. In reasoning, I find that I am aptto have a kind of vaguely localized diagram in my mind,with the various fractional objects of the thought disposedat particular points thereof; and the oscillations of my attentionfrom one of them to another are most distinctly felt[Pg 301]as alternations of direction in movements occurring insidethe head.[260]
In consenting and negating, and in making a mentaleffort, the movements seem more complex, and I find themharder to describe. The opening and closing of the glottisplay a great part in these operations, and, less distinctly,the movements of the soft palate, etc., shutting off the posteriornares from the mouth. My glottis is like a sensitivevalve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at everymental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects of mythought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass throughmy throat and nose, the moment the repugnance is overcome.The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me,one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent. The movementsof the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respondvery sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeablenessor disagreeableness of what comes before my mind.
Ineffort of any sort, contractions of the jaw-muscles andof those of respiration are added to those of the brow andglottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head properlyso called. It passes out of the head whenever the welcomingor rejecting of the object isstrongly felt. Then aset of feelings pour in from many bodily parts, all 'expressive'of my emotion, and the head-feelings proper areswallowed up in this larger mass.
In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one personat least,the 'Self of selves,' when carefully examined,is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiarmotions in the head or between the head and throat. I donot for a moment say that this isall it consists of, for Ifully realize how desperately hard is introspection in thisfield. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions arethe portions of my innermost activity of which I ammostdistinctly aware. If the dim portions which I cannot yetdefine should prove to be like unto these distinct portionsin me, and I like other men,it would follow that our entirefeeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that[Pg 302]name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact natureis by most men overlooked.
Now, without pledging ourselves in any way to adopt thishypothesis, let us dally with it for a while to see to whatconsequences it might lead if it were true.
In the first place, the nuclear part of the Self, intermediarybetween ideas and overt acts, would be a collectionof activities physiologically in no essential way differentfrom the overt acts themselves. If we divide all possiblephysiological acts intoadjustments andexecutions, thenuclear self would be the adjustments collectively considered;and the less intimate, more shifting self, so far asit was active, would be the executions. But both adjustmentsand executions would obey the reflex type. Bothwould be the result of sensorial and ideational processesdischarging either into each other within the brain, or intomuscles and other parts outside. The peculiarity of theadjustments would be that they are minimal reflexes, fewin number, incessantly repeated, constant amid great fluctuationsin the rest of the mind's content, and entirelyunimportant and uninteresting except through their usesin furthering or inhibiting the presence of various things,and actions before consciousness. These characters wouldnaturally keep us from introspectively paying much attentionto them in detail, whilst they would at the same timemake us aware of them as a coherent group of processes,strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousnesscontained,—even with the other constituents of the 'Self,'material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be. Theyare reactions, and they areprimary reactions. Everythingarouses them; for objects which have no other effectswill for a moment contract the brow and make the glottisclose. It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand anentrance-examination, and just show its face so as to beeither approved or sent back. These primary reactionsare like the opening or the closing of the door. In themidst of psychic change they are the permanent coreof turnings-towards and turnings-from, of yieldings andarrests, which naturally seem central and interior in comparison[Pg 303]with the foreign matters,a propos to which theyoccur, and hold a sort of arbitrating, decisive position, quiteunlike that held by any of the other constituents of the Me.It would not be surprising, then, if we were to feel them asthe birthplace of conclusions and the starting point of acts,or if they came to appear as what we called a while backthe 'sanctuary within the citadel' of our personal life.[Pg 304][261]
If they really were the innermost sanctuary, theultimateone of all the selves whose being we can ever directlyexperience, it would follow thatall that is experienced is,strictly considered,objective; that this Objective falls asunderinto two contrasted parts, one realized as 'Self,' theother as 'not-Self; 'and that over and above these partsthereis nothing save the fact that they are known, the factof the stream of thought being there as the indispensablesubjective condition of their being experienced at all. Butthiscondition of the experience is not one of thethings experiencedat the moment; this knowing is not immediatelyknown. It is only known in subsequent reflection. Instead,then, of the stream of thought being one ofcon-sciousness,"thinking its own existence along with whatever else itthinks," (as Ferrier says) it might be better called a streamofSciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some ofwhich it makes what it calls a 'Me,' and only aware of its'pure' Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way.Each 'section' of the stream would then be a bit of sciousnessor knowledge of this sort, including and contemplatingits 'me' and its 'not-me' as objects which work out theirdrama together, but not yet including or contemplating itsown subjective being. The sciousness in question would betheThinker, and the existence of this thinker would be givento us rather as a logical postulate than as that direct innerperception of spiritual activity which we naturally believeourselves to have. 'Matter,' as something behind physicalphenomena, is a postulate of this sort. Between the postulatedMatter and the postulated Thinker, the sheet of phenomenawould then swing, some of them (the 'realities')pertaining more to the matter, others (the fictions, opinions,and errors) pertaining more to the Thinker. Butwho theThinker would be, or how many distinct Thinkers we oughtto suppose in the universe, would all be subjects for anulterior metaphysical inquiry.
Speculations like this traverse common-sense; and notonly do they traverse common sense (which in philosophyis no insuperable objection) but they contradict the fundamentalassumption ofevery philosophic school. Spiritualists,transcendentalists, and empiricists alike admit in[Pg 305]us a continual direct perception of the thinking activity inthe concrete. However they may otherwise disagree, theyvie with each other in the cordiality of their recognition ofourthoughts as the one sort of existent which skepticismcannot touch.[262] I will therefore treat the last few pages asa parenthetical digression, and from now to the end of thevolume revert to the path of common-sense again. I meanby this that I will continue to assume (as I have assumedall along, especially in the last chapter) a direct awarenessof the process of our thinking as such, simply insisting onthe fact that it is an even more inward and subtle phenomenonthan most of us suppose. At the conclusion of thevolume, however, I may permit myself to revert again to thedoubts here provisionally mooted, and will indulge in somemetaphysical reflections suggested by them.
At present, then, the only conclusion I come to is thefollowing: That (in some persons at least) the part of theinnermost Self which is most vividly felt turns out to consistfor the most part of a collection of cephalic movementsof 'adjustments' which, for want of attention andreflection, usually fail to be perceived and classed as whatthey are; that over and above these there is an obscurerfeeling of something more; but whether it be of fainterphysiological processes, or of nothing objective at all, butrather of subjectivity as such, of thought become 'its ownobject,' must at present remain an open question,—like thequestion whether it be an indivisible active soul-substance,or the question whether it be a personification of the pronounI, or any other of the guesses as to what its nature maybe.
Farther than this we cannot as yet go clearly in ouranalysis of the Self's constituents. So let us proceed to theemotions of Self which they arouse.
These are primarilyself-complacency andself-dissatisfaction.Of what is called 'self-love,' I will treat a little[Pg 306]farther on. Language has synonyms enough for both primaryfeelings. Thus pride, conceit, vanity, self-esteem,arrogance, vainglory, on the one hand; and on the othermodesty, humility, confusion, diffidence, shame, mortification,contrition, the sense of obloquy and personal despair.These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct andelementary endowments of our nature. Associationistswould have it that they are, on the other hand, secondaryphenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensiblepleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debasedpersonal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the representedpleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sumof the represented pains forming the opposite feeling ofshame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondlyrehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in afit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expectationof rewardis not the self-satisfaction, and the mereapprehension of the evilis not the self-despair, for there isa certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of uscarries about with him, and which is independent of theobjective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent.That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound inunfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secureand who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of hispowers to the end.
One may say, however, that the normalprovocative ofself-feeling is one's actual success or failure, and the goodor bad actual position one holds in the world. "He put inhis thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boyam I." A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego,with powers that have uniformly brought him success, withplace and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to bevisited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himselfwhich he had when he was a boy. "Is not this greatBabylon, which I have planted?"[263] Whereas he who hasmade one blunder after another, and still lies in middle lifeamong the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow[Pg 307]all sicklied o'er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trialswith which his powers can really cope.
The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasementare of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed asa primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage orpain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expression.In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are innervated,the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling andelastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays uponthe lips. This whole complex of symptoms is seen in anexquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always containsome patients who are literally mad with conceit, andwhose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggeringgait is in tragic contrast with their lack of anyvaluable personal quality. It is in these same castles ofdespair that we find the strongest examples of the oppositephysiognomy, in good people who think they have committed'the unpardonable sin' and are lost forever, whocrouch and cringe and slink from notice, and are unable tospeak aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and likeanger, in similar morbid conditions, these opposite feelingsof Self may be aroused with no adequate exciting cause.And in fact we ourselves know how the barometer of ourself-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day toanother through causes that seem to be visceral and organicrather than rational, and which certainly answer to no correspondingvariations in the esteem in which we are heldby our friends. Of the origin of these emotions in the race,we can speak better when we have treated of—
These words cover a large number of our fundamentalinstinctive impulses. We have those ofbodily self-seeking,those ofsocial self-seeking, and those ofspiritual self-seeking.
All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movementsof alimentation and defence are acts of bodily self-preservation.Fear and anger prompt to acts that are usefulin the same way. Whilst if by self-seeking we meanthe providing for the future as distinguished from maintainingthe present, we must class both anger and fear[Pg 308]with the hunting, the acquisitive, the home-constructingand the tool-constructing instincts, as impulses to self-seekingof the bodily kind. Really, however, these latterinstincts, with amativeness, parental fondness, curiosityand emulation, seek not only the development of thebodily Self, but that of the material Self in the widest possiblesense of the word.
Oursocial self-seeking, in turn, is carried on directlythrough our amativeness and friendliness, our desire toplease and attract notice and admiration, our emulationand jealousy, our love of glory, influence, and power,and indirectly through whichever of the material self-seekingimpulses prove serviceable as means to socialends. That the direct social self-seeking impulses areprobably pure instincts is easily seen. The noteworthything about the desire to be 'recognized' by others is thatits strength has so little to do with the worth of the recognitioncomputed in sensational or rational terms. We arecrazy to get a visiting-list which shall be large, to be ableto say when any one is mentioned, "Oh! I know him well,"and to be bowed to in the street by half the people wemeet. Of course distinguished friends and admiringrecognition are the most desirable—Thackeray somewhereasks his readers to confess whether it would not giveeach ofthem an exquisite pleasure to be met walking downPall Mall with a duke on either arm. But in default ofdukes and envious salutations almost anything will do forsome of us; and there is a whole race of beings to-daywhose passion is to keep their names in the newspapers,no matter under what heading, 'arrivals and departures,''personal paragraphs,' 'interviews,'—gossip, even scandal,will suit them if nothing better is to be had. Guiteau,Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to whichthis sort of craving for the notoriety of print may go in apathological case. The newspapers bounded his mentalhorizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer on the scaffold,one of the most heartfelt expressions was: "The newspaperpress of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O Lord!"
Not only the people but the places and things I knowenlarge my Self in a sort of metaphoric social way. "Ça[Pg 309]me connaît," as the French workman says of the implementhe can use well. So that it comes about that persons forwhoseopinion we care nothing are nevertheless personswhose notice we woo; and that many a man truly great,many a woman truly fastidious in most respects, will take adeal of trouble to dazzle some insignificant cad whosewhole personality they heartily despise.
Under the head ofspiritual self-seeking ought to beincluded every impulse towards psychic progress, whetherintellectual, moral, or spiritual in the narrow sense of theterm. It must be admitted, however, that much that commonlypasses for spiritual self-seeking in this narrow senseis only material and social self-seeking beyond the grave.In the Mohammedan desire for paradise and the Christianaspiration not to be damned in hell, the materiality of thegoods sought is undisguised. In the more positive andrefined view of heaven many of its goods, the fellowship ofthe saints and of our dead ones, and the presence of God,are but social goods of the most exalted kind. It is onlythe search of the redeemed inward nature, the spotlessnessfrom sin, whether here or hereafter, that can count asspiritual self-seeking pure and undefined.
But this broad external review of the facts of the life ofthe Self will be incomplete without some account of the
With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts ourchoice to but one of many represented goods, and even so itis here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standingby one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest.Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome andfat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a milliona year, be a wit, abon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as aphilosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, andAfrican explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. Butthe thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's workwould run counter to the saint's; thebon-vivant and thephilanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopherand the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same[Pg 310]tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivablyat the outset of life be alikepossible to a man. Butto make any one of them actual, the rest must more or lessbe suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest,deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out theone on which to stake his salvation. All other selvesthereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self arereal. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs,carrying shame and gladness with them. This isas strong an example as there is of that selective industryof the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 284 ff.).Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things ofa kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here choosesone of many possible selves or characters, and forthwithreckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adoptedexpressly as its own.
I, who for the time have staked my all on being apsychologist, am mortified if others know much morepsychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in thegrossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give meno sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions'to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. Sowe have the paradox of a man shamed to death because heis only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in theworld. That he is able to beat the whole population of theglobe minus one is nothing; he has 'pitted' himself tobeat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that nothingelse counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeedheis not.
Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat,suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandonedthe attempt to 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, ofself at all. With no attempt there can be no failure; withno failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this worlddepends entirely on what weback ourselves to be and do.It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposedpotentialities; a fraction of which our pretensionsare the denominator and the numerator our success: thus,Self-esteem = Success/ Pretensions. Such a fraction may be increased[Pg 311]as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing thenumerator.[264] To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief asto get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant,and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.The history of evangelical theology, with its conviction ofsin, its self-despair, and its abandonment of salvation byworks, is the deepest of possible examples, but we meetothers in every walk of life. There is the strangest lightnessabout the heart when one's nothingness in a particularline is once accepted in good faith.All is not bitterness inthe lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable 'No.'Many Bostonians,crede experto (and inhabitants of othercities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men to-day,if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping upa Musical Self, and without shame let people hear themcall a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day whenwe give up striving to be young,—or slender! Thank God!we say,those illusions are gone. Everything added to theSelf is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man wholost every penny during our civil war went and actuallyrolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happysince he was born.
Once more, then, our self-feeling is in our power. AsCarlyle says: "Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hastthou the world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of ourtime write, it is only withrenunciation that life, properlyspeaking, can be said to begin."
Neither threats nor pleadings can move a man unlessthey touch some one of his potential or actual selves. Onlythus can we, as a rule, get a 'purchase' on another's will.The first care of diplomatists and monarchs and all who wishto rule or influence is, accordingly, to find out their victim'sstrongest principle of self-regard, so as to make that the[Pg 312]fulcrum of all appeals. But if a man has given up thosethings which are subject to foreign fate, and ceased toregard them as parts of himself at all, we are well-nighpowerless over him. The Stoic receipt for contentmentwas to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was out ofyour own power,—then fortune's shocks might rain downunfelt. Epictetus exhorts us, by thus narrowing and at thesame time solidifying our Self to make it invulnerable: "Imust die; well, but must I die groaning too? I will speakwhat appears to be right, and if the despot says, then Iwill put you to death, I will reply, 'When did I ever tellyou that I was immortal? You will do your part and Imine; it is yours to kill and mine to die intrepid; yours tobanish, mine to depart untroubled.' How do we act in avoyage? We choose the pilot, the sailors, the hour. Afterwardscomes a storm. What have I to care for? My partis performed. This matter belongs to the pilot. But theship is sinking; what then have I to do? That which aloneI can do—submit to being drowned without fear, withoutclamor or accusing of God, but as one who knows thatwhat is born must likewise die."[265]
This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enoughin its place and time, is, it must be confessed, only possibleas an habitual mood of the soul to narrow and unsympatheticcharacters. It proceeds altogether by exclusion. IfI am a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to bemygoods, and the temptation lies very near to deny that theyare goods at all. We find this mode of protecting the Selfby exclusion and denial very common among people whoare in other respects not Stoics. All narrow peopleintrenchtheir Me, theyretract it,—from the region of what they cannotsecurely possess. People who don't resemble them, orwho treat them with indifference, people over whom theygain no influence, are people on whose existence, howevermeritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chillnegation, if not with positive hate. Who will not be mineI will exclude from existence altogether; that is, as far as[Pg 313]I can make it so, such people shall be as if they were not.[266]Thus may a certain absoluteness and definiteness in theoutline of my Me console me for the smallness of its content.
Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by theentirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The outlineof their self often gets uncertain enough, but for thisthe spread of its content more than atones.Nil humani ame alienum. Let them despise this little person of mine,and treat me like a dog,I shall not negatethem so long asI have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as Iam. What positive good is in them shall be mine too, etc.,etc. The magnanimity of these expansive natures is oftentouching indeed. Such persons can feel a sort of delicaterapture in thinking that, however sick, ill-favored, mean-conditioned,and generally forsaken they may be, they yetare integral parts of the whole of this brave world, have afellow's share in the strength of the dray-horses, the happinessof the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones,and are not altogether without part or lot in the good fortunesof the Vanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns themselves.Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego mayseek to establish itself in reality. He who, with MarcusAurelius, can truly say, "O Universe, I wish all that thouwishest," has a self from which every trace of negativenessand obstructiveness has been removed—no wind can blowexcept to fill its sails.
A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the differentselves of which a man may be 'seized and possessed,' andthe consequent different orders of his self-regard, in anhierarchical scale, with the bodily Self at the bottom, thespiritual Self at top, and the extracorporeal material selvesand the various social selves between. Our merely naturalself-seeking would lead us to aggrandize all these selves;we give up deliberately only those among them which we[Pg 314]find we cannot keep. Our unselfishness is thus apt to be a'virtue of necessity'; and it is not without all show of reasonthat cynics quote the fable of the fox and the grapes indescribing our progress therein. But this is the moraleducation of the race; and if we agree in the result thaton the whole the selves we can keep are the intrinsicallybest, we need not complain of being led to the knowledgeof their superior worth in such a tortuous way.
Of course this is not the only way in which we learnto subordinate our lower selves to our higher. A directethical judgment unquestionably also plays its part, and last,not least, we apply to our own persons judgments originallycalled forth by the acts of others. It is one of the strangestlaws of our nature that many things which we are well satisfiedwith in ourselves disgust us when seen in others.With another man's bodily 'hoggishness' hardly anyonehas any sympathy;—almost as little with his cupidity, hissocial vanity and eagerness, his jealousy, his despotism,and his pride. Left absolutely to myself I should probablyallow all these spontaneous tendencies to luxuriate in meunchecked, and it would be long before I formed a distinctnotion of the order of their subordination. But havingconstantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come erelong to see, as Herr Horwicz says, my own lusts in themirror of the lusts of others, and tothink about them in avery different way from that in which I simplyfeel. Ofcourse, the moral generalities which from childhood havebeen instilled into me accelerate enormously the advent ofthis reflective judgment on myself.
So it comes to pass that, as aforesaid, men have arrangedthe various selves which they may seek in an hierarchicalscale according to their worth. A certain amount of bodilyselfishness is required as a basis for all the other selves.But too much sensuality is despised, or at best condonedon account of the other qualities of the individual. Thewider material selves are regarded as higher than theimmediate body. He is esteemed a poor creature who isunable to forego a little meat and drink and warmth andsleep for the sake of getting on in the world. The socialself as a whole, again, ranks higher than the material self[Pg 315]as a whole. We must care more for our honor, our friends,our human ties, than for a sound skin or wealth. And thespiritual self is so supremely precious that, rather thanlose it, a man ought to be willing to give up friends andgood fame, and property, and life itself.
In each kind of self, material, social, and spiritual, mendistinguish between the immediate and actual, and the remoteand potential, between the narrower and the widerview, to the detriment of the former and advantage of thelatter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment forthe sake of one's general health; one must abandon thedollar in the hand for the sake of the hundred dollars tocome; one must make an enemy of his present interlocutorif thereby one makes friends of a more valued circle; onemust go without learning and grace, and wit, the better tocompass one's soul's salvation.
Of all these wider, more potential selves,the potentialsocial self is the most interesting, by reason of certainapparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and byreason of its connection with our moral and religious life.When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the condemnationof my own family, club, and 'set'; when, as aprotestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a'regular practitioner,' homœopath, or what not, I am alwaysinwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against theloss of my actual social self by the thought of other andbetterpossible social judges than those whose verdict goesagainst me now. The ideal social self which I thus seekin appealing to their decision may be very remote: it maybe represented as barely possible. I may not hope for itsrealization during my lifetime; I may even expect thefuture generations, which would approve me if they knewme, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone.Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitablythe pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at leastworthy of approving recognition by the highestpossiblejudging companion, if such companion there be.[267] This[Pg 316]self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanentMe which I seek. This judge is God, the AbsoluteMind, the 'Great Companion.' We hear, in these days ofscientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion aboutthe efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us whywe should not pray, whilst others are given us why weshould. But in all this very little is said of the reason whywedo pray, which is simply that we cannothelp praying.It seems probable that, in spite of all that 'science' may doto the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time,unless their mental nature changes in a manner whichnothing we know should lead us to expect. The impulseto pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilstthe innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self ofthesocial sort, it yet can find its only adequateSocius in anideal world.
All progress in the social Self is the substitution ofhigher tribunals for lower; this ideal tribunal is the highest;and most men, either continually or occasionally,carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest outcaston this earth can feel himself to be real and valid bymeans of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand,for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when theouter social self failed and dropped from us would be theabyss of horror. I say 'for most of us,' because it isprobable that individuals differ a good deal in the degreein which they are haunted by this sense of an ideal spectator.It is a much more essential part of the consciousnessof some men than of others. Those who have the most ofit are possibly the mostreligious men. But I am sure thateven those who say they are altogether without it deceivethemselves, and really have it in some degree. Only anon-gregarious animal could be completely without it.Probably no one can make sacrifices for 'right,' without[Pg 317]to some degree personifying the principle of right forwhich the sacrifice is made, and expecting thanks from it.Complete social unselfishness, in other words, can hardlyexist;complete social suicide hardly occur to a man's mind.Even such texts as Job's, "Though He slay me yet will Itrust Him," or Marcus Aurelius's, "If gods hate me andmy children, there is a reason for it," can least of all becited to prove the contrary. For beyond all doubt Jobrevelled in the thought of Jehovah's recognition of the worshipafter the slaying should have been done; and the Romanemperor felt sure the Absolute Reason would not be allindifferent to his acquiescence in the gods' dislike. Theold test of piety, "Are you willing to be damned for theglory of God?" was probably never answered in the affirmativeexcept by those who felt sure in their heart of heartsthat God would 'credit' them with their willingness, andset more store by them thus than if in His unfathomablescheme He had not damned them at all.
All this about the impossibility of suicide is said on thesupposition ofpositive motives. When possessed by theemotion offear, however, we are in anegative state of mind;that is, our desire is limited to the mere banishing of something,without regard to what shall take its place. In thisstate of mind there can unquestionably be genuine thoughts,and genuine acts, of suicide, spiritual and social, as well asbodily. Anything,anything, at such times, so as to escapeand not to be! But such conditions of suicidal frenzy arepathological in their nature and run dead against everythingthat is regular in the life of the Self in man.
We must now try to interpret the facts of self-love andself-seeking a little more delicately from within.
A man in whom self-seeking of any sort is largelydeveloped is said to be selfish.[268] He is on the other hand[Pg 318]called unselfish if he shows consideration for the interests ofother selves than his own. Now what is the intimatenatureof the selfish emotion in him? and what is the primaryobject of its regard? We have described him pursuing andfostering as his self first one set of things and then another;we have seen the same set of facts gain or lose interest in hiseyes, leave him indifferent, or fill him either with triumphor despair according as he made pretensions to appropriatethem, treated them as if they were potentially or actuallyparts of himself, or not. We know how little it matters tous whethersome man, a man taken at large and in theabstract, prove a failure or succeed in life,—he may behanged for aught we care,—but we know the utter momentousnessand terribleness of the alternative when the manis the one whose name we ourselves bear.I must not bea failure, is the very loudest of the voices that clamor ineach of our breasts: let fail who may,I at least must succeed.Now the first conclusion which these facts suggestis that each of us is animated by adirect feeling of regardfor his own pure principle of individual existence, whateverthat may be, taken merely as such. It appears as if all ourconcrete manifestations of selfishness might be the conclusionsof as many syllogisms, each with this principle as thesubject of its major premiss, thus: Whatever is me isprecious; this is me; therefore this is precious; whateveris mine must not fail; this is mine; therefore this mustnot fail, etc. It appears, I say, as if this principle inoculatedall it touched with its own intimate quality of worth;as if, previous to the touching, everything might be matterof indifference, and nothing interesting in its own right; asif my regard for my own body even were an interest notsimply in this body, but in this body only so far as it ismine.
But what is this abstract numerical principle of identity,[Pg 319]this 'Number One' within me, for which, according to proverbialphilosophy, I am supposed to keep so constant a'lookout'? Is it the inner nucleus of my spiritual self, thatcollection of obscurely felt 'adjustments,'plus perhaps thatstill more obscurely perceived subjectivity as such, of whichwe recently spoke? Or is it perhaps the concrete streamof my thought in its entirety, or some one section of thesame? Or may it be the indivisible Soul-Substance, inwhich, according to the orthodox tradition, my facultiesinhere? Or, finally, can it be the mere pronoun I? Surelyit is none of these things, that self for which I feel such hotregard. Though all of them together were put within me,I should still be cold, and fail to exhibit anything worthyof the name of selfishness or of devotion to 'Number One.'To have a self that I cancare for, nature must first presentme with someobject interesting enough to make me instinctivelywish to appropriate it for itsown sake, and out of itto manufacture one of those material, social, or spiritualselves, which we have already passed in review. We shallfind that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that haveso struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contractionsof the sphere of what shall be considered me andmine, are but results of the fact that certainthings appealto primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, andthat we follow their destinies with an excitement that owesnothing to a reflective source. These objects our consciousnesstreats as the primordial constituents of its Me.Whatever other objects, whether by association with thefate of these, or in any other way, come to be followed withthe same sort of interest, form our remoter and more secondaryself.The wordsme,then, andself,so far as theyarouse feeling and connote emotional worth, areobjectivedesignations, meaningall the thingswhich have the powerto produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of acertain peculiar sort. Let us try to justify this propositionin detail.
The most palpable selfishness of a man is his bodilyselfishness; and his most palpable self is the body to whichthat selfishness relates. Now I say that he identifies himselfwith this body because he lovesit, and that he does[Pg 320]not love it because he finds it to be identified with himself.Reverting to natural history-psychology will help us to seethe truth of this. In the chapter on Instincts we shalllearn that every creature has a certain selective interest incertain portions of the world, and that this interest is asoften connate as acquired. Ourinterest in things meansthe attention and emotion which the thought of them willexcite, and the actions which their presence will evoke.Thus every species is particularly interested in its ownprey or food, its own enemies, its own sexual mates, andits own young. These things fascinate by their intrinsicpower to do so; they are cared for for their own sakes.
Well, it stands not in the least otherwise with our bodies.They too are percepts in our objective field—they aresimply the most interesting percepts there. What happensto them excites in us emotions and tendencies to actionmore energetic and habitual than any which are excited byother portions of the 'field.' What my comrades call mybodily selfishness or self-love, is nothing but the sum ofall the outer acts which this interest in my body spontaneouslydraws from me. My 'selfishness' is here but a descriptivename for grouping together the outward symptomswhich I show. When I am led by self-love to keepmy seat whilst ladies stand, or to grab something first andcut out my neighbor, what I really love is the comfortableseat, is the thing itself which I grab. I love them primarily,as the mother loves her babe, or a generous man anheroic deed. Wherever, as here, self-seeking is the outcomeof simple instinctive propensity, it is but a name forcertain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention fatally,and fatally provokes the 'selfish' response. Could an automatonbe so skilfully constructed as to ape these acts, itwould be called selfish as properly as I. It is true that Iam no automaton, but a thinker. But my thoughts, likemy acts, are here concerned only with the outward things.They need neither know nor care for any pure principlewithin. In fact the more utterly 'selfish' I am in thisprimitive way, the more blindly absorbed my thought willbe in the objects and impulses of my lusts, and the moredevoid of any inward looking glance. A baby, whose consciousness[Pg 321]of the pure Ego, of himself as a thinker, is notusually supposed developed, is, in this way, as some Germanhas said, 'der vollendeteste Egoist.' His corporeal person,and what ministers to its needs, are the only self hecan possibly be said to love. His so-called self-love is buta name for his insensibility to all but this one set of things.It may be that he needs a pure principle of subjectivity, asoul or pure Ego (he certainly needs a stream of thought)to make him sensible at all to anything, to make him discriminateand loveüberhaupt,—how that may be, we shallsee ere long; but this pure Ego, which would then be thecondition of his loving, need no more be theobject of hislove than it need be the object of his thought. If his interestslay altogether in other bodies than his own, if allhis instincts were altruistic and all his acts suicidal, still hewould need a principle ofconsciousness just as he does now.Such a principle cannot then be the principle of his bodilyselfishness any more than it is the principle of any other tendencyhe may show.
So much for the bodily self-love. But mysocial self-love,my interest in the images other men have framed ofme, is also an interest in a set of objects external to mythought. These thoughts in other men's minds are out ofmy mind and 'ejective' to me. They come and go, andgrow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with pride, or blushwith shame, at the result, just as at my success or failurein the pursuit of a material thing. So that here again, justas in the former case, the pure principle seems out of thegame as anobject of regard, and present only as the generalform or condition under which the regard and the thinkinggo on in me at all.
But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving amutilated account of the facts. Those images of me in theminds of other men are, it is true, things outside of me,whose changes I perceive just as I perceive any other outwardchange. But the pride and shame which I feel arenot concerned merely withthose changes. I feel as if somethingelse had changed too, when I perceive my image inyour mind to have changed for the worse, something in meto which that image belongs, and which a moment ago I felt[Pg 322]inside of me, big and strong and lusty, but now weak, contracted,and collapsed. Is not this latter change the changeI feel the shame about? Is not the condition of this thinginside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of myself-regard? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my barenumerical principle of distinction from other men, and noempirical part of me at all?
No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my totalempirical selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection ofobjective facts, to which the depreciated image in your mind'belongs.' In what capacity is it that I claim and demanda respectful greeting from you instead of this expression ofdisdain? It is not as being a bare I that I claim it; it isas being an I who has always been treated with respect,who belongs to a certain family and 'set,' who has certainpowers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities,duties, and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this iswhat your disdain negates and contradicts; this is 'thething inside of me' whose changed treatment I feel theshame about; this is what was lusty, and now, in consequenceof your conduct, is collapsed; and this certainly isan empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is feltmodified and changed for the worse during my feeling ofshame is often more concrete even than this,—it is simplymy bodily person, in which your conduct immediately andwithout any reflection at all on my part works thosemuscular, glandular, and vascular changes which togethermake up the 'expression' of shame. In this instinctive,reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entirevehicle of the self-feeling as, in the coarser cases which wefirst took up, it was the vehicle of the self-seeking. As, insimple 'hoggishness,' a succulent morsel gives rise, by thereflex mechanism, to behavior which the bystanders find'greedy,' and consider to flow from a certain sort of 'self-regard;'so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanismquite as reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior,which the bystanders call 'shame-faced' and which theyconsider due to another kind of self-regard. But in bothcases there may be no particular selfregarded at all by themind: and the name self-regard may be only a descriptive[Pg 323]title imposed from without the reflex acts themselves, andthe feelings that immediately result from their discharge.
After the bodily and social selves come the spiritual.But which of my spiritual selves do I really care for? MySoul-substance? my 'transcendental Ego, or Thinker'?my pronoun I? my subjectivity as such? my nucleus ofcephalic adjustments? or my more phenomenal and perishablepowers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibilities,and the like? Surely the latter. But they, relativelyto the central principle, whatever it may be, are externaland objective. They come and go, and it remains—"soshakes the magnet, and so stands the pole." It may indeedhave to be there for them to be loved, but being there isnot identical with being loved itself.
To sum up, then,we see no reason to suppose that 'self-love'is primarily, or secondarily, or ever, love for one's mere principleof conscious identity. It is always love for somethingwhich, as compared with that principle, is superficial, transient,liable to be taken up or dropped at will.
And zoological psychology again comes to the aid ofour understanding and shows us that this must needs beso. In fact, in answering the question what things it is thata man loves in his self-love, we have implicitly answered thefarther question, of why he loves them.
Unless his consciousness were something more thancognitive, unless it experienced a partiality for certain ofthe objects, which, in succession, occupy its ken, it couldnot long maintain itself in existence; for, by an inscrutablenecessity, each human mind's appearance on this earth isconditioned upon the integrity of the body with which itbelongs, upon the treatment which that body gets fromothers, and upon the spiritual dispositions which use it astheir tool, and lead it either towards longevity or to destruction.Its own body, then, first of all, its friends next, andfinally its spiritual dispositions,mustbe the supremely interestingobjectsfor each human mind. Each mind, tobegin with, must have a certain minimum of selfishness inthe shape of instincts of bodily self-seeking in order to exist.This minimum must be there as a basis for all farther consciousacts, whether of self-negation or of a selfishness[Pg 324]more subtle still. All minds must have come, by the wayof the survival of the fittest, if by no directer path, to takean intense interest in the bodies to which they are yoked,altogether apart from any interest in the pure Ego whichthey also possess.
And similarly with the images of their person in theminds of others. I should not be extant now had I not becomesensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on thefaces among which my life is cast. Looks of contempt caston other persons need affect me in no such peculiar way.Were my mental life dependent exclusively on some otherperson's welfare, either directly or in an indirect way, thennatural selection would unquestionably have brought itabout that I should be as sensitive to the social vicissitudesof that other person as I now am to my own. Instead ofbeing egoistic I should be spontaneously altruistic, then.But in this case, only partially realized in actual humanconditions, though the self I empirically love would havechanged, my pure Ego or Thinker would have to remainjust what it is now.
My spiritual powers, again, must interest me more thanthose of other people, and for the same reason. I shouldnot be here at all unless I had cultivated them and keptthem from decay. And the same law which made me oncecare for them makes me care for them still.
My own body and what ministers to its needs are thus theprimitive object, instinctively determined, of my egoistic interests.Other objects may become interesting derivatively throughassociation with any of these things, either as means or ashabitual concomitants;and so in a thousand ways the primitivesphere of the egoistic emotions may enlarge and changeits boundaries.
This sort of interest is really themeaning of the word'my.' Whatever has it iseo ipso a part of me. My child,my friend dies, and where he goes I feel that part of myselfnow is and evermore shall be:
"For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man's down-lying;
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning."
The fact remains, however, that certain special sorts ofthing tend primordially to possess this interest, and formthenatural me. But all these things areobjects, properlyso called, to the subject which does the thinking.[269] Andthis latter fact upsets at once the dictum of the old-fashionedsensationalist psychology, that altruistic passionsand interests are contradictory to the nature of things, andthat if they appear anywhere to exist, it must be as secondaryproducts, resolvable at bottom into cases of selfishness,taught by experience a hypocritical disguise. If the zoologicaland evolutionary point of view is the true one, there isno reason why any object whatevermight not arouse passionand interest as primitively and instinctively as any other,whether connected or not with the interests of the me.The phenomenon of passion is in origin and essence thesame, whatever be the target upon which it is discharged;and what the target actually happens to be is solely a questionof fact. I might conceivably be as much fascinated,and as primitively so, by the care of my neighbor's bodyas by the care of my own. The only check to such exuberantaltruistic interests is natural selection, which wouldweed out such as were very harmful to the individual or tohis tribe. Many such interests, however, remain unweededout—the interest in the opposite sex, for example, whichseems in mankind stronger than is called for by its utilitarianneed; and alongside of them remain interests, likethat in alcoholic intoxication, or in musical sounds, which,for aught we can see, are without any utility whatever.The sympathetic instincts and the egoistic ones are thusco-ordinate. They arise, so far as we can tell, on the samepsychologic level. The only difference between them is,that the instincts called egoistic form much the larger mass.
The only author whom I know to have discussed thequestion whether the 'pure Ego,'per se, can be an objectof regard, is Herr Horwicz, in his extremely able and acutePsychologische Analysen. He too says that all self-regardis regard for certain objective things. He disposes so well[Pg 326]of one kind of objection that I must conclude by quoting apart of his own words:
First, the objection:
"The fact is indubitable that one's own children always pass forthe prettiest and brightest, the wine from one's own cellar for the best—atleast for its price,—one's own house and horses for the finest.With what tender admiration do we con over our own little deed ofbenevolence! our own frailties and misdemeanors, how ready we are toacquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on the ground of'extenuating circumstances'! How much more really comic are ourown jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will not bear beingrepeated ten or twelve times over! How eloquent, striking, powerful,our own speeches are! How appropriate our own address! In short,how much more intelligent, soulful, better, is everything about us thanin anyone else. The sad chapter of artists' and authors' conceit andvanity belongs here.
"The prevalence of this obvious preference which we feel for everythingof our own is indeed striking. Does it not look as if our dear Egomust first lend its color and flavor to anything in order to make it pleaseus?... Is it not the simplest explanation for all these phenomena, soconsistent among themselves, to suppose that the Ego, the self, whichforms the origin and centre of ourthinking life, is at the same time theoriginal and central object of our life of feeling, and the ground bothof whatever special ideas and of whatever special feelings ensue?"
Herr Horwicz goes on to refer to what we have alreadynoticed, that various things which disgust us in others donot disgust us at all in ourselves.
"To most of us even the bodily warmth of another, for example thechair warm from another's sitting, is felt unpleasantly, whereas thereis nothing disagreeable in the warmth of the chair in which we havebeen sitting ourselves."
After some further remarks, he replies to these factsand reasonings as follows;
"We may with confidence affirm that our own possessions in mostcases please us better [not because they are ours], but simply because weknow them better, 'realize' them more intimately, feel them moredeeply. We learn to appreciate what is ours in all its details and shadings,whilst the goods of others appear to us in coarse outlines and rudeaverages. Here are some examples: A piece of music which one playsone's self is heard and understood better than when it is played by another.We get more exactly all the details, penetrate more deeply intothe musical thought. We may meanwhile perceive perfectly well thatthe other person is the better performer, and yet nevertheless—at times—getmore enjoyment from our own playing because it brings the[Pg 327]melody and harmony so much nearer home to us. This case may almostbe taken as typical for the other cases of self-love. On close examination,we shall almost always find that a great part of our feeling aboutwhat is ours is due to the fact that welive closer to our own things, andso feel them more thoroughly and deeply. As a friend of mine wasabout to marry, he often bored me by the repeated and minute way inwhich he would discuss the details of his new household arrangements.I wondered that so intellectual a man should be so deeply interested inthings of so external a nature. But as I entered, a few years later, thesame condition myself, these matters acquired for me an entirely differentinterest, and it became my turn to turn them over and talk of themunceasingly.... The reason was simply this, that in the first instanceIunderstood nothing of these things and their importance for domesticcomfort, whilst in the latter ease they came home to me with irresistibleurgency, and vividly took possession of my fancy. So it is with manya one who mocks at decorations and titles, until he gains one himself.And this is also surely the reason why one's own portrait or reflection inthe mirror is so peculiarly interesting a thing to contemplate ... not onaccount of any absolute 'c'est moi,' but just as with the music playedby ourselves. What greets our eyes is what we know best, most deeplyunderstand; because we ourselves have felt it and lived through it. Weknow what has ploughed these furrows, deepened these shadows,blanched this hair; and other faces may be handsomer, but none canspeak to us or interest us like this."[270]
Moreover, this author goes on to show that our ownthings arefuller for us than those of others because of thememories they awaken and the practical hopes and expectationsthey arouse. This alone would emphasize them, apartfrom any value derived from their belonging to ourselves.We may conclude with him, then, thatan original centralself-feeling can never explain the passionate warmth of our self-regardingemotions, which must, on the contrary, be addresseddirectly to special things less abstract and empty of content. Tothese things the name of 'self' may be given, or to our conducttowards them the name of 'selfishness,' but neither in the selfnor the selfishness does the pure Thinker play the 'title-role.'
Only one more point connected with our self-regard needbe mentioned. We have spoken of it so far as active instinctor emotion. It remains to speak of it as coldintellectualself-estimation. We may weigh our own Me in the[Pg 328]balance of praise and blame as easily as we weigh otherpeople,—though with difficulty quite as fairly. Thejustman is the one who can weigh himself impartially. Impartialweighing presupposes a rare faculty of abstraction fromthe vividness with which, as Herr Horwicz has pointed out,things known as intimately as our own possessions andperformances appeal to our imagination; and an equallyrare power of vividly representing the affairs of others. But,granting these rare powers, there is no reason why a manshould not pass judgment on himself quite as objectivelyand well as on anyone else. No matter how hefeels abouthimself, unduly elated or unduly depressed, he may stilltrulyknow his own worth by measuring it by the outwardstandard he applies to other men, and counteract the injusticeof the feeling he cannot wholly escape. This self-measuringprocess has nothing to do with the instinctiveself-regard we have hitherto been dealing with. Beingmerely one application of intellectual comparison, it needno longer detain us here. Please note again, however, howthe pure Ego appears merely as the vehicle in which theestimation is carried on, the objects estimated being all ofthem facts of an empirical sort,[271] one's body, one's credit,[Pg 329]one' fame, one's intellectual ability, one's goodness, orwhatever the case may be.
The empirical life of Self is divided, as below, into
| MATERIAL. | SOCIAL. | SPIRITUAL. | |
| SELF-SEEKING. | Bodily Appetites and Instincts | Desire to please, be noticed, admired, etc. | Intellectual, Moral and Religious Aspiration, Conscientiousness. |
| Love of Adornment, Foppery, Acquisitiveness, Constructiveness. | Sociability, Emulation, Envy, Love, Pursuit of Honor, Ambition, etc. | ||
| Love of Home, etc. | |||
| SELF-ESTIMATION. | Personal Vanity, Modesty, etc. | Social and Family Pride, Vainglory, Snobbery, Humility, Shame, etc. | Sense of Moral or Mental Superiority, Purity, etc. |
| Pride of Wealth, Fear of Poverty | Sense of Inferiority or of Guilt | ||
Having summed up in the above table the principalresults of the chapter thus far, I have said all that need[Pg 330]be said of the constituents of the phenomenal self, andof the nature of self-regard. Our decks are consequentlycleared for the struggle with that pure principle of personalidentity which has met us all along our preliminary exposition,but which we have always shied from and treated asa difficulty to be postponed. Ever since Hume's time, ithas been justly regarded as the most puzzling puzzle withwhich psychology has to deal; and whatever view one mayespouse, one has to hold his position against heavy odds.If, with the Spiritualists, one contend for a substantial soul,or transcendental principle of unity, one can give no positiveaccount of what that may be. And if, with the Humians,one deny such a principle and say that the stream of passingthoughts is all, one runs against the entire common-senseof mankind, of which the belief in a distinct principleof selfhood seems an integral part. Whatever solution beadopted in the pages to come, we may as well make up ourminds in advance that it will fail to satisfy the majority ofthose to whom it is addressed. The best way of approachingthe matter will be to take up first—
In the last chapter it was stated in as radical a way aspossible that the thoughts which we actually know to existdo not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one[Pg 331]thinker and not to another. Each thought, out of a multitudeof other thoughts of which it may think, is able todistinguish those which belong to its own Ego from thosewhich do not. The former have a warmth and intimacyabout them of which the latter are completely devoid, beingmerely conceived, in a cold and foreign fashion, and notappearing as blood-relatives, bringing their greetings to usfrom out of the past.
Now this consciousness of personal sameness may betreated either as a subjective phenomenon or as an objectivedeliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. We may explainhow one bit of thought can come to judge other bitsto belong to the same Ego with itself; or we may criticiseits judgment and decide how far it may tally with thenature of things.
As a mere subjective phenomenon the judgment presentsno difficulty or mystery peculiar to itself. It belongs tothe great class of judgments of sameness; and there isnothing more remarkable in making a judgment of samenessin the first person than in the second or the third.The intellectual operations seem essentially alike, whetherI say 'I am the same,' or whether I say 'the pen is thesame, as yesterday.' It is as easy to think this as to thinkthe opposite and say 'neither I nor the pen is the same.'
This sort ofbringing of things together into the object of asingle judgment is of course essential to all thinking. Thethings are conjoinedin the thought, whatever may be therelation in which they appear to the thought. The thinkingthem isthinking them together, even if only with the resultof judging that they do notbelong together. This sort ofsubjective synthesis, essential to knowledge as such (wheneverit has a complex object), must not be confounded withobjective synthesis or union instead of difference or disconnection,known among the things.[272] The subjective synthesis[Pg 332]thesis is involved in thought's mere existence. Even areally disconnected world could only beknown to be suchby having its parts temporarily united in the Object of somepulse of consciousness.[273]
The sense of personal identity is not, then, this meresynthetic form essential to all thought. It is the sense of asameness perceivedby thought and predicated of thingsthought-about. These things are a present self and a selfof yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, butthinks that they are identical. The psychologist, looking onand playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, andshow there was no real identity,—there might have been noyesterday, or, at any rate, no self of yesterday; or, if therewere, the sameness predicated might not obtain, or mightbe predicated on insufficient grounds. In either case thepersonal identity would not exist as afact; but it wouldexist as afeeling all the same; the consciousness of it bythe thought would be there, and the psychologist wouldstill have to analyze that, and show where its illusorinesslay. Let us now be the psychologist and see whether it beright or wrong when it says,I am the same self that I wasyesterday.
We may immediately call it right and intelligible so faras it posits a past time with past thoughts or selves containedtherein—these were data which we assumed at theoutset of the book. Right also and intelligible so far as itthinks of a present self—that present self we have juststudied in its various forms. The only question for us isas to what the consciousness may mean when it calls the[Pg 333]present self thesame with one of the past selves which ithas in mind.
We spoke a moment since of warmth and intimacy.This leads us to the answer sought. For, whatever thethought we are criticising may think about its present self,that self comes to its acquaintance, or is actually felt, withwarmth and intimacy. Of course this is the case with thebodily part of it; we feel the whole cubic mass of our bodyall the while, it gives us an unceasing sense of personalexistence. Equally do we feel the inner 'nucleus of thespiritual self,' either in the shape of yon faint physiologicaladjustments, or (adopting the universal psychological belief),in that of the pure activity of our thought takingplace as such. Our remoter spiritual, material, and socialselves, so far as they are realized, come also with a glowand a warmth; for the thought of them infallibly bringssome degree of organic emotion in the shape of quickenedheart-beats, oppressed breathing, or some other alteration,even though it be a slight one, in the general bodily tone.The character of 'warmth,' then, in the present self, reducesitself to either of two things,—something in the feelingwhich we have of the thought itself, as thinking, or elsethe feeling of the body's actual existence at the moment,—orfinally to both. We cannot realize our present self withoutsimultaneously feeling one or other of these two things.Any other fact which brings these two things with it intoconsciousness will be thought with a warmth and an intimacylike those which cling to the present self.
Anydistant self which fulfils this condition will bethought with such warmth and intimacy. But whichdistant selvesdo fulfil the condition, when represented?
Obviously those, and only those, which fulfilled it whenthey were alive.Them we shall imagine with the animalwarmth upon them, to them may possibly cling the aroma,the echo of the thinking taken in the act. And by a naturalconsequence, we shall assimilate them to each other andto the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as wethink, and separate them as a collection from whateverselves have not this mark, much as out of a herd of cattlelet loose for the winter on some wide western prairie the[Pg 334]owner picks out and sorts together when the time for theround-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which hefinds his own particular brand.
The various members of the collection thus set apartare felt to belong with each other whenever they arethought at all. The animal warmth, etc., is their herd-mark,the brand from which they can never more escape. Itruns through them all like a thread through a chaplet andmakes them into a whole, which we treat as a unit, nomatter how much in other ways the parts may differinterse. Add to this character the farther one that the distantselves appear to our thought as having for hours of timebeencontinuous with each other, and the most recent onesof them continuous with the Self of the present moment,melting into it by slow degrees; and we get a still strongerbond of union. As we think we see an identical bodilything when, in spite of changes of structure, it exists continuouslybefore our eyes, or when, however interrupted itspresence, its quality returns unchanged; so here we thinkwe experience an identicalSelf when it appears to us in ananalogous way. Continuity makes us unite what dissimilaritymight otherwise separate; similarity makes us unitewhat discontinuity might hold apart. And thus it is,finally, that Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul,and recalling what both had in mind before they went tosleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his,and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold andpale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul. As wellmight he confound Paul's body, which he only sees, withhis own body, which he sees but also feels. Each of uswhen he awakens says, Here's the same old self again, justas he says, Here's the same old bed, the same old room, thecame old world.
The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly likeany one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena.It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a fundamentalrespect; or on the continuity before the mind, of the phenomenacompared.
And it must not be taken to mean more than thesegrounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or[Pg 335]absolute Unity in which all differences are overwhelmed.The past and present selves compared are the same just sofar as theyare the same, and no farther. A uniform feelingof 'warmth,' of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feelingof pure psychic energy?) pervades them all; and this iswhat gives them ageneric unity, and makes them the sameinkind. But this generic unity coexists with generic differencesjust as real as the unity. And if from the one pointof view they are one self, from others they are as trulynot one but many selves. And similarly of the attribute ofcontinuity; it gives its own kind of unity to the self—thatof mere connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definitephenomenal thing—but it gives not a jot or tittle more.And this unbrokenness in the stream of selves, like theunbrokenness in an exhibition of 'dissolving views,' in nowise implies any farther unity or contradicts any amountof plurality in other respects.
And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance andthe continuity are no longer felt, the sense of personal identitygoes too. We hear from our parents various anecdotesabout our infant years, but we do not appropriate them aswe do our own memories. Those breaches of decorumawaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency.That child is a foreign creature with which our presentself is no more identified in feeling than it is with somestranger's living child to-day. Why? Partly becausegreat time-gaps break up all these early years—we cannotascend to them by continuous memories; and partly becauseno representation of how the childfelt comes up withthe stories. We know what he said and did; but no sentimentof his little body, of his emotions, of his psychic strivingsas they felt to him, comes up to contribute an elementof warmth and intimacy to the narrative we hear, and themain bond of union with our present self thus disappears.It is the same with certain of our dimly-recollected experiences.We hardly know whether to appropriate them orto disown them as fancies, or things read or heard and notlived through. Their animal heat has evaporated; the feelingsthat accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or[Pg 336]so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment ofidentity can be decisively cast.
Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings(especially bodily feelings) experienced along with thingswidely different in all other regards,thus constitutes the realand verifiable 'personal identity' which we feel. There isno other identity than this in the 'stream' of subjectiveconsciousness which we described in the last chapter. Itsparts differ, but under all their differences they are knitin these two ways; and if either way of knitting disappears,the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fineday unable to recall any of his past experiences, so thathe has to learn his biography afresh, or if he only recallsthe facts of it in a cold abstract way as things that he is sureonce happened; or if, without this loss of memory, hisbodily and spiritual habits all change during the night, eachorgan giving a different tone, and the act of thought becomingaware of itself in a different way; hefeels, and hesays,that he is a changed person. He disowns his former me,gives himself a new name, identifies his present life withnothing from out of the older time. Such cases are notrare in mental pathology; but, as we still have some reasoningto do, we had better give no concrete account ofthem until the end of the chapter.
This description of personal identity will be recognizedby the instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine professedby the empirical school. Associationists in England andFrance, Herbartians in Germany, all describe the Self asan aggregate of which each part, as to itsbeing, is a separatefact. So far so good, then; thus much is true whateverfarther things may be true; and it is to the imperishableglory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to havetaken so much of the meaning of personal identity out ofthe clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifiablething.
But in leaving the matter here, and saying that this sumof passing things is all, these writers have neglected certainmore subtle aspects of the Unity of Consciousness, to whichwe next must turn.
Our recent simile of the herd of cattle will help us. Itwill be remembered that the beasts were brought togetherinto one herd because their owner found on each of themhis brand. The 'owner' symbolizes here that 'section' ofconsciousness, or pulse of thought, which we have all alongrepresented as the vehicle of the judgment of identity; andthe 'brand' symbolizes the characters of warmth and continuity,by reason of which the judgment is made. Thereis found aself-brand, just as there is found a herd-brand.Each brand, so far, is the mark, or cause of our knowing,that certain things belong-together. But if the brandis theratio cognoscendi of the belonging, the belonging,in the case of the herd, is in turn theratio existendi ofthe brand. No beast would be so branded unless he belongedto the owner of the herd. They are not his becausethey are branded; they are branded because they are his.So that it seems as if our description of the belonging-togetherof the various selves, as a belonging-together whichis merelyrepresented, in a later pulse of thought, hadknocked the bottom out of the matter, and omitted themost characteristic one of all the features found in the herd—afeature which common-sense finds in the phenomenonof personal identity as well, and for our omission of whichshe will hold us to a strict account. For common-senseinsists that the unity of all the selves is not a mere appearanceof similarity or continuity, ascertained after thefact. She is sure that it involves a real belonging to a realOwner, to a pure spiritual entity of some kind. Relationto this entity is what makes the self's constituents stick togetheras they do for thought. The individual beasts donot stick together, for all that they wear the same brand.Each wanders with whatever accidental mates it finds. Theherd's unity is only potential, its centre ideal, like the'centre of gravity' in physics, until the herdsman or ownercomes. He furnishes a real centre of accretion to whichthe beasts are driven and by which they are held. Thebeasts stick together by sticking severally to him. Just so,common-sense insists, there must be a real proprietor inthe case of the selves, or else their actual accretion into a'personal consciousness' would never have taken place.[Pg 338]To the usual empiricist explanation of personal consciousnessthis is a formidable reproof, because all the individualthoughts and feelings which have succeeded each other 'upto date' are represented by ordinary Associationism as insome inscrutable way 'integrating' or gumming themselvestogether on their own account, and thus fusing into a stream.All the incomprehensibilities which inChapter VI we sawto attach to the idea of things fusing without amediumapply to the empiricist description of personal identity.
But in our own account the medium is fully assigned,the herdsman is there, in the shape of something not amongthe things collected, but superior to them all, namely, thereal, present onlooking, remembering, 'judging thought'or identifying 'section' of the stream. This is what collects,—'owns'some of the past facts which it surveys, anddisowns the rest,—and so makes a unity that is actualizedand anchored and does not merely float in the blue air ofpossibility. And the reality of such pulses of thought, withtheir function of knowing, it will be remembered that wedid not seek to deduce or explain, but simply assumed themas the ultimate kind of fact that the psychologist must admitto exist.
But this assumption, though it yields much, still doesnot yield all that common-sense demands. The unity intowhich the Thought—as I shall for a time proceed to call,with a capital T, the present mental state—binds the individualpast facts with each other and with itself, does notexist until the Thought is there. It is as if wild cattle werelassoed by a newly-created settler and then owned for thefirst time. But the essence of the matter to common-senseis that the past thoughts never were wild cattle, they werealways owned. The Thought does not capture them, butas soon as it comes into existence it finds them already itsown. How is this possible unless the Thought have asubstantial identity with a former owner,—not a mere continuityor a resemblance, as in our account, but areal unity?Common-sense in fact would drive us to admit what wemay for the moment call an Arch-Ego, dominating the entirestream of thought and all the selves that may berepresented in it, as the ever self-same and changeless[Pg 339]principle implied in their union. The 'Soul' of Metaphysicsand the 'Transcendental Ego' of the KantianPhilosophy, are, as we shall soon see, but attempts to satisfythis urgent demand of common-sense. But, for a timeat least, we can still express without any such hypothesesthat appearance of never-lapsing ownership for which common-sensecontends.
For how would it be if the Thought, the present judgingThought, instead of being in any way substantially ortranscendentally identical with the former owner of thepast self, merely inherited his 'title,' and thus stood ashis legal representative now? It would then, if its birthcoincided exactly with the death of another owner,findthe past self already its own as soon as it found it at all,and the past self would thus never be wild, but alwaysowned, by a title that never lapsed. We can imagine along succession of herdsmen coming rapidly into possessionof the same cattle by transmission of an original title bybequest. May not the 'title' of a collective self be passedfrom one Thought to another in some analogous way?
It is a patent fact of consciousness that a transmissionlike this actually occurs. Each pulse of cognitive consciousness,each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another.The other, among the things it knows, knows its own predecessor,and finding it 'warm,' in the way we have described,greets it, saying: "Thou artmine, and part of thesame self with me." Each later Thought, knowing and includingthus the Thoughts which went before, is the finalreceptacle—and appropriating them is the final owner—ofall that they contain and own. Each Thought is thusborn an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever itrealized as its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kantsays, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motionbut knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit bothits motion and its consciousness to a second, which tookboth up intoits consciousness and passed them to a third,until the last ball held all that the other balls had held,and realized it as its own. It is this trick which the nascentthought has of immediately taking up the expiringthought and 'adopting' it, which is the foundation of the[Pg 340]appropriation of most of the remoter constituents of theself. Who owns the last self owns the self before the last,for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed.
It is impossible to discover anyverifiable features inpersonal identity, which this sketch does not contain, impossibleto imagine how any transcendent non-phenomenalsort of an Arch-Ego, were he there, could shape matters toany other result, or be known in time by any other fruit,than just this production of a stream of consciousness each'section' of which should know, and knowing, hug toitself and adopt, all those that went before,—thus standingas therepresentative of the entire past stream; and whichshould similarly adopt the objects already adopted byany portion of this spiritual stream. Such standing-as-representative,and such adopting, are perfectly clear phenomenalrelations. The Thought which, whilst it knowsanother Thought and the Object of that Other, appropriatesthe Other and the Object which the Other appropriated,is still a perfectly distinct phenomenon from thatOther; it may hardly resemble it; it may be far removedfrom it in space and time.
The only point that is obscure is theact of appropriationitself. Already in enumerating the constituents of theself and their rivalry, I had to use the word appropriate.And the quick-witted reader probably noticed at the time,in hearing how one constituent was let drop and disownedand another one held fast to and espoused, that the phrasewas meaningless unless the constituents were objects in thehands of something else. A thing cannot appropriate itself;itis itself; and still less can it disown itself. There mustbe an agent of the appropriating and disowning; but thatagent we have already named. It is the Thought to whomthe various 'constituents' are known. That Thought is avehicle of choice as well as of cognition; and among thechoices it makes are these appropriations, or repudiations,of its 'own.' But the Thought never is an object in its ownhands, it never appropriates or disowns itself. It appropriatesto itself, it is the actual focus of accretion, the hookfrom which the chain of past selves dangles, planted firmly[Pg 341]in the Present, which alone passes for real, and thus keepingthe chain from being a purely ideal thing. Anon thehook itself will drop into the past with all it carries, andthen be treated as an object and appropriated by a newThought in the new present which will serve as livinghook in turn. The present moment of consciousness isthus, as Mr. Hodgson says, the darkest in the whole series.It may feel its own immediate existence—we have all alongadmitted the possibility of this, hard as it is by direct introspectionto ascertain the fact—but nothing can be knownabout it till it be dead and gone. Its appropriations aretherefore less toitself than to the most intimately feltpartof its present Object, the body, and the central adjustments,which accompany the act of thinking, in the head.Theseare the real nucleus of our personal identity, and it is theiractual existence, realized as a solid present fact, whichmakes us say 'as sureas I exist, those past facts were partof myself.' They are the kernel to which therepresentedparts of the Self are assimilated, accreted, and knit on;and even were Thought entirely unconscious of itself inthe act of thinking, these 'warm' parts of its presentobject would be a firm basis on which the consciousnessof personal identity would rest.[274] Such consciousness, then,[Pg 342]as a psychologic fact, can be fully described without supposingany other agent than a succession of perishingthoughts, endowed with the functions of appropriation andrejection, and of which some can know and appropriate orreject objects already known, appropriated, or rejected bythe rest.
To illustrate by diagram, let A, B, and C stand for threesuccessive thoughts, each with its object inside of it. If B'sobject be A, and C's object be B; then A, B, and C wouldstand for three pulses in a consciousness of personal identity.Each pulse wouldbe something different from theothers; but B would know and adopt A, and C wouldknow and adopt A and B. Three successive states of thesame brain, on which each experience in passing leaves itsmark, might very well engender thoughts differing fromeach other in just such a way as this.
The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker;and though theremay be another non-phenomenal Thinkerbehind that, so far we do not seem to need him to expressthe facts. But we cannot definitively make up our mindabout him until we have heard the reasons that have historicallybeen used to prove his reality.
To a brief survey of the theories of the Ego let us thennext proceed. They are three in number, as follows:
1) The Spiritualist theory;
2) The Associationist theory;
3) The Transcendentalist theory.
InChapter VI we were led ourselves to the spiritualisttheory of the 'Soul,' as a means of escape from the unintelligibilitiesof mind-stuff 'integrating' with itself, and from[Pg 343]the physiological improbability of a material monad, withthought attached to it, in the brain. But at the end of thechapter we said we should examine the 'Soul' critically ina later place, to see whether it had any other advantagesas a theory over the simple phenomenal notion of a streamof thought accompanying a stream of cerebral activity, bya law yet unexplained.
The theory of the Soul is the theory of popular philosophyand of scholasticism, which is only popular philosophymade systematic. It declares that the principle of individualitywithin us must besubstantial, for psychic phenomenaare activities, and there can be no activity without a concreteagent. This substantial agent cannot be the brain butmust be somethingimmaterial; for its activity, thought, isboth immaterial, and takes cognizance of immaterial things,and of material things in general and intelligible, as well asin particular and sensible ways,—all which powers are incompatiblewith the nature of matter, of which the brainis composed. Thought moreover is simple, whilst the activitiesof the brain are compounded of the elementary activitiesof each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneousor free, whilst all material activity is determinedab extra; and the will can turn itself against all corporealgoods and appetites, which would be impossible were it acorporeal function. For these objective reasons the principleof psychic life must be both immaterial and simple aswell as substantial, must be what is calleda Soul. Thesame consequence follows from subjective reasons. Ourconsciousness of personal identity assures us of our essentialsimplicity: the owner of the various constituents of theself, as we have seen them, the hypothetical Arch-Egowhom we provisionally conceived as possible, is a real entityof whose existence self-consciousness makes us directlyaware. No material agent could thus turn round and graspitself—material activities always grasp something else thanthe agent. And if a braincould grasp itself and be self-conscious,it would be conscious of itselfas a brain andnot as something of an altogether different kind. The Soulthen exists as a simple spiritual substance in which thevarious psychic faculties, operations, and affections inhere.
If we ask what a Substance is, the only answer is thatit is a self-existent being, or one which needs no other subjectin which to inhere. At bottom its only positive determinationis Being, and this is something whose meaningwe all realize even though we find it hard to explain. TheSoul is moreover anindividual being, and if we ask whatthat is, we are told to look in upon our Self, and we shalllearn by direct intuition better than through any abstractreply. Our direct perception of our own inward being isin fact by many deemed to be the original prototype outof which our notion of simple active substance in general isfashioned. Theconsequences of the simplicity and substantialityof the Soul are its incorruptibility and naturalimmortality—nothingbut God's directfiat can annihilate it—anditsresponsibility at all times for whatever it may haveever done.
This substantialist view of the soul was essentially theview of Plato and of Aristotle. It received its completelyformal elaboration in the middle ages. It was believed inby Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Wolf, Berkeley, andis now defended by the entire modern dualistic or spiritualisticor common-sense school. Kant held to it whiledenying its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing consequencesverifiable here below. Kant's successors, the absoluteidealists, profess to have discarded it,—how that maybe we shall inquire ere long. Let us make up our mindswhat to think of it ourselves.
It is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjectivephenomena of consciousness as they appear. Wehave formulated them all without its aid, by the suppositionof a stream of thoughts, each substantially differentfrom the rest, but cognitive of the rest and 'appropriative'of each other's content. At least, if I have not alreadysucceeded in making this plausible to the reader, I amhopeless of convincing him by anything I could add now.The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immaterialitythat appear in the psychic life are thus accounted foras phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with noneed of reference to any more simple or substantial agentthan the present Thought or 'section' of the stream. We[Pg 345]have seen it to be single and unique in the sense of havingnoseparable parts (above,p. 239 ff.)—perhaps that is the onlykind of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. Thepresent Thought also has being,—at least all believers inthe Soul believe so—and if there be no other Being inwhich it 'inheres,' it ought itself to be a 'substance.' Ifthis kind of simplicity and substantiality were all that ispredicated of the Soul, then it might appear that we hadbeen talking of the soul all along, without knowing it, whenwe treated the present Thought as an agent, an owner, andthe like. But the Thought is a perishing and not an immortalor incorruptible thing. Its successors may continuouslysucceed to it, resemble it, and appropriate it, buttheyare not it, whereas the Soul-Substance is supposed tobe a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meantsomethingbehind the present Thought, another kind ofsubstance, existing on a non-phenomenal plane.
When we brought in the Soul at the end ofChapter VI,as an entity which the various brain-processes were supposedto affect simultaneously, and which responded totheir combined influence by single pulses of its thought, itwas to escape integrated mind-stuff on the one hand, andan improbable cerebral monad on the other. But when(as now, after all we have been through since that earlierpassage) we take the two formulations, first of a brain towhose processes pulses of thoughtsimply correspond, andsecond, of one to whose processes pulses of thoughtin aSoul correspond, and compare them together, we see that atbottom the second formulation is only a more roundaboutway than the first, of expressing the same bald fact.That bald fact is thatwhen the brain acts, a thought occurs.The spiritualistic formulation says that the brain-processesknock the thought, so to speak, out of a Soul which standsthere to receive their influence. The simpler formulationsays that the thought simplycomes. But what positivemeaning has the Soul, when scrutinized, but theground ofpossibility of the thought? And what is the 'knocking' butthedetermining of the possibility to actuality? And what is thisafter all but giving a sort of concreted form to one's beliefthat the coming of the thought, when the brain-processes[Pg 346]occur, hassome sort of ground in the nature of things? Ifthe world Soul be understood merely to express that claim,it is a good word to use. But if it be held to do more,to gratify the claim,—for instance, to connect rationally thethought which comes, with the processes which occur, andto mediate intelligibly between their two disparate natures,—thenit is an illusory term. It is, in fact, with the wordSoul as with the word Substance in general. To say thatphenomena inhere in a Substance is at bottom only torecord one's protest against the notion that the bare existenceof the phenomena is the total truth. A phenomenonwould not itself be, we insist, unless there were somethingmore than the phenomenon. To the more we give the provisionalname of Substance. So, in the present instance,we ought certainly to admit that there is more than thebare fact of coexistence of a passing thought with apassing brain-state. But we do not answer the question'What is that more?' when we say that it is a 'Soul'which the brain-state affects. This kind of moreexplainsnothing; and when we are once trying metaphysical explanationswe are foolish not to go as far as we can. For myown part I confess that the moment I become metaphysicaland try to define the more, I find the notion of some sort ofananima mundi thinking in all of us to be a more promisinghypothesis, in spite of all its difficulties, than that of alot of absolutely individual souls. Meanwhile, aspsychologists,we need not be metaphysical at all. The phenomenaare enough, the passing Thought itself is the onlyverifiablethinker, and its empirical connection with the brain-processis the ultimate known law.
To the other arguments which would prove the need ofa soul, we may also turn a deaf ear. The argument fromfree-will can convince only those who believe in free-will;and even they will have to admit that spontaneity is just aspossible, to say the least, in a temporary spiritual agentlike our 'Thought' as in a permanent one like the supposedSoul. The same is true of the argument from the kinds ofthings cognized. Even if the brain could not cognize universal,immaterials, or its 'Self,' still the 'Thought' whichwe have relied upon in our accountis not the brain, closely[Pg 347]as it seems connected with it; and after all, if the brain couldcognize at all, one does not well see why it might not cognizeone sort of thing as well as another. The great difficultyis in seeing how a thing can cognizeanything. Thisdifficulty is not in the least removed by giving to the thingthat cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists do notdeduce any of the properties of the mental life fromotherwise known properties of the soul. They simply findvarious characters ready-made in the mental life, andthese they clap into the Soul, saying, "Lo! behold thesource from whence they flow!" The merely verbal characterof this 'explanation' is obvious. The Soul invoked, farfrom making the phenomena more intelligible, can only bemade intelligible itself by borrowing their form,—it mustbe represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of consciousnessduplicating the one we know.
Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizingwhose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson,is: "Whatever you aretotally ignorant of, assert to be theexplanation of everything else."
Locke and Kant, whilst still believing in the soul, beganthe work of undermining the notion that we know anythingabout it. Most modern writers of the mitigated spiritualistic,or dualistic philosophy—the Scotch school, as it isoften called among us—are forward to proclaim this ignorance,and to attend exclusively to the verifiable phenomenaof self-consciousness, as we have laid them down. Dr.Wayland, for example, begins his Elements of IntellectualPhilosophy with the phrase "Of the essence of Mind weknow nothing," and goes on: "All that we are able to affirmof it is that it issomething which perceives, reflects, remembers,imagines, and wills; but what that somethingiswhich exerts these energies we know not. It is only as weare conscious of the action of these energies that we areconscious of the existence of mind. It is only by the exertionof its own powers that the mind becomes cognizant oftheir existence. The cognizance of its powers, however,gives us no knowledge of that essence of which they arepredicated. In these respects our knowledge of mind is[Pg 348]precisely analogous to our knowledge of matter." Thisanalogy of our two ignorances is a favorite remark in theScotch school. It is but a step to lump them togetherinto a single ignorance, that of the 'Unknowable' to whichany one fond of superfluities in philosophy may accord thehospitality of his belief, if it so please him, but which anyone else may as freely ignore and reject.
The Soul-theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so faras accounting for the actually verified facts of consciousexperience goes. So far, no one can be compelled to subscribeto it for definite scientific reasons. The case wouldrest here, and the reader be left free to make his choice,were it not for other demands of a more practical kind.
The first of these isImmortality, for which the simplicityand substantiality of the Soul seem to offer a solidguarantee. A 'stream' of thought, for aught that we seeto be contained in its essence, may come to a full stop atany moment; but a simple substance is incorruptible, andwill, by its own inertia, persist in Being so long as the Creatordoes not by a direct miracle snuff it out. Unquestionablythis is the stronghold of the spiritualistic belief,—asindeed the popular touchstone for all philosophies is thequestion, "What is their bearing on a future life?"
The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guaranteesno immortality of a sortwe care for. The enjoyment of theatom-like simplicity of their substancein sæcula sæculorumwould not to most people seem a consummation devoutlyto be wished. The substance must give rise to a stream ofconsciousness continuous with the present stream, in orderto arouse our hope, but of this the mere persistence of thesubstanceper se offers no guarantee. Moreover, in thegeneral advance of our moral ideas, there has come to besomething ridiculous in the way our forefathers had ofgrounding their hopes of immortality on the simplicity oftheir substance. The demand for immortality is nowadaysessentially teleological. We believe ourselves immortalbecause we believe ourselvesfit for immortality. A 'substance'ought surely to perish, we think, if not worthyto survive; and an insubstantial 'stream' to prolong itself,provided it be worthy, if the nature of Things is organized[Pg 349]in the rational way in which we trust it is. Substance orno substance, soul or 'stream,' what Lotze says of immortalityis about all that human wisdom can say:
"We have no other principle for deciding it than this general idealisticbelief: that every created thing will continue whose continuancebelongs to the meaning of the world, and so long as it does so belong;whilst every one will pass away whose reality is justified only in a transitoryphase of the world's course. That this principle admits of nofurther application in human hands need hardly be said.We surelyknow not the merits which may give to one being a claim on eternity,nor the defects which would cut others off."[275]
A second alleged necessity for a soul-substance is ourforensic responsibility before God. Locke caused an uproarwhen he said that the unity ofconsciousness made aman the sameperson, whether supported by the samesubstanceor no, and that God would not, in the great day,make a person answer for what he remembered nothing of.It was supposed scandalous that our forgetfulness mightthus deprive God of the chance of certain retributions,which otherwise would have enhanced his 'glory.' This iscertainly a good speculative ground for retaining the Soul—atleast for those who demand a plenitude of retribution.The mere stream of consciousness, with its lapses of memory,cannot possibly be as 'responsible' as a soul whichisat the judgment day all that it ever was. To modern readers,however, who are less insatiate for retribution thantheir grandfathers, this argument will hardly be as convincingas it seems once to have been.
One great use of the Soul has always been to accountfor, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individualityof each personal consciousness. The thoughts of onesoul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must beeternally insulated from those of every other soul. But wehave already begun to see that, although unity is the rule ofeach man's consciousness, yet in some individuals, at least,thoughts may split away from the others and form separate[Pg 350]selves. As for insulation, it would be rash, in view ofthe phenomena of thought-transference, mesmeric influenceand spirit-control, which are being alleged nowadays onbetter authority than ever before, to be too sure aboutthat point either. The definitively closed nature of ourpersonal consciousness is probably an average statisticalresultant of many conditions, but not an elementary forceor fact; so that, if one wishes to preserve the Soul, the lesshe draws his arguments fromthat quarter the better. Solong as our self, on the whole, makes itself good and practicallymaintains itself as a closed individual, why, as Lotzesays, is not that enough? And why is thebeing-an-individualin some inaccessible metaphysical way so much prouderan achievement?[276]
My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul isthat it explains nothing and guarantees nothing. Its successivethoughts are the only intelligible and verifiablethings about it, and definitely to ascertain the correlationsof these with brain-processes is as much as psychology canempirically do. From the metaphysical point of view, it istrue that one may claim that the correlations have a rationalground; and if the word Soul could be taken to meanmerely some such vague problematic ground, it would beunobjectionable. But the trouble is that it professes togive the ground in positive terms of a very dubiously crediblesort. I therefore feel entirely free to discard the wordSoul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will bein the vaguest and most popular way. The reader whofinds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, perfectlyfree to continue to believe in it; for our reasoningshave not established the non-existence of the Soul; theyhave only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes.
The next theory of the pure Self to which we pass is
Locke paved the way for it by the hypothesis he suggestedof the same substance having two successive consciousnesses,[Pg 351]or of the same consciousness being supportedby more than one substance. He made his readers feelthat theimportant unity of the Self was its verifiable andfelt unity, and that a metaphysical or absolute unity wouldbe insignificant, so long as aconsciousness of diversity mightbe there.
Hume showed how great the consciousness of diversityactually was. In the famous chapter on Personal Identity,in his Treatise on Human Nature, he writes as follows:
"There are some philosophers who imagine we are every momentintimately conscious of what we call ourSelf; that we feel its existenceand its continuance in existence, and are certain, beyond the evidenceof a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity....Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that veryexperience which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of Self,after the manner it is here explained.... It must be some one impressionthat gives rise to every real idea.... If any impression givesrise to the idea of Self, that impression must continue invariablythe same through the whole course of our lives, since self is supposedto exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant andinvariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensationssucceed each other, and never all exist at the same time.... For mypart, when I enter most intimately into what I callmyself, I alwaysstumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light orshade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catchmyself atany time without a perception, and never can observe anything but theperception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as bysound sleep, so long am I insensible ofmyself and may truly be saidnot to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and couldI neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolutionof my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what isfarther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If anyone, uponserious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion ofhimself I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I canallow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we areessentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceivesomething simple and continued which he callshimself; though I amcertain there is no such principle in me.
"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may ventureto affirm of the rest of mankind that they arenothing but a bundle orcollection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with aninconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Oureyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Ourthought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other sensesand faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of[Pg 352]the soul which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one momentThe mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successivelymake their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinitevariety of postures and situations.There is properly no simplicityin it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propensionwe may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparisonof the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptionsonly, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distantnotion of the place where these scenes are represented, nor of the materialof which it is composed."
But Hume, after doing this good piece of introspectivework, proceeds to pour out the child with the bath, and tofly to as great an extreme as the substantialist philosophers.As they say the Self is nothing but Unity, unity abstract andabsolute, so Hume says it is nothing but Diversity, diversityabstract and absolute; whereas in truth it is that mixtureof unity and diversity which we ourselves have alreadyfound so easy to pick apart. We found among the objectsof the stream certain feelings that hardly changed, thatstood out warm and vivid in the past just as the presentfeeling does now; and we found the present feeling to bethe centre of accretion to which,de proche en proche, theseother feelings are,by the judging Thought, felt to cling. Humesays nothing of the judging Thought; and he denies thisthread of resemblance, this core of sameness runningthrough the ingredients of the Self, to exist even as a phenomenalthing. To him there is notertium quid betweenpure unity and pure separateness. A succession of ideas"connected by a close relation affords to an accurate viewas perfect a notion of diversity as if there wasno mannerof relation" at all.
"All our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and the mindnever perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Did ourperceptions either inhere in something simple or individual, ordid themind perceive some real connection among them, there would be nodifficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of asceptic and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding,I pretend not, however, to pronounce it insuperable. Others, perhaps,...may discover some hypothesis that will reconcile these contradictions."[277]
Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician asThomas Aquinas. No wonder he can discover no 'hypothesis.'The unity of the parts of the stream is just as 'real'a connection as their diversity is a real separation; bothconnection and separation are ways in which the pastthoughts appear to the present Thought;—unlike eachother in respect of date and certain qualities—this is theseparation; alike in other qualities, and continuous in time—thisis the connection. In demanding a more 'real' connectionthan this obvious and verifiable likeness and continuity,Hume seeks 'the world behind the looking glass,'and gives a striking example of that Absolutism which isthe great disease of philosophic Thought.
The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thuschopped up our 'stream' was adopted by all of his successorsas a complete inventory of the facts. The associationistPhilosophy was founded. Somehow, out of 'ideas,' eachseparate, each ignorant of its mates, but sticking togetherand calling each other up according to certain laws, all thehigher forms of consciousness were to be explained, andamong them the consciousness of our personal identity.The task was a hard one, in which what we called thepsychologist's fallacy (p. 196 ff.) bore the brunt of thework. Two ideas, one of 'A,' succeeded by another of 'B,'were transmuted into a third idea of 'B after A.' An ideafrom last year returning now was taken to be an ideaof lastyear; two similar ideas stood for anidea of similarity, andthe like; palpable confusions, in which certain factsaboutthe ideas, possible only to an outside knower of them, wereput into the place of the ideas' own proper and limited deliveranceand content. Out of such recurrences and resemblancesin a series of discrete ideas and feelings a knowledgewas somehow supposed to be engendered in eachfeeling that itwas recurrent and resembling, and that ithelped to form a series to whose unity the nameI came tobe joined. In the same way, substantially, Herbart,[278] in[Pg 354]Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would fuseinto amanner of representing itself for whichI was the consecratedname.[279]
The defect of all these attempts is that the conclusionpretended to follow from certain premises is by no meansrationally involved in the premises. A feeling of any kind,if it simplyreturns, ought to be nothing else than what itwas at first. If memory of previous existence and all sortsof other cognitive functions are attributed to it when it returns,it is no longer the same, but a widely different feeling,and ought to be so described.We have so describedit with the greatest explicitness. We have said that feelingsnever do return. We have not pretended toexplainthis; we have recorded it as an empirically ascertainedlaw, analogous to certain laws of brain-physiology; and,seeking to define the way in which new feelings do differfrom the old, we have found them to becognizant andappropriativeof the old, whereas the old were always cognizantand appropriative of something else. Once more, thisaccount pretended to be nothing more than a completedescription of the facts. It explained them no more thanthe associationist account explains them. But the latterboth assumes to explain them and in the same breath falsifiesthem, and for each reason stands condemned.
It is but just to say that the associationist writers as arule seem to have a lurking bad conscience about the Self;and that although they are explicit enough about what it is,namely, a train of feelings or thoughts, they are very shyabout openly tackling the problem of how it comes to beaware of itself. Neither Bain nor Spencer, for example,directly touch this problem. As a rule, associationistwriters keep talking about 'the mind' and about what 'we'do; and so, smuggling in surreptitiously what they oughtavowedly to have postulated in the form of a present'judging Thought,' they either trade upon their reader'slack of discernment or are undiscerning themselves.
Mr. D. G. Thompson is the only associationist writer Iknow who perfectly escapes this confusion, andpostulates[Pg 355]openly what he needs. "All states of consciousness," hesays, "imply and postulate a subject Ego, whose substanceis unknown and unknowable, to which [why not sayby which?] states of consciousness are referred as attributes,but which in the process of reference becomes objectifiedand becomes itself an attribute of a subject Egowhich lies still beyond, and which ever eludes cognitionthough ever postulated for cognition."[280] This is exactlyour judging and remembering present 'Thought,' describedin less simple terms.
After Mr. Thompson, M. Taine and the two Mills deservecredit for seeking to be as clear as they can. Taine tells usin the first volume of his 'Intelligence' what the Egois,—acontinuous web of conscious events no more really distinctfrom each other[281] than rhomboids, triangles, andsquares marked with chalk on a plank are really distinct,for the plank itself is one. In the second volume hesaysall these parts have a common character embedded in them,that of beinginternal [this is our character of 'warmness,'otherwise named]. This character is abstracted and isolatedby a mental fiction, and is what we areconscious of asour self—'this stablewithin is what each of us callsI orme.' Obviously M. Taine forgets to tell us what this 'eachof us' is, which suddenly starts up and performs the abstractionand 'calls' its product I or me. The characterdoes not abstractitself. Taine means by 'each of us'merely the present 'judging Thought' with its memory andtendency to appropriate, but he does not name it distinctlyenough, and lapses into the fiction that the entire series ofthoughts, the entire 'plank,' is the reflecting psychologist.
James Mill, after defining Memory as a train of associatedideas beginning with that of my past self and endingwith that of my present self, defines my Self as a train ofideas of which Memory declares the first to be continuouslyconnected with the last. The successive associated ideas[Pg 356]'run, as it were, into a single point of consciousness.[282]John Mill, annotating this account, says:
"The phenomenon of Self and that of Memory are merely two sidesof the same fact, or two different modes of viewing the same fact. Wemay, as psychologists, set out from either of them, and refer the otherto it.... But it is hardly allowable to do both. At least it mustbe said that by doing so we explain neither. We only show that thetwo things are essentially the same; that my memory of having ascendedSkiddaw on a given day, and my consciousness of being thesame person who ascended Skiddaw on that day, are two modes of statingthe same fact: a fact which psychology has as yet failed to resolveinto anything more elementary. In analyzing the complex phenomenaof consciousness, we must come to something ultimate; and we seemto have reached two elements which have a goodprima facie claim tothat title. There is, first,... the difference between a fact and theThought of that fact: a distinction which we are able to cognize in thepast, and which then constitutes Memory, and in the future, when itconstitutes Expectation; but in neither case can we give any accountof it except that it exists.... Secondly, in addition to this, andsetting out from the belief ... that the idea I now have was derivedfrom a previous sensation ... there is the further convictionthat this sensation ... was my own; that it happened to my self.In other words, I am aware of a long and uninterrupted successionof past feelings, going back as far as memory reaches, and terminatingwith the sensations I have at the present moment, all of which are connectedby an inexplicable tie, that distinguishes them not only from anysuccession or combination in mere thought, but also from the parallelsuccessions of feelings which I believe, on satisfactory evidence, to havehappened to each of the other beings, shaped like myself, whom I perceivearound me. This succession of feelings, which I call my memoryof the past, is that by which I distinguish my Self. Myself is theperson who had that series of feelings, and I know nothing of myself,by direct knowledge, except that I had them. But there is a bond ofsome sort among all the parts of the series, which makes me say thatthey were feelings of a person who was the same person throughout[according to us this is their 'warmth' and resemblance to the 'centralspiritual self' now actually felt] and a different person from those whohad any of the parallel successions of feelings; and this bond, to me,constitutes my Ego. Here I think the question must rest, until somepsychologist succeeds better than anyone else has done, in showing amode in which the analysis can be carried further."[283]
The reader must judge of our own success in carryingthe analysis farther. The various distinctions we havemade are all parts of an endeavor so to do. John Mill himself,in a later-written passage, so far from advancing in theline of analysis, seems to fall back upon something perilouslynear to the Soul. He says:
"The fact of recognizing a sensation,... remembering that ithas been felt before, is the simplest and most elementary fact of memory:and theinexplicable tie ... which connects the present consciousnesswith the past one of which it reminds me, is as near as Ithink we can get to a positive conception of Self. That there is somethingreal in this tie, real as the sensations themselves, and not a mereproduct of the laws of thought without any fact corresponding to it, Ihold to be indubitable.... This original element,... to which wecannot give any name but its own peculiar one, without implying somefalse or ungrounded theory, is the Ego, or Self. As such I ascribe areality to the Ego—to my own mind—different from that real existenceas a Permanent Possibility, which is the only reality I acknowledge inMatter.... We are forced to apprehend every part of the series aslinked with the other parts bysomething in common which is not thefeelings themselves, any more than the succession of the feelings is thefeelings themselves; and as that which is the same in the first as in thesecond, in the second as in the third, in the third as in the fourth,and so on, must be the same in the first and in the fiftieth, this commonelement is a permanent element. But beyond this we can affirmnothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves. The feelingsor consciousnesses which belong or have belonged to it, and itspossibilities of having more, are the only facts there are to be assertedof Self—the only positive attributes, except permanence, which we canascribe to it."[284]
Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was toaffirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his father,and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemiesas practically to abandon it altogether.[285] In this place the[Pg 358]concessions amount, so far as they are intelligible, to theadmission of something very like the Soul. This 'inexplicabletie' which connects the feelings, this 'somethingin common' by which they are linked and which is not thepassing feelings themselves, but something 'permanent,' ofwhich we can 'affirm nothing' save its attributes and itspermanence, what is it but metaphysical Substance comeagain to life? Much as one must respect the fairness ofMill's temper, quite as much must one regret his failureof acumen at this point. At bottom he makes the sameblunder as Hume: the sensationsper se, he thinks, haveno 'tie.' The tie of resemblance and continuity which theremembering Thought finds among them is not a 'real tie'but 'a mere product of the laws of thought;' and thefact that the present Thought 'appropriates' them is also[Pg 359]no real tie. But whereas Hume was contented to say thatthere might after allbe no 'real tie,' Mill, unwilling to admitthis possibility, is driven, like any scholastic, to place itin a non-phenomenal world.
John Mill's concessions may be regarded as thedefinitivebankruptcy of the associationist description of the consciousnessof self, starting, as it does, with the bestintentions, and dimly conscious of the path, but 'perplexedin the extreme' at last with the inadequacy of those 'simplefeelings,' non-cognitive, non-transcendent of themselves,which were the only baggage it was willing to take along.One mustbeg memory, knowledge on the part of the feelingsof something outside themselves. That granted, everyother true thing follows naturally, and it is hard to goastray. The knowledge the present feeling has of the past[Pg 360]ones is a real tie between them, so is their resemblance;so is their continuity; so is the one's 'appropriation'of the other: all are real ties, realized in the judgingThought of every moment, the only place wheredisconnectionscould be realized, did they exist. Hume and Millboth imply that a disconnection can be realized there, whilsta tie cannot. But the ties and the disconnections are exactlyon a par, in this matter of self-consciousness. Theway in which the present Thought appropriates the past isa real way, so long as no other owner appropriates it in amore real way, and so long as the Thought has no groundsfor repudiating it stronger than those which lead to itsappropriation. But no other owner ever does in point offact present himself for my past; and the grounds which Iperceive for appropriating it—viz., continuity and resemblancewith the present—outweigh those I perceive for disowningit—viz., distance in time. My present Thoughtstands thus in the plenitude of ownership of the train ofmy past selves, is owner not onlyde facto, butde jure, themost real owner there can be, and all without the suppositionof any 'inexplicable tie,' but in a perfectly verifiableand phenomenal way.
Turn we now to what we may call
which owes its origin to Kant. Kant's own statements aretoo lengthy and obscure for verbatim quotation here, so Imust give their substance only. Kant starts, as I understandhim, from a view of theObject essentially like our own descriptionof it onp. 275 ff., that is, it is a system of things,qualities or facts in relation. "Object is that in the knowledge(Begriff) of which the Manifold of a given Perceptionis connected."[286] But whereas we simply begged the vehicleof this connected knowledge in the shape of what wecall the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Consciousness(which we declared to be the ultimate factfor psychology), Kant denies this to be an ultimate factand insists on analyzing it into a large number of distinct,[Pg 361]though equally essential, elements. The 'Manifoldness' ofthe Object is due to Sensibility, whichper se is chaotic,and the unity is due to the synthetic handling which thisManifold receives from the higher faculties of Intuition,Apprehension, Imagination, Understanding, and Apperception.It is the one essential spontaneity of the Understandingwhich, under these different names, brings unityinto the manifold of sense.
"The Understandingis, in fact, nothing more than the faculty ofbinding togethera priori, and of bringing the Manifold of given ideasunder the unity of Apperception, which consequently is the supremeprinciple in all human knowledge" (§ 16).
The material connected must begiven by lower facultiesto the Understanding, for the latter is not an intuitivefaculty, but by nature 'empty.' And the bringing ofthis material 'under the unity of Apperception' is explainedby Kant to mean the thinking it always so that,whatever its other determinations be, it may be known asthought by me.[287] Though this consciousness, thatI thinkit, need not be at every moment explicitly realized, it isalwayscapable of being realized. For if an objectincapableof being combined with the idea of a thinker were there,how could it be known, how related to other objects, howform part of 'experience' at all?
The awareness thatI think is therefore implied in all experience.No connected consciousness of anything withoutthat ofSelf as its presupposition and 'transcendental' condition!All things, then, so far as they are intelligible at all,are so through combination with pure consciousness ofSelf,[Pg 362]and apart from this, at least potential, combination nothingis knowableto us at all.
But this self, whose consciousness Kant thus establisheddeductively as aconditio sine quâ non of experience, is in thesame breath denied by him to have any positive attributes.Although Kant's name for it—the 'original transcendentalsynthetic Unity of Apperception'—is so long, our consciousnessabout it is, according to him, short enough. Self-consciousnessof this 'transcendental' sort tells us, 'nothow we appear, not how we inwardly are, but onlythat weare' (§ 25). At the basis of our knowledge of our selvesthere lies only "the simple and utterly empty idea:I; ofwhich we cannot even say we have a notion, but only a consciousnesswhich accompanies all notions. In thisI, orheorit (the thing) which thinks, nothing more is representedthan the bare transcendental Subject of the knowledge =x,which is only recognized by the thoughts which are its predicates,and of which, taken by itself, we cannot form theleast conception" (ibid. 'Paralogisms'). The pure Ego ofall apperception is thus for Kant not the soul, but only that'Subject' which is the necessary correlate of the Object inall knowledge. Thereis a soul, Kant thinks, but this mereego-form of our consciousness tells us nothing about it,neither whether it be substantial, nor whether it be immaterial,nor whether it be simple, nor whether it be permanent.These declarations on Kant's part of the utterbarrenness of the consciousness of the pure Self, and of theconsequent impossibility of any deductive or 'rational'psychology, are what, more than anything else, earned forhim the title of the 'all-destroyer.' The only self we knowanything positiveabout, he thinks, is the empiricalme, notthe pureI; the self which is an object among other objectsand the 'constituents' of which we ourselves have seen, andrecognized to be phenomenal things appearing in the formof space as well as time.
This, for our purposes, is a sufficient account of the'transcendental' Ego.
Those purposes go no farther than to ascertain whetheranything in Kant's conception ought to make us give up ourown, of a remembering and appropriating Thought incessantly[Pg 363]renewed. In many respects Kant's meaning is obscure,but it will not be necessary for us to squeeze thetexts in order to make sure what it actually and historicallywas. If we can define clearly two or three things which itmaypossibly have been, that will help us just as much toclear our own ideas.
On the whole, a defensible interpretation of Kant'sview would take somewhat the following shape. Like ourselveshe believes in a Reality outside the mind of which hewrites, but the critic who vouches for that reality does soon grounds of faith, for it is not a verifiable phenomenalthing. Neither is it manifold. The 'Manifold' which theintellectual functions combine is a mental manifold altogether,which thusstands between the Ego of Apperceptionand the outer Reality, but still stands inside the mind.In the function of knowing there is a multiplicity to be connected,and Kant brings this multiplicity inside the mind.The Reality becomes a mere emptylocus, or unknowable,the so-called Noumenon; the manifold phenomenon is inthe mind. We, on the contrary, put the Multiplicity withthe Reality outside, and leave the mind simple. Both of usdeal with the same elements—thought and object—the onlyquestion is in which of them the multiplicity shall belodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be 'synthetized'when it comes to be thought. And that particular way oflodging it will be the better, which, in addition to describingthe facts naturally, makes the 'mystery of synthesis'least hard to understand.
Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological.The notion of our thought being this sort of an elaborateinternal machine-shop stands condemned by all we said infavor of its simplicity onpages 276 ff. Our Thought is notcomposed of parts, however so composed its objects maybe. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it to be reducedto order. There is something almost shocking in thenotion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-burlyin her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thoughtand Reality at all, the multiplicity should be lodged in thelatter and not in the former member of the couple of relatedterms. The parts and their relations surely belong less tothe knower than to what is known.
But even were all the mythology true, the process ofsynthesis would in no whit beexplained by calling the insideof the mind its seat. No mystery would be made lighter bysuch means. It is just as much a puzzlehow the 'Ego' canemploy the productive Imagination to make the Understandinguse the categories to combine the data which Recognition,Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intuition,as how the Thought can combine the objective facts.Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same:theMany known by the One. Or does one seriously think heunderstands betterhow the knower 'connects' its objects,when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and thelatter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls themThought and Things respectively? Knowing must have avehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis,Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—whatyou like—it mustknow. The best grammaticalsubject for the verbknow would, if possible, be one fromwhose other properties the knowing could be deduced.And if there be no such subject, the best one would bethat with the fewest ambiguities and the least pretentiousname. By Kant's confession, the transcendental Ego has noproperties, and from it nothing can be deduced. Its nameis pretentious, and, as we shall presently see, has its meaningambiguously mixed up with that of the substantialsoul. So on every possible account we are excused fromusing it instead of our own term of the present passing'Thought,' as the principle by which the Many is simultaneouslyknown.
Theambiguity referred to in the meaning of the transcendentalEgo is as to whether Kant signified by it anAgent, and by the Experience it helps to constitute, anoperation; or whether the experience is an eventproducedin an unassigned way, and the Ego a mere indwellingelementtherein contained. If an operation be meant, thenEgo and Manifold must both be existent prior to that collisionwhich results in the experience of one by the other.If a mere analysis is meant, there is no such prior existence,and the elements onlyare in so far as they are in union.Now Kant's tone and language are everywhere the very[Pg 365]words of one who is talking of operations and the agentsby which they are performed.[288] And yet there is reason tothink that at bottom he may have had nothing of the sortin mind.[289] In this uncertainty we need again do no morethan decide what to think of his transcendental Egoif it bean agent.
Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantialismgrown shame-faced, and the Ego only a 'cheap andnasty' edition of the soul. All our reasons for preferringthe 'Thought' to the 'Soul' apply with redoubled forcewhen the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly explainednothing; the 'syntheses,' which she performed,were simply taken ready-made and clapped on to her asexpressions of her nature taken after the fact; but at leastshe had some semblance of nobility and outlook. Shewas called active; might select; was responsible, and permanentin her way. The Ego is simplynothing: as ineffectualand windy an abortion as Philosophy can show.It would indeed be one of Reason's tragedies if the goodKant, with all his honesty and strenuous pains, shouldhave deemed this conception an important outbirth of histhought.
But we have seen that Kant deemed it of next to no importanceat all. It was reserved for his Fichtean and Hegeliansuccessors to call it the first Principle of Philosophy,to spell its name in capitals and pronounce it with adoration,to act, in short, as if they were going up in a balloon,whenever the notion of it crossed their mind. Here again,however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and knowthat I may not read my authors aright. The whole lessonof Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me,the lesson of simplicity. With Kant, complication both ofthought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced[Pg 366]by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence.With Hegel it was a raging fever. Terribly, therefore, dothe sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy haveeaten set our teeth on edge. We have in England andAmerica, however, a contemporary continuation of Hegelismfrom which, fortunately, somewhat simpler deliverancescome; and, unable to find any definite psychology in whatHegel, Rosenkranz, or Erdmann tells us of the Ego, I turnto Caird and Green.
The great difference, practically, between these authorsand Kant is their complete abstraction from the onlookingPsychologist and from the Reality he thinks he knows; orrather it is the absorption of both of these outlying termsinto the proper topic of Psychology, viz., the mental experienceof the mind under observation. The Realitycoalesces with the connected Manifold, the Psychologistwith the Ego, knowing becomes 'connecting,' and thereresults no longer a finite or criticisable, but an 'absolute'Experience, of which the Object and the Subject are alwaysthe same. Our finite 'Thought' is virtually and potentiallythis eternal (or rather this 'timeless'), absolute Ego, andonly provisionally and speciously the limited thing whichit seemsprima facie to be. The later 'sections' of our'Stream,' which come and appropriate the earlier ones,are those earlier ones, just as in substantialism the Soul isthroughout all time the same.[290] This 'solipsistic' character[Pg 367]of an Experience conceived as absolute really annihilatespsychology as a distinct body of science.
Psychology is a natural science, an account of particularfinite streams of thought, coexisting and succeedingin time. It is of course conceivable (though far from clearlyso) that in the last metaphysical resort all these streamsof thought may be thought by one universal All-thinker.But in this metaphysical notion there is no profit for psychology;for grant that one Thinker does think in all of us,still what He thinks in me and what in you can never be deducedfrom the bare idea of Him. The idea of Him seemseven to exert a positively paralyzing effect on the mind.The existence of finite thoughts is suppressed altogether.Thought's characteristics, as Professor Green says, are
"not to be sought in the incidents of individual lives which lastbut for a day.... No knowledge, nor any mental act involved inknowledge, can properly be called a 'phenomenon of consciousness.'...For a phenomenon is a sensible event, related in the way ofantecedence or consequence to other sensible events, but the consciousnesswhich constitutes a knowledge ... is not an event so relatednor made up of such events."
Again, if
"we examine the constituents of any perceived object,... weshall find alike that it is only for consciousness that they can exist, andthat the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot be merely aseries of phenomena or a succession of states.... It then becomes clearthat there is a function of consciousness, as exercised in the most rudimentaryexperience [namely, the function ofsynthesis] which is incompatiblewith the definition of consciousness as any sort of succession ofany sort of phenomena."[291]
Were we to follow these remarks, we should have toabandon our notion of the 'Thought' (perennially renewed intime, but always cognitive thereof), and to espouse instead of[Pg 368]it an entity copied from thought in all essential respects, butdiffering from it in being 'out of time.' What psychologycan gain by this barter would be hard to divine. Moreoverthis resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul iscompleted by other resemblances still. The monism ofthe post-Kantian idealists seems always lapsing into aregular old-fashioned spiritualistic dualism. They incessantlytalk as if, like the Soul, their All-thinker were anAgent, operating on detached materials of sense. This maycome from the accidental fact that the English writings ofthe school have been more polemic than constructive, andthat a reader may often take for a positive profession astatementad hominem meant as part of a reduction to theabsurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge intoelements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But Ithink the matter has profounder roots. Professor Greenconstantly talks of the 'activity' of Self as a 'condition' ofknowledge taking place. Facts are said to become incorporatedwith other facts only through the 'action of a combiningself-consciousness upon data of sensation.'
"Every object we perceive ... requires, in order to its presentation,theaction of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject toconditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as mayhold the appearances together, without fusion, in an apprehendedfact."[292]
It is needless to repeat that the connection of things inour knowledge is in no whitexplained by making it thedeed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who isout of time. The agency of phenomenal thought comingand going in time is just as easy tounderstand. And whenit is furthermore said that the agent that combines is thesame 'self-distinguishing subject' which 'in another modeof its activity' presents the manifold object to itself, theunintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we areforced to confess that the entire school of thought in question,in spite of occasional glimpses of something more refined,still dwells habitually in that mythological stage ofthought where phenomena are explained as results of[Pg 369]dramas enacted by entities which but reduplicate the charactersof the phenomena themselves. The self must notonlyknow its object,—that is too bald and dead a relationto be written down and left in its static state. The knowingmust be painted as a 'famous victory' in which theobject's distinctness is in some way 'overcome.'
"The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, toitself as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that opposition.Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself aresolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifoldnessand division of the mighty universe, and hope to master its secrets.As the lightning sleeps in the dew-drop, so in the simple and transparentunity of self-consciousness there is held in equilibrium that vitalantagonism of opposites which ... seems to rend the world asunder.The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, tobreak down the barrier between itself and things and find itself in them,just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the divisionand conflict of things."[293]
This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way ofrepresenting knowledge has the merit of not being tame.To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is liketurning from the fireworks, trap-doors, and transformationsof the pantomime into the insipidity of the midnight, where
"ghastly through the drizzling rain,
On the bald street breaks the blank day!"[294]
And yet turn we must, with the confession that our'Thought'—a cognitive phenomenal event in time—is, ifit exist at all, itself the only Thinker which the facts require.The only service that transcendental egoism has done topsychology has been by its protests against Hume's 'bundle'-theory[Pg 370]of mind. But this service has been ill-performed;for the Egoists themselves, let them say what they will,believe in the bundle, and in their own system merelytie itup, with their special transcendental string, invented forthat use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this miraculoustying or 'relating,' the Ego's duties were done. Of its farmore important duty of choosing some of the things it tiesand appropriating them, to the exclusion of the rest, theytell us never a word. To sum up, then, my own opinion ofthe transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior metaphysicaltruth it may divine) a school in which psychologyat least has naught to learn, and whose deliverances aboutthe Ego in particular in no wise oblige us to revise our ownformulation of the Stream of Thought.[295]
With this, all possible rival formulations have been discussed.The literature of the Self is large, but all its[Pg 371]authors may be classed as radical or mitigated representativesof the three schools we have named, substantialism,associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own opinionmust be classed apart, although it incorporates essentialelements from all three schools.There need never havebeen a quarrel between associationism and its rivals if the formerhad admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought,and the latter been willing to allow that 'perishing' pulses ofthought might recollect and know.
We may sum up by saying that personality implies theincessant presence of two elements, an objective person,known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized ascontinuing in time.Hereafter let us use the wordsmeandIfor the empirical person and the judging Thought.
In the first place, although its changes are gradual,they become in time great. The central part of theme isthe feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head;and in the feeling of the body should be included that ofthe general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottomthese are but the habits in which organic activities and sensibilitiesrun. Well, from infancy to old age, this assemblageof feelings, most constant of all, is yet a prey to slowmutation. Our powers, bodily and mental, change at leastas fast.[296] Our possessions notoriously are perishable facts.[Pg 372]The identity which theI discovers, as it surveys this longprocession, can only be a relative identity, that of a slowshifting in which there is always some common ingredientretained.[297] The commonest element of all, the most uniform,is the possession of the same memories. Howeverdifferent the man may be from the youth, both look backon the same childhood, and call it their own.
Thus the identity found by theI in itsme is only aloosely construed thing, an identity 'on the whole,' justlike that which any outside observer might find in the same[Pg 373]assemblage of facts. We often say of a man 'he is sochanged one would not know him'; and so does a man,less often, speak of himself. These changes in theme,recognized by the I, or by outside observers, may be graveor slight. They deserve some notice here.
may be divided into two main classes:
1. Alterations of memory; and
2. Alterations in the present bodily and spiritual selves.
1.Alterations of memory are eitherlosses or false recollections.In either case theme is changed. Should a manbe punished for what he did in his childhood and no longerremembers? Should he be punished for crimes enactedin post-epileptic unconsciousness, somnambulism, or in anyinvoluntarily induced state of which no recollection is retained?Law, in accord with common-sense, says: "No;he is not the same person forensically now which he wasthen." These losses of memory are a normal incident ofextreme old age, and the person'sme shrinks in the ratioof the facts that have disappeared.
In dreams we forget our waking experiences; they areas if they were not. And the converse is also true. As arule, no memory is retained during the waking state ofwhat has happened during mesmeric trance, although whenagain entranced the person may remember it distinctly, andmay then forget facts belonging to the waking state. Wethus have, within the bounds of healthy mental life, anapproach to an alternation ofme's.
False memories are by no means rare occurrences inmost of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the consciousnessof the me. Most people, probably, are in doubtabout certain matters ascribed to their past. They mayhave seen them, may have said them, done them, or theymay only have dreamed or imagined they did so. Thecontent of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into thestream of real life in a most perplexing way. The mostfrequent source of false memory is the accounts we give toothers of our experiences. Such accounts we almost always[Pg 374]make both more simple and more interesting than thetruth. We quote what we should have said or done,rather than what we really said or did; and in the firsttelling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But erelong the fiction expels the reality from memory and reignsin its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibilityof testimony meant to be quite honest. Especiallywhere the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tiltthat way, and the memory follows the story. Dr. Carpenterquotes from Miss Cobbe the following, as an instanceof a very common sort:
"It happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously conscientiousfriend narrate an incident of table-turning, to which sheappended an assurance that the table rapped whennobody was withina yard of it. The writer being confounded by this latter fact, thelady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement, promisedto look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transaction.The note was examined, and was found to contain the distinctstatement that the table rapped whenthe hands of six persons restedon it! The lady's memory as to all other points proved to be strictlycorrect; and in this point she had erred in entire good faith."[298]
It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accuratein all its details, although it is the inessential detailsthat suffer most change.[299] Dickens and Balzac were said tohave constantly mingled their fictions with their real experiences.Every one must have knownsome specimen ofour mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of his ownperson and the sound of his own voice as never to be ableeven to think the truth when his autobiography was inquestion. Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thoune'er wake to the difference between thy real and thyfondly-imagined self![Pg 375][300]
2. When we pass beyond alterations of memory to abnormalalterations in the present self we have still graverdisturbances. These alterations are of three main types,from the descriptive point of view. But certain cases unitefeatures of two or more types; and our knowledge of theelements and causes of these changes of personality is soslight that the division into types must not be regarded ashaving any profound significance. The types are:
(1) Insane delusions;
(2) Alternating selves;
(3) Mediumships or possessions.
1) In insanity we often have delusions projected intothe past, which are melancholic or sanguine according tothe character of the disease. But the worst alterations ofthe self come from present perversions of sensibility andimpulse which leave the past undisturbed, but induce thepatient to think that the presentme is an altogether newpersonage. Something of this sort happens normally inthe rapid expansion of the whole character, intellectual aswell as volitional, which takes place after the time ofpuberty. The pathological cases are curious enough tomerit longer notice.
The basis of our personality, as M. Ribot says, is thatfeeling of our vitality which, because it is so perpetuallypresent, remains in the background of our consciousness.
"It is the basis because, always present, always acting, withoutpeace or rest, it knows neither sleep nor fainting, and lasts as long aslife itself, of which it is one form. It serves as a support to that self-consciousme which memory constitutes, it is the medium of associationamong its other parts.... Suppose now that it were possible at onceto change our body and put another into its place: skeleton, vessels,viscera, muscles, skin, everything made new, except the nervous systemwith its stored-up memory of the past. There can be no doubtthat in such a case the afflux of unaccustomed vital sensations wouldproduce the gravest disorders. Between the old sense of existence engravedon the nervous system, and the new one acting with all theintensity of its reality and novelty, there would be irreconcilable contradiction."[301]
With the beginnings of cerebral disease there oftenhappens something quite comparable to this:
"Masses of new sensation, hitherto foreign to the individual, impulsesand ideas of the same inexperienced kind, for example terrors,representations of enacted crime, of enemies pursuing one, etc. At theoutset, these stand in contrast with the old familiarme, as a strange,often astonishing and abhorrentthou.[302] Often their invasion into theformer circle of feelings is felt as if the old self were being taken possessionof by a dark overpowering might, and the fact of such 'possession'is described in fantastic images. Always this doubleness, thisstruggle of the old self against the new discordant forms of experience,is accompanied with painful mental conflict, with passion, with violentemotional excitement. This is in great part the reason for the commonexperience, that the first stage in the immense majority of cases ofmental disease is an emotional alteration particularly of a melancholicsort. If now the brain-affection, which is the immediate cause of thenew abnormal train of ideas, be not relieved, the latter becomes confirmed.It may gradually contract associations with the trains of ideaswhich characterized the old self, or portions of the latter may be extinguishedand lost in the progress of the cerebral malady, so that littleby little the opposition of the two consciousme's abates, and the emotionalstorms are calmed. But by that timethe old me itself has beenfalsified and turned into another by those associations, by that receptioninto itself of the abnormal elements of feeling and of will. Thepatient may again be quiet, and his thought sometimes logically correct,but in it the morbid erroneous ideas are always present, with the adhesionsthey have contracted, as uncontrollable premises, and the man isno longer the same, but a really new person, his old self transformed."[303]
But the patient himself rarely continues to describe thechange in just these terms unless newbodily sensations inhim or the loss of old ones play a predominant part.Mere perversions of sight and hearing, or even of impulse,soon cease to be felt as contradictions of the unity of theme.
What the particular perversions of the bodily sensibilitymay be, which give rise to these contradictions, is for themost part impossible for a sound-minded person to conceive.One patient has another self that repeats all histhoughts for him. Others, among whom are some of thefirst characters in history, have familiar dæmons who speakwith them, and are replied to. In another someone'makes' his thoughts for him. Another has two bodies,lying in different beds. Some patients feel as if they hadlost parts of their bodies, teeth, brain, stomach, etc. Insome it is made of wood, glass, butter, etc. In some itdoes not exist any longer, or is dead, or is a foreign objectquite separate from the speaker's self. Occasionally, partsof the body lose their connection for consciousness withthe rest, and are treated as belonging to another personand moved by a hostile will. Thus the right hand mayfight with the left as with an enemy.[304] Or the cries of thepatient himself are assigned to another person with whomthe patient expresses sympathy. The literature of insanityis filled with narratives of such illusions as these. M.Taine quotes from a patient of Dr. Krishaber an account ofsufferings, from which it will be seen how completely alooffrom what is normal a man's experience may suddenly become:
"After the first or second day it was for some weeks impossible toobserve or analyze myself. The suffering—angina pectoris—was toooverwhelming. It was not till the first days of January that I couldgive an account to myself of what I experienced.... Here is the firstthing of which I retain a clear remembrance. I was alone, and alreadya prey to permanent visual trouble, when I was suddenly seized with avisual trouble infinitely more pronounced. Objects grew small and recededto infinite distances—men and things together. I was myself immeasurably[Pg 378]far away, I looked about me with terror and astonishment;the world was escaping from me.... I remarked at the sametime that my voice was extremely far away from me, that it sounded nolonger as if mine. I struck the ground with my foot, and perceived itsresistance; but this resistance seemed illusory—not that the soil wassoft, but that the weight of my body was reduced to almost nothing....I had the feeling of being without weight...." In addition tobeing so distant, "objects appeared to meflat. When I spoke withanyone, I saw him like an image cut out of paper with no relief.... Thissensation lasted intermittently for two years.... Constantly it seemedas if my legs did not belong to me. It was almost as bad with my arms.As for my head, it seemed no longer to exist.... I appeared to myselfto act automatically, by an impulsion foreign to myself.... Therewas inside of me a new being, and another part of myself, the old being,which took no interest in the new-comer. I distinctly remembersaying to myself that the sufferings of this new being were to meindifferent. I was never really dupe of these illusions, but my mindgrew often tired of incessantly correcting the new impressions, and Ilet myself go and lived the unhappy life of this new entity. I had anardent desire to see my old world again, to get back to my old self.This desire kept me from killing myself.... I was another, and Ihated, I despised this other; he was perfectly odious to me; it was certainlyanother who had taken my form and assumed my functions."[305]
In cases similar to this, it is as certain that theI is unalteredas that theme is changed. That is to say, the presentThought of the patient is cognitive of both the oldmeand the new, so long as its memory holds good. Only,within that objective sphere which formerly lent itself sosimply to the judgment of recognition and of egoistic appropriation,strange perplexities have arisen. The present andthe past both seen therein will not unite. Where is my oldme? What is this new one? Are they the same? Or haveI two? Such questions, answered by whatever theory thepatient is able to conjure up as plausible, form the beginningof his insane life.[306]
A case with which I am acquainted through Dr. C. J.Fisher of Tewksbury has possibly its origin in this way.The woman, Bridget F.,
"has been many years insane, and always speaks of her supposed selfas 'the rat,' asking me to 'bury the little rat,' etc. Her real self shespeaks of in the third person as 'the good woman,' saying, 'The goodWoman knew Dr. F. and used to work for him,' etc. Sometimes shesadly asks: 'Do you think the good woman will ever come back?' Sheworks at needlework, knitting, laundry, etc., and shows her work, saying,'Isn't that good for only a rat?' She has, during periods of depression,hid herself under buildings, and crawled into holes and underboxes. 'She was only a rat, and wants to die,' she would say when wefound her."
2. The phenomenon ofalternating personality in its simplestphases seems based on lapses of memory. Any manbecomes, as we say,inconsistent with himself if he forgets hisengagements, pledges, knowledges, and habits; and it ismerely a question of degree at what point we shall saythat his personality is changed. In the pathological casesknown as those of double or alternate personality the lapseof memory is abrupt, and is usually preceded by a periodof unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length oftime. In the hypnotic trance we can easily produce analteration of the personality, either by telling the subject toforget all that has happened to him since such or such a date,in which case he becomes (it may be) a child again, or bytelling him he is another altogether imaginary personage, inwhich case all facts about himself seem for the time beingto lapse from out his mind, and he throws himself into thenew character with a vivacity proportionate to the amountof histrionic imagination which he possesses.[307] But in thepathological cases the transformation is spontaneous. Themost famous case, perhaps, on record is that of Félida X.,[Pg 380]reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux.[308] At the age of fourteenthis woman began to pass into a 'secondary' statecharacterized by a change in her general disposition andcharacter, as if certain 'inhibitions,' previously existing,were suddenly removed. During the secondary state sheremembered the first state, but on emerging from it intothe first state she remembered nothing of the second. Atthe age of forty-four the duration of the secondary state(which was on the whole superior in quality to the originalstate) had gained upon the latter so much as to occupy mostof her time. During it she remembers the events belongingto the original state, but her complete oblivion of the secondarystate when the original state recurs is often verydistressing to her, as, for example, when the transitiontakes place in a carriage on her way to a funeral, and shehasn't the least idea which one of her friends may be dead.She actually became pregnant during one of her early secondarystates, and during her first state had no knowledgeof how it had come to pass. Her distress at these blanksof memory is sometimes intense and once drove her toattempt suicide.
To take another example, Dr. Rieger gives an account[309]of an epileptic man who for seventeen years had passed hislife alternately free, in prisons, or in asylums, his characterbeing orderly enough in the normal state, but alternatingwith periods, during which he would leave his home forseveral weeks, leading the life of a thief and vagabond, beingsent to jail, having epileptic fits and excitement, beingaccused of malingering, etc., etc., and with never a memoryof the abnormal conditions which were to blame for allhis wretchedness.
"I have never got from anyone," says Dr. Rieger, "so singular animpression as from this man, of whom it could not be said that he hadany properly conscious past at all.... It is really impossible to thinkone's self into such a state of mind. His last larceny had been performedin Nürnberg, he knew nothing of it, and saw himself before the[Pg 381]court and then in the hospital, but without in the least understandingthe reason why. That he had epileptic attacks, he knew. But itwas impossible to convince him that for hours together he raved andacted in an abnormal way."
Another remarkable case is that of Mary Reynolds,lately republished again by Dr. Weir Mitchell.[310] This dulland melancholy young woman, inhabiting the Pennsylvaniawilderness in 1811,
"was found one morning, long after her habitual time for rising, in aprofound sleep from which it was impossible to arouse her. Aftereighteen or twenty hours of sleeping she awakened, but in a state ofunnatural consciousness. Memory had fled. To all intents and purposesshe was as a being for the first time ushered into the world. 'Allof the past that remained to her was the faculty of pronouncing a fewwords, and this seems to have been as purely instinctive as the wailingsof an infant; for at first the words which she uttered were connectedwith no ideas in her mind.' Until she was taught their significancethey were unmeaning sounds.
"'Her eyes were virtually for the first time opened upon the world.Old things had passed away; all things had become new.' Her parents,brothers, sisters, friends, were not recognized or acknowledged as suchby her. She had never seen them before,—never known them,—wasnot aware that such persons had been. Now for the first time shewas introduced to their company and acquaintance. To the scenes bywhich she was surrounded she was a perfect stranger. The house, thefields, the forest, the hills, the vales, the streams,—all were novelties.The beauties of the landscape were all unexplored.
"She had not the slightest consciousness that she had ever existedprevious to the moment in which she awoke from that mysteriousslumber. 'In a word, she was an infant, just born, yet born in a state ofmaturity, with a capacity for relishing the rich, sublime, luxuriantwonders of created nature.'
"The first lesson in her education was to teach her by what ties shewas bound to those by whom she was surrounded, and the duties devolvingupon her accordingly. This she was very slow to learn, and,'indeed, never did learn, or, at least, never would acknowledge theties of consanguinity, or scarcely those of friendship. She consideredthose she had once known as for the most part strangers and enemies,among whom she was, by some remarkable and unaccountable means,transplanted, though from what region or state of existence was a problemunsolved.'
"The next lesson was to re-teach her the arts of reading and writing.She was apt enough, and made such rapid progress in both thatin a[Pg 382]few weeks she had readily re-learned to read and write. In copying hername which her brother had written for her as a first lesson, she tookher pen in a very awkward manner and began to copy from right to leftin the Hebrew mode, as though she had been transplanted from anEastern soil....
"The next thing that is noteworthy is the change which took placein her disposition. Instead of being melancholy she was now cheerfulto extremity. Instead of being reserved she was buoyant and social.Formerly taciturn and retiring, she was now merry and jocose. Herdisposition was totally and absolutely changed. While she was, in thissecond state, extravagantly fond of company, she was much more enamouredof nature's works, as exhibited in the forests, hills, vales, andwater-courses. She used to start in the morning, either on foot orhorseback, and ramble until nightfall over the whole country; nor wasshe at all particular whether she were on a path or in the trackless forest.Her predilection for this manner of life may have been occasioned by therestraint necessarily imposed upon her by her friends, which caused herto consider them her enemies and not companions, and she was glad tokeep out of their way.
"She knew no fear, and as bears and panthers were numerous inthe woods, and rattlesnakes and copperheads abounded everywhere,her friends told her of the danger to which she exposed herself, but itproduced no other effect than to draw forth a contemptuous laugh, asshe said, 'I know you only want to frighten me and keep me at home,but you miss it, for I often see your bears and I am perfectly convincedthat they are nothing more than black hogs.'
"One evening, after her return from her daily excursion, she toldthe following incident: 'As I was riding to-day along a narrow path agreat black hog came out of the woods and stopped before me. I neversaw such an impudent black hog before. It stood up on its hind feetand grinned and gnashed its teeth at me. I could not make the horsego on. I told him he was a fool to be frightened at a hog, and tried towhip him past, but he would not go and wanted to turn back. I toldthe hog to get out of the way, but he did not mind me. "Well," said I,"if you won't for words, I'll try blows;" so I got off and took a stick,and walked up toward it. When I got pretty close by, it got down onall fours and walked away slowly and sullenly, stopping every few stepsand looking back and grinning and growling. Then I got on my horseand rode on.'...
"Thus it continued for five weeks, when one morning, after a protractedsleep, she awoke and was herself again. She recognized theparental, the brotherly, and sisterly ties as though nothing had happened,and immediately went about the performance of duties incumbentupon her, and which she had planned five weeks previously.Great was her surprise at the change which one night (as she supposed)had produced. Nature bore a different aspect. Not a trace was left inher mind of the giddy scenes through which she had passed. Her ramblings[Pg 383]through the forest, her tricks and humor, all were faded from hermemory, and not a shadow left behind. Her parents saw their child;her brothers and sisters saw their sister. She now had all the knowledgethat she had possessed in her first state previous to the change, stillfresh and in as vigorous exercise as though no change had been. Butany new acquisitions she had made, and any new ideas she had obtained,were lost to her now—yet not lost, but laid up out of sight in safe-keepingfor future use. Of course her natural disposition returned; hermelancholy was deepened by the information of what had occurred. Allwent on in the old-fashioned way, and it was fondly hoped that themysterious occurrences of those five weeks would never be repeated, butthese anticipations were not to be realized. After the lapse of a fewweeks she fell into a profound sleep, and awoke in her second state,taking up her new life again precisely where she had left it when shebefore passed from that state. She was not now a daughter or a sister.All the knowledge she possessed was that acquired during the few weeksof her former period of second consciousness. She knew nothing ofthe intervening time. Two periods widely separated were brought intocontact. She thought it was but one night.
"In this state she came to understand perfectly the facts of her case,not from memory, but from information. Yet her buoyancy of spiritswas so great that no depression was produced. On the contrary, itadded to her cheerfulness, and was made the foundation, as was everythingelse, of mirth.
"These alternations from one state to another continued at intervalsof varying length for fifteen or sixteen years, but finally ceased whenshe attained the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, leaving herpermanentlyin her second state. In this she remained without change for the lastquarter of a century of her life."
The emotional opposition of the two states seems, however,to have become gradually effaced in Mary Reynolds:
"The change from a gay, hysterical, mischievous woman, fond ofjests and subject to absurd beliefs or delusive convictions, to one retainingthe joyousness and love of society, but sobered down to levels of practicalusefulness, was gradual. The most of the twenty-five years whichfollowed she was as different from her melancholy, morbid self as fromthe hilarious condition of the early years of her second state. Some ofher family spoke of it as her third state. She is described as becomingrational, industrious, and very cheerful, yet reasonably serious; possessedof a well-balanced temperament, and not having the slightestindication of an injured or disturbed mind. For some years she taughtschool, and in that capacity was both useful and acceptable, being ageneral favorite with old and young.
"During these last twenty-five years she lived in the samehouse with the Rev. Dr. John V. Reynolds, her nephew, part of that[Pg 384]time keeping house for him, showing a sound judgment and a thoroughacquaintance with the duties of her position.
"Dr. Reynolds, who is still living in Meadville," says Dr. Mitchell,"and who has most kindly placed the facts at my disposal, states inhis letter to me of January 4, 1888, that at a later period of her life shesaid she did sometimes seem to have a dim, dreamy idea of a shadowypast, which she could not fully grasp, and could not be certain whetherit originated in a partially restored memory or in the statements of theevents by others during her abnormal state.
"Miss Reynolds died in January, 1854, at the age of sixty-one. Onthe morning of the day of her death she rose in her usual health, ateher breakfast, and superintended household duties. While thus employedshe suddenly raised her hands to her head and exclaimed:'Oh! I wonder what is the matter with my head!' and immediatelyfell to the floor. When carried to a sofa she gasped once or twice anddied."
In such cases as the preceding, in which the secondarycharacter is superior to the first, there seems reason tothink that the first one is the morbid one. The wordinhibitiondescribes its dulness and melancholy. Félida X.'soriginal character was dull and melancholy in comparisonwith that which she later acquired, and the change may beregarded as the removal of inhibitions which had maintainedthemselves from earlier years. Such inhibitions weall know temporarily, when we can not recollect or in someother way command our mental resources. The systematizedamnesias (losses of memory) of hypnotic subjects orderedto forget all nouns, or all verbs, or a particular letterof the alphabet, or all that is relative to a certain person,are inhibitions of the sort on a more extensive scale. Theysometimes occur spontaneously as symptoms of disease.[311]Now M. Pierre Janet has shown that such inhibitions whenthey bear on a certain class of sensations (making the subjectanæsthetic thereto) and also on the memory of suchsensations, are the basis of changes of personality. Theanæsthetic and 'amnesic' hysteric is one person; but whenyou restore her inhibited sensibilities and memories byplunging her into the hypnotic trance—in other words, when[Pg 385]you rescue them from their 'dissociated' and split-off condition,and make them rejoin the other sensibilities andmemories—she is a different person. As said above (p. 203),the hypnotic trance is one method of restoring sensibilityin hysterics. But one day when the hysteric anæstheticnamed Lucie was already in the hypnotic trance, M. Janetfor a certain reason continued to make passes over her fora full half-hour as if she were not already asleep. The resultwas to throw her into a sort of syncope from which,after half an hour, she revived in a second somnambulic conditionentirely unlike that which had characterized herthitherto—different sensibilities, a different memory, a differentperson, in short. In the waking state the poor youngwoman was anæsthetic all over, nearly deaf, and with abadly contracted field of vision. Bad as it was, however,sight was her best sense, and she used it as a guide in allher movements. With her eyes bandaged she became entirelyhelpless, and like other persons of a similar sortwhose cases have been recorded, she almost immediatelyfell asleep in consequence of the withdrawal of her lastsensorial stimulus. M. Janet calls this waking or primary(one can hardly in such a connection say 'normal') state bythe name of Lucie 1. In Lucie 2, her first sort of hypnotictrance, the anæsthesias were diminished but not removed.In the deeper trance, 'Lucie 3,' brought about as just described,no trace of them remained. Her sensibility becameperfect, and instead of being an extreme example of the'visual' type, she was transformed into what in Prof.Charcot's terminology is known as a motor. That is tosay, that whereas when awake she had thought in visualterms exclusively, and could imagine things only by rememberinghow theylooked, now in this deeper trance herthoughts and memories seemed to M. Janet to be largelycomposed of images of movement and of touch.
Having discovered this deeper trance and change ofpersonality in Lucie, M. Janet naturally became eager tofind it in his other subjects. He found it in Rose, in Marie,and in Léonie; and his brother, Dr. Jules Janet, who wasinterne at the Salpétrière Hospital, found it in the celebratedsubject Wit.... whose trances had been studied for years[Pg 386]by the various doctors of that institution without any ofthem having happened to awaken this very peculiar individuality.[312]
With the return of all the sensibilities in the deepertrance, these subjects turned, as it were, into normalpersons. Their memories in particular grew more extensive,and hereupon M. Janet spins a theoretic generalization.When a certain kind of sensation, he says,is abolishedin an hysteric patient, there is also abolished along withit all recollection of past sensations of that kind. If, for example,hearing be the anæsthetic sense, the patient becomesunable even to imagine sounds and voices, and has tospeak (when speech is still possible) by means of motor orarticulatory cues. If the motor sense be abolished, the patientmust will the movements of his limbs by first definingthem to his mind in visual terms, and must innervate hisvoice by premonitory ideas of the way in which the wordsare going to sound. The practical consequences of thislaw would be great, for all experiences belonging to asphere of sensibility which afterwards became anæsthetic,as, for example, touch, would have been stored away andremembered in tactile terms, and would be incontinentlyforgotten as soon as the cutaneous and muscular sensibilityshould come to be cut out in the course of disease.Memory of them would be restored again, on theother hand, so soon as the sense of touch came back.Now, in the hysteric subjects on whom M. Janet experimented,touch did come back in the state of trance. Theresult was that all sorts of memories, absent in the ordinarycondition, came back too, and they could then go back andexplain the origin of many otherwise inexplicable things intheir life. One stage in the great convulsive crisis of hystero-epilepsy,for example, is what French writers call thephase des attitudes passionelles, in which the patient, withoutspeaking or giving any account of herself, will go throughthe outward movements of fear, anger, or some other emotionalstate of mind. Usually this phase is, with each[Pg 387]patient, a thing so stereotyped as to seem automatic, anddoubts have even been expressed as to whether any consciousnessexists whilst it lasts. When, however, thepatient Lucie's tactile sensibility came back in the deepertrance, she explained the origin of her hysteric crisis in agreat fright which she had had when a child, on a daywhen certain men, hid behind the curtains, had jumped outupon her; she told how she went through this scene againin all her crises; she told of her sleep-walking fits throughthe house when a child, and how for several months shehad been shut in a dark room because of a disorder of theeyes. All these were things of which she recollected nothingwhen awake, because they were records of experiencesmainly of motion and of touch.
But M. Janet's subject Léonie is interesting, andshows best how with the sensibilities and motor impulsesthe memories and character will change.
"This woman, whose life sounds more like an improbable romancethan a genuine history, has had attacks of natural somnambulism sincethe age of three years. She has been hypnotized constantly by all sortsof persons from the age of sixteen upwards, and she is now forty-five.Whilst her normal life developed in one way in the midst of her poorcountry surroundings, her second life was passed in drawing-rooms anddoctors' offices, and naturally took an entirely different direction. To-day,when in her normal state, this poor peasant woman is a seriousand rather sad person, calm and slow, very mild with every one, andextremely timid: to look at her one would never suspect the personagewhich she contains. But hardly is she put to sleep hypnotically whena metamorphosis occurs. Her face is no longer the same. She keepsher eyes closed, it is true, but the acuteness of her other senses suppliestheir place. She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes insupportably so.She remains good-natured, but has acquired a singular tendency to ironyand sharp jesting. Nothing is more curious than to hear her after asitting when she has received a visit from strangers who wished to seeher asleep. She gives a word-portrait of them, apes their manners,pretends to know their little ridiculous aspects and passions, and foreach invents a romance. To this character must be added the possessionof an enormous number of recollections, whose existence she doesnot even suspect when awake, for her amnesia is then complete....She refuses the name of Léonie and takes that of Léontine (Léonie 2)to which her first magnetizers had accustomed her. 'That good womanis not myself,' she says, 'she is too stupid!' To herself, Léontine orLéonie 2, she attributes all the sensations and all the actions, in a wordall the conscious experiences which she has undergonein somnambulism,[Pg 388]and knits them together to make the history of her already long life.To Léonie 1 [as M. Janet calls the waking woman] on the other hand, sheexclusively ascribes the events lived through in waking hours. I wasat first struck by an important exception to the rule, and was disposedto think that there might be something arbitrary in this partition ofher recollections. In the normal state Léonie has a husband and children;but Léonie 2, the somnambulist, whilst acknowledging the childrenas her own, attributes the husband to 'the other.' This choice, wasperhaps explicable, but it followed no rule. It was not till later that Ilearned that her magnetizers in early days, as audacious as certain hypnotizersof recent date, had somnambulized her for her firstaccouchements,and that she had lapsed into that state spontaneously in thelater ones. Léonie 2 was thus quite right in ascribing to herself thechildren—it was she who had had them, and the rule that her firsttrance-state forms a different personality was not broken. But it isthe same with her second or deepest state of trance. When after therenewed passes, syncope, etc., she reaches the condition which I havecalled Léonie 3, she is another person still. Serious and grave, insteadof being a restless child, she speaks slowly and moves but little. Againshe separates herself from the waking Léonie 1. 'A good but ratherstupid woman,' she says, 'and not me.' And she also separates herselffrom Léonie 2: 'How can you see anything of me in that crazy creature?'she says. 'Fortunately I am nothing for her.'"
Léonie 1 knows only of herself; Léonie 2, of herself andof Léonie 1; Léonie 3 knows of herself and of both theothers. Léonie 1 has a visual consciousness; Léonie 2 hasone both visual and auditory; in Léonie 3 it is at oncevisual, auditory, and tactile. Prof. Janet thought at firstthat he was Léonie 3's discoverer. But she told himthat she had been frequently in that condition before. Aformer magnetizer had hit upon her just as M. Janet had,in seeking by means of passes to deepen the sleep ofLéonie 2.
"This resurrection of a somnambulic personage who had beenextinct for twenty years is curious enough; and in speaking to Léonie3, I naturally now adopt the name of Léonore which was given her by herfirst master."
The most carefully studied case of multiple personalityis that of the hysteric youth Louis V. about whom MM.Bourru and Burot have written a book.[313] The symptomsare too intricate to be reproduced here with detail. Sufficeit that Louis V. had led an irregular life, in the army, in[Pg 389]hospitals, and in houses of correction, and had had numeroushysteric anæsthesias, paralyses, and contractures attackinghim differently at different times and when he lived atdifferent places. At eighteen, at an agricultural House ofCorrection he was bitten by a viper, which brought on aconvulsive crisis and leftboth of his legs paralyzed forthree years. During this condition he was gentle, moral,and industrious. But suddenly at last, after a long convulsiveseizure, his paralysis disappeared, and with it hismemory for all the time during which it had endured. Hischaracter also changed: he became quarrelsome, gluttonous,impolite, stealing his comrades' wine, and money froman attendant, and finally escaped from the establishmentand fought furiously when he was overtaken and caught.Later, when he first fell under the observation of theauthors, hisright side was half paralyzed and insensible,and his character intolerable; the application of metalstransferred the paralysis to theleft side, abolished hisrecollections of the other condition, and carried him psychicallyback to the hospital of Bicêtre where he had beentreated for a similar physical condition. His character,opinions, education, all underwent a concomitant transformation.He was no longer the personage of the momentbefore. It appeared ere long that any present nervous disorderin him could be temporarily removed by metals,magnets, electric or other baths, etc.; and that any pastdisorder could be brought back by hypnotic suggestion.He also went through a rapid spontaneous repetition of hisseries of past disorders after each of the convulsive attackswhich occurred in him at intervals. It was observed thateach physical state in which he found himself, excludedcertain memories and brought with it a definite modificationof character.
"The law of these changes," say the authors, "is quite clear.There exist precise, constant, and necessary relations between thebodily and the mental state, such that it is impossible to modify theone without modifying the other in a parallel fashion."[314]
The case of this proteiform individual would seem, then,nicely to corroborate M. P. Janet's law that anæsthesias andgaps in memory go together. Coupling Janet's law withLocke's that changes of memory bring changes of personality,we should have an apparent explanation of some cases atleast of alternate personality. But mere anæsthesia doesnot sufficiently explain the changes of disposition, which areprobably due to modifications in the perviousness of motorand associative paths, co-ordinate with those of the sensorialpaths rather than consecutive upon them. And indeeda glance at other cases than M. Janet's own, suffices to showus that sensibility and memory are not coupled in anyinvariable way.[315] M. Janet's law, true of his own cases,does not seem to hold good in all.
Of course it is mere guesswork to speculate on whatmay be the cause of the amnesias which lie at the bottomof changes in the Self. Changes of blood-supply havenaturally been invoked. Alternate action of the two hemisphereswas long ago proposed by Dr. Wigan in his bookon the Duality of the Mind. I shall revert to this explanationafter considering the third class of alterations of theSelf, those, namely, which I have called 'possessions.'
I have myself become quite recently acquainted withthe subject of a case of alternate personality of the 'ambulatory'[Pg 391]sort, who has given me permission to name him inthese pages.[316]
The Rev. Ansel Bourne, of Greene, R. I., was brought up to thetrade of a carpenter; but, in consequence of a sudden temporary loss,of sight and hearing under very peculiar circumstances, he became convertedfrom Atheism to Christianity just before his thirtieth year, andhas since that time for the most part lived the life of an itinerantpreacher. He has been subject to headaches and temporary fits of depressionof spirits during most of his life, and has had a few fits of unconsciousnesslasting an hour or less. He also has a region of somewhatdiminished cutaneous sensibility on the left thigh. Otherwise hishealth is good, and his muscular strength and endurance excellent.He is of a firm and self-reliant disposition, a man whose yea is yea andhis nay, nay; and his character for uprightness is such in the communitythat no person who knows him will for a moment admit thepossibility of his case not being perfectly genuine.
On January 17, 1887, he drew 551 dollars from a bank in Providencewith which to pay for a certain lot of land in Greene, paidcertain bills, and got into a Pawtucket horse-car. This is the lastincident which he remembers. He did not return home that day, andnothing was heard of him for two months. He was published in thepapers as missing, and foul play being suspected, the police sought invain his whereabouts. On the morning of March 14th, however, atNorristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown, whohad rented a small shop six weeks previously, stocked it with stationery,confectionery, fruit and small articles, and carried on his quiettrade without seeming to any one unnatural or eccentric, woke up ina fright and called in the people of the house to tell him where he was.He said that his name was Ansel Bourne, that he was entirely ignorantof Norristown, that he knew nothing of shop-keeping, and thatthe last thing he remembered—it seemed only yesterday—was drawingthe money from the bank, etc., in Providence. He would not believethat two months had elapsed. The people of the house thoughthim insane; and so, at first, did Dr. Louis H. Read, whom they calledin to see him. But on telegraphing to Providence, confirmatory messagescame, and presently his nephew, Mr. Andrew Harris, arrivedupon the scene, made everything straight, and took him home. He wasvery weak, having lost apparently over twenty pounds of flesh duringhis escapade, and had such a horror of the idea of the candy-store thathe refused to set foot in it again.
The first two weeks of the period remained unaccounted for, as hehad no memory, after he had once resumed his normal personality, ofany part of the time, and no one who knew him seems to have seen him[Pg 392]after he left home. The remarkable part of the change is, of course,the peculiar occupation which the so-called Brown indulged in. Mr.Bourne has never in his life had the slightest contact with trade.'Brown' was described by the neighbors as taciturn, orderly in hishabits, and in no way queer. He went to Philadelphia several times;replenished his stock; cooked for himself in the back shop, where healso slept; went regularly to church; and once at a prayer-meetingmade what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the courseof which he related an incident which he had witnessed in his naturalstate of Bourne.
This was all that was known of the case up to June 1890, when Iinduced Mr. Bourne to submit to hypnotism, so as to see whether, in thehypnotic trance, his 'Brown' memory would not come back. It did sowith surprising readiness; so much so indeed that it proved quite impossibleto make him whilst in the hypnosis remember any of the factsof his normal life. He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but "didn't knowas he had ever met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne hesaid that he had "never seen the woman before," etc. On the otherhand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight,[317] and gaveall sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole thing wasprosaic enough; and the Brown-personality seems to be nothing but arather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself.He gives no motive for the wandering except that there was 'troubleback there' and he 'wanted rest.' During the trance he looks old,the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow and weak,and he sits screening his eyes and trying vainly to remember what laybefore and after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm allhedged in," he says: "I can't get out at either end. I don't knowwhat set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know howI ever left that store, or what became of it." His eyes are practicallynormal, and all his sensibilities (save for tardier response) about thesame in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion, etc.,to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous,but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne'sskull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves.
The case (whether it contain an epileptic element or not) shouldapparently be classed as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance, persistingfor two months. The peculiarity of it is that nothing else like it everoccurred in the man's life, and that no eccentricity of character came[Pg 393]out. In most similar cases, the attacks recur, and the sensibilities andconduct markedly change.[318]
3. In 'mediumships' or 'possessions' the invasion and thepassing away of the secondary state are both relativelyabrupt, and the duration of the state is usually short—i.e.,from a few minutes to a few hours. Whenever the secondarystate is well developed no memory for aught that happenedduring it remains after the primary consciousnesscomes back. The subject during the secondary consciousnessspeaks, writes, or acts as if animated by a foreign person,and often names this foreign person and gives hishistory. In old times the foreign 'control' was usually ademon, and is so now in communities which favor that belief.With us he gives himself out at the worst for anIndian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage.Usually he purports to be the spirit of a dead personknown or unknown to those present, and the subject isthen what we call a 'medium.' Mediumistic possession inall its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special typeof alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in someform is by no means an uncommon gift, in persons who haveno other obvious nervous anomaly. The phenomena arevery intricate, and are only just beginning to be studiedin a proper scientific way. The lowest phase of mediumshipis automatic writing, and the lowest grade of that iswhere the Subject knows what words are coming, but feelsimpelled to write them as if from without. Then comeswriting unconsciously, even whilst engaged in reading ortalk. Inspirational speaking, playing on musical instruments,etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases ofpossession, in which the normal self is not excluded fromconscious participation in the performance, though theirinitiative seems to come from elsewhere. In the highestphase the trance is complete, the voice, language, and[Pg 394]everything are changed, and there is no after-memorywhatever until the next trance comes. One curious thingabout trance-utterances is their generic similarity in differentindividuals. The 'control' here in America is either agrotesque, slangy, and flippant personage ('Indian' controls,calling the ladies 'squaws,' the men 'braves,' thehouse a 'wigwam,' etc., etc., are excessively common); or,if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he abounds in acuriously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in whichphrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression,development, etc., keep recurring. It seems exactly as ifone author composed more than half of the trance-messages,no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether allsub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certainstratum of theZeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, Iknow not; but this is obviously the case with the secondaryselves which become 'developed' in spiritualist circles.There the beginnings of the medium trance are indistinguishablefrom effects of hypnotic suggestion. The subjectassumes the rôle of a medium simply because opinionexpects it of him under the conditions which are present;and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity proportionateto his histrionic gifts. But the odd thing is thatpersons unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often actin the same way when they become entranced, speak in thename of the departed, go through the motions of theirseveral death-agonies, send messages about their happyhome in the summer-land, and describe the ailments ofthose present. I have no theory to publish of these cases,several of which I have personally seen.
As an example of the automatic writing performances Iwill quote from an account of his own case kindly furnishedme by Mr. Sidney Dean of Warren, R I., member of Congressfrom Connecticut from 1855 to 1859, who has been allhis life a robust and active journalist, author, and man ofaffairs. He has for many years been a writing subject, andhas a large collection of manuscript automatically produced.
"Some of it," he writes us, "is in hieroglyph, or strange compoundedarbitrary characters, each series possessing a seeming unity in general[Pg 395]design or character, followed by what purports to be a translation orrendering into mother English. I never attempted the seemingly impossiblefeat of copying the characters. They were cut with the precisionof a graver's tool, and generally with a single rapid stroke of the pencil.Many languages, some obsolete and passed from history, are professedlygiven. To see them would satisfy you that no one could copythem except by tracing.
"These, however, are but a small part of the phenomena. The'automatic' has given place to theimpressional, and when the work isin progress I am in the normal condition, and seemingly two minds, intelligences,persons, are practically engaged. The writing is in my ownhand but the dictation not of my own mind and will, but that of another,upon subjects of which I can have no knowledge and hardly atheory; and I, myself, consciously criticise the thought, fact, mode ofexpressing it, etc., while the hand is recording the subject-matter andeven the words impressed to be written. IfI refuse to write the sentence,or even the word, the impression instantly ceases, and my willingnessmust be mentally expressed before the work is resumed, and itis resumed at the point of cessation, even if it should be in the middleof a sentence. Sentences are commenced without knowledge of mine asto their subject or ending. In fact, I have never known in advance thesubject of disquisition.
"There is in progress now, at uncertain times, not subject to mywill, a series of twenty-four chapters upon the scientific features of life,moral, spiritual, eternal. Seven have already been written in the mannerindicated. These were preceded by twenty-four chapters relatinggenerally to the life beyond material death, its characteristics, etc.Each chapter is signed by the name of some person who has lived onearth,—some with whom I have been personally acquainted, othersknown in history.... I know nothing of the alleged authorshipof any chapter until it is completed and the name impressed and appended....I am interested not only in the reputed authorship,—ofwhich I have nothing corroborative,—but in the philosophy taught,of which I was in ignorance until these chapters appeared. From mystandpoint of life—which has been that of biblical orthodoxy—thephilosophy is new, seems to be reasonable, and is logically put. I confessto an inability to successfully controvert it to my own satisfaction.
"It is an intelligentego who writes, or else the influence assumesindividuality, which practically makes of the influence a personality. Itisnot myself; of that I am conscious at every step of the process. Ihave also traversed the whole field of the claims of 'unconscious cerebration,'so called, so far as I am competent to critically examine it, andit fails, as a theory, in numberless points, when applied to this strangework through me. It would be far more reasonable and satisfactory forme to accept the silly hypothesis of re-incarnation,—the old doctrine ofmetempsychosis,—as taught by some spiritualists to-day, and to believethat I lived a former life here, and that once in a while it dominates my[Pg 396]intellectual powers, and writes chapters upon the philosophy of life, oropens a post-office for spirits to drop their effusions, and have themput into English script. No; the easiest and most natural solution tome is to admit the claim made, i.e., that it is a decarnated intelligencewho writes. Butwho? that is the question. The names of scholarsand thinkers who once lived are affixed to the most ungrammatical andweakest ofbosh....
"It seems reasonable to me—upon the hypothesis that it is a personusing another's mind or brain—that there must be more or less ofthat other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to theunseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, thefact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. For instance,while the influence is impressing my brain with the greatestforce and rapidity, so that my pencil fairly flies over the paper to recordthe thoughts, I am conscious that, in many cases, the vehicle of thethought, i.e., the language, is very natural and familiar to me, as if,somehow,my personality as a writer was getting mixed up with themessage. And, again, the style, language, everything, is entirelyforeign to my own style."
I am myself persuaded by abundant acquaintance withthe trances of one medium that the 'control' may be altogetherdifferent from anypossible waking self of the person.In the case I have in mind, it professes to be a certain departedFrench doctor; and is, I am convinced, acquaintedwith facts about the circumstances, and the living and deadrelatives and acquaintances, of numberless sitters whom themedium never met before, and of whom she has never heardthe names. I record my bare opinion here unsupported bythe evidence, not, of course, in order to convert anyone tomy view, but because I am persuaded that a serious studyof these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs ofpsychology, and think that my personal confession maypossibly draw a reader or two into a field which thesoi-disant'scientist' usually refuses to explore.
Many persons have found evidence conclusive to theirminds that in some cases the control is really the departedspirit whom it pretends to be. The phenomena shadeoff so gradually into cases where this is obviously absurd,that the presumption (quite apart froma priori 'scientific'prejudice) is great against its being true. The caseof Lurancy Vennum is perhaps as extreme a case of 'possession'[Pg 397]of the modern sort as one can find.[319] Lurancy wasa young girl of fourteen, living with her parents at Watseka,Ill., who (after various distressing hysterical disorders andspontaneous trances, during which she was possessed by departedspirits of a more or less grotesque sort) finally declaredherself to be animated by the spirit of Mary Roff (aneighbor's daughter, who had died in an insane asylumtwelve years before) and insisted on being sent 'home' to Mr.Roff's house. After a week of 'homesickness' and importunityon her part, her parents agreed, and the Roffs, whopitied her, and who were spiritualists into the bargain, tookher in. Once there, she seems to have convinced the familythat their dead Mary had exchanged habitations with Lurancy.Lurancy was said to be temporarily in heaven, andMary's spirit now controlled her organism, and lived againin her former earthly home.
"The girl, now in her new home, seemed perfectly happy and content,knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when inher original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and callingby name those who were friends and neighbors of the family from1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundredsof incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all theperiod of her sojourn at Mr. Roff's she had no knowledge of, and didnot recognize, any of Mr. Vennum's family, their friends or neighbors,yet Mr. and Mrs. Vennum and their children visited her and Mr. Roff'speople, she being introduced to them as to any strangers. After frequentvisits, and hearing them often and favorably spoken of, shelearned to love them as acquaintances, and visited them with Mrs. Roffthree times. From day to day she appeared natural, easy, affable, andindustrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her household duties,assisting in the general work of the family as a faithful, prudent daughtermight be supposed to do, singing, reading, or conversing as opportunityoffered, upon all matters of private or general interest to thefamily."
The so-called Mary whilst at the Roffs' would sometimes'go back to heaven,' and leave the body in a 'quiet trance,'i.e., without the original personality of Lurancy returning.After eight or nine weeks, however, the memory andmanner of Lurancy would sometimes partially, but not entirely,return for a few minutes. Once Lurancy seems to[Pg 398]have taken full possession for a short time. At last, aftersome fourteen weeks, conformably to the prophecy which'Mary' had made when she first assumed 'control,' shedeparted definitively and the Lurancy-consciousness cameback for good. Mr. Roff writes:
"She wanted me to take her home, which I did. She called me Mr.Roff, and talked with me as a young girl would, not being acquainted.I asked her how things appeared to her—if they seemed natural. Shesaid it seemed like a dream to her. She met her parents and brothersin a very affectionate manner, hugging and kissing each one in tears ofgladness. She clasped her arms around her father's neck a long time,fairly smothering him with kisses. I saw her father just now (eleveno'clock). He says she has been perfectly natural, and seems entirelywell."
Lurancy's mother writes, a couple of months later, thatshe was
"perfectly and entirely well and natural. For two or three weeks afterher return home, she seemed a little strange to what she had been beforeshe was taken sick last summer, but only, perhaps, the natural changethat had taken place with the girl, and except it seemed to her asthough she had been dreaming or sleeping, etc. Lurancy has beensmarter, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and morepolite than before. We give the credit of her complete cure and restorationto her family, to Dr. E. W. Stevens, and Mr. and Mrs. Roff, bytheir obtaining her removal to Mr. Roff's, where her cure was perfected.We firmly believe that, had she remained at home, she would have died,or we would have been obliged to send her to the insane asylum; andif so, that she would have died there; and further, that I could not havelived but a short time with the care and trouble devolving on me.Several of the relatives of Lurancy, including ourselves, now believeshe was cured by spirit power, and that Mary Roff controlled the girl."
Eight years later, Lurancy was reported to be marriedand a mother, and in good health. She had apparently outgrownthe mediumistic phase of her existence.[320]
On the condition of the sensibility during these invasions,few observations have been made. I have found thehands of two automatic writers anæsthetic during the act.[Pg 399]In two others I have found this not to be the case. Automaticwriting is usually preceded by shooting pains alongthe arm-nerves and irregular contractions of the arm-muscles.I have found one medium's tongue and lipsapparently insensible to pin-pricks during her (speaking)trance.
If we speculate on the brain-condition during all thesedifferent perversions of personality, we see that it must besupposed capable of successively changing all its modes ofaction, and abandoning the use for the time being of wholesets of well-organized association-paths. In no other waycan we explain the loss of memory in passing from onealternating condition to another. And not only this, butwe must admit that organized systems of paths can bethrown out of gear with others, so that the processes in onesystem give rise to one consciousness, and those of anothersystem to anothersimultaneously existing consciousness.Thus only can we understand the facts of automatic writing,etc., whilst the patient is out of trance, and the false anæsthesiasand amnesias of the hysteric type. But just whatsort of dissociation the phrase 'thrown out of gear' maystand for, we cannot even conjecture; only I think we oughtnot to talk of the doubling of the self as if it consisted inthe failure to combine on the part of certain systems ofideas which usually do so. It is better to talk ofobjectsusually combined, and which are now divided between thetwo 'selves,' in the hysteric and automatic cases in question.Each of the selves is due to a system of cerebralpaths acting by itself. If the brain acted normally, andthe dissociated systems came together again, we should geta new affection of consciousness in the form of a third 'Self'different from the other two, but knowing their objectstogether, as the result.—After all I have said in the lastchapter, this hardly needs further remark.
Some peculiarities in the lower automatic performancessuggest that the systems thrown out of gear with each otherare contained one in the right and the other in the lefthemisphere. The subjects, e.g., often write backwards, orthey transpose letters, or they write mirror-script. All these[Pg 400]are symptoms of agraphic disease. The left hand, if leftto its natural impulse, will in most people write mirror-scriptmore easily than natural script. Mr. F. W. H. Myershas laid stress on these analogies.[321] He has also calledattention to the usual inferior moral tone of ordinary planchettewriting. On Hughlings Jackson's principles, theleft hemisphere, being the more evolved organ, at ordinarytimes inhibits the activity of the right one; but Mr. Myerssuggests that during the automatic performances the usualinhibition may be removed and the right hemisphere setfree to act all by itself. This is very likely to some extentto be the case. But the crude explanation of 'two' selvesby 'two' hemispheres is of course far from Mr. Myers'sthought. The selves may be more than two, and the brain-systemsseverally used for each must be conceived as interpenetratingeach other in very minute ways.
To sum up now this long chapter. The consciousness ofSelf involves a stream of thought, each part of which as 'I'can 1) remember those which went before, and know thethings they knew; and 2) emphasize and care paramountlyfor certain ones among them as 'me,' andappropriate tothese the rest. The nucleus of the 'me' is always the bodilyexistence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remembered-past-feelingsresemble this present feeling are deemedto belong to the sameme with it. Whatever other thingsare perceived to beassociated with this feeling are deemedto form part of that me'sexperience; and of them certainones (which fluctuate more or less) are reckoned to bethemselvesconstituents of the me in a larger sense,—suchare the clothes, the material possessions, the friends, thehonors and esteem which the person receives or may receive.This me is an empirical aggregate of things objectivelyknown. TheI which knows them cannot itself be an[Pg 401]aggregate, neither for psychological purposes need it beconsidered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity likethe Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego, viewed as 'outof time.' It is aThought, at each moment different fromthat of the last moment, butappropriative of the latter,together with all that the latter called its own. All theexperiential facts find their place in this description, unencumberedwith any hypothesis save that of the existence ofpassing thoughts or states of mind. The same brain maysubserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting;but by what modifications in its action, or whetherultra-cerebral conditions may intervene, are questions whichcannot now be answered.
If anyone urge that I assign noreason why the successivepassing thoughts should inherit each other's possessions,or why they and the brain-states should be functions(in the mathematical sense) of each other, I reply that thereason, if there be any, must lie where all real reasons lie,in the total sense or meaning of the world. If there be sucha meaning, or any approach to it (as we are bound to trustthere is), it alone can make clear to us why such finitehuman streams of thought are called into existence insuch functional dependence upon brains. This is as muchas to say that the special natural science ofpsychology muststop with the mere functional formula.If the passing thoughtbe the directly verifiable existent which no school has hithertodoubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, andpsychology need not look beyond. The only pathway thatI can discover for bringing in a more transcendental thinkerwould be todeny that we have anydirect knowledge of thethought as such. The latter's existence would then bereduced to a postulate, an assertion that theremust be aknower correlative to all thisknown; and the problemwhothat knower is would have become a metaphysical problem.With the question once stated in these terms, the spiritualistand transcendentalist solutions must be consideredasprima facie on a par with our own psychological one,and discussed impartially. But that carries us beyond thepsychological or naturalistic point of view.
[257] See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze'sMicrocosmus, Eng. tr. vol. i, p. 592 ff.
[258] "Who filches from me my good name," etc.
[259] "He who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strongmotives on men ... seems little skilled in the nature and history of mankind;the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves chiefly,if not solely, by this law of fashion; and so they do that which keepsthem in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God or themagistrate. The penalties that attend the breach of God's laws some, nay,most, men seldom seriously reflect on; and amongst those that do, many,whilst they break the laws, entertain thoughts of future reconciliation,and making their peace for such breaches: and as to the punishments duefrom the laws of the commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselveswith the hope of impunity. But no man escapes the punishment oftheircensure and dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of thecompany he keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there onein ten thousand who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under theconstant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of astrange and unusual constitution who can content himself to live in constantdisgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. Solitude manymen have sought and been reconciled to; but nobody that has the leastthought or sense of a man about him can live in society under theconstant dislike and ill opinion of his familiars and those he converseswith. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he must bemade up of irreconcilable contradictions who can take pleasure in companyand yet be insensible of contempt and disgrace from his companions."(Locke's Essay, book ii, ch. xxviii, § 12.)
[260] For some farther remarks on these feelings of movement see thenext chapter.
[261] Wundt's account of Self-consciousness deserves to be compared withthis. What I have called 'adjustments' he calls processes of 'Apperception.'"In this development (of consciousness) one particular group of perceptsclaims a prominent significance, namely, those of which the springlies in ourselves. The images of feelings we get from our own body, andthe representations of our own movements distinguish themselves from allothers by forming apermanent group. As there are always some musclesin a state either of tension or of activity it follows that we never lack asense, either dim or clear, of the positions or movements of our body....This permanent sense, moreover, has this peculiarity, that we are aware ofour power at any moment voluntarily to arouse any one of its ingredients.We excite the sensations of movement immediately by such impulses of thewill as shall arouse the movements themselves; and we excite the visualand tactile feelings of our body by the voluntary movement of our organsof sense. So we come to conceive this permanent mass of feeling asimmediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it theconsciousness ofourself. This self-consciousness is, at the outset, thoroughly sensational,...only gradually the second-named of its characters, its subjection toour will, attains predominance. In proportion as the apperception of allour mental objects appears to us as an inward exercise of will, does ourself-consciousness begin both to widen itself and to narrow itself at thesame time. It widens itself in that every mental act whatever comes tostand in relation to our will; and it narrows itself in that it concentratesitself more and more upon the inner activity of apperception, over againstwhich our own body and all the representations connected with it appearas external objects, different from our proper self. This consciousness,contracted down to the process of apperception, we call our Ego; and theapperception of mental objects in general, may thus, after Leibnitz, bedesignated as the raising of them into our self-consciousness. Thus thenatural development of self-consciousness implicitly involves the mostabstract forms in which this faculty has been described in philosophy; onlyphilosophy is fond of placing the abstract ego at the outset, and so reversingthe process of development. Nor should we overlook the fact that thecompletely abstract ego [as pure activity], although suggested by thenatural development of our consciousness, is never actually found therein.The most speculative of philosophers is incapable of disjoining his egofrom those bodily feelings and images which form the incessant backgroundof his awareness of himself. The notion of his ego as such is, likeevery notion, derived from sensibility, for the process of apperception itselfcomes to our knowledge chiefly through those feelings of tension [what Ihave above called inward adjustments] which accompany it." (PhysiologischePsychologie, 2te Aufl. Bd. ii, pp. 217-19.)
[262] The only exception I know of is M. J. Souriau, in his importantarticle in the Revue Philosophique, vol. xxi, p. 449. M. Souriau's conclusionis 'que la conscience n'existe pas' (p. 472).
[263] See the excellent remarks by Prof. Bain on the 'Emotion of Power'in his 'Emotions and the Will.'
[264] Cf. Carlyle:Sartor Resartus, 'The Everlasting Yea.' "I tell thee,blockhead, it all comes of thy vanity; of what thou fanciest those samedeserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is mostlikely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservestto be hanged in a hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp....What act of legislature was there thatthou shouldst be happy? A littlewhile ago thou hadst no right tobe at all." etc., etc.
[265] T. W. Higginson's translation (1866), p. 105.
[266] "The usual mode of lessening the shock of disappointment or disesteemis to contract, if possible, a low estimate of the persons that inflict it.This is our remedy for the unjust censures of party spirit, as well as ofpersonal malignity." (Bain: Emotion and Will, p. 209.)
[267] It must be observed that the qualities of the Self thus ideally constitutedare all qualities approved by my actual fellows in the first instance;and that my reason for now appealing from their verdict to that of theideal judge lies in some outward peculiarity of the immediate case. Whatonce was admired in me as courage has now become in the eyes of men'impertinence'; what was fortitude is obstinacy; what was fidelity isnow fanaticism. The ideal judge alone, I now believe, can read myqualities, my willingnesses, my powers, for what they truly are. Myfellows, misled by interest and prejudice, have gone astray.
[268] Thekind of selfishness varies with the self that is sought. If it bethe mere bodily self; if a man grabs the best food, the warm corner, thevacant seat; if he makes room for no one, spits about, and belches in ourfaces,—we call it hoggishness. If it be the social self, in the form of popularityor influence, for which he is greedy, he may in material ways subordinatehimself to others as the best means to his end; and in this case he isvery apt to pass for a disinterested man. If it be the 'other-worldly' selfwhich he seeks, and if he seeks it ascetically,—even though he wouldrather see all mankind damned eternally than lose his individual soul,—'saintliness'will probably be the name by which his selfishness will becalled.
[269] Lotze, Med. Psych. 498-501; Microcosmos, bk. ii, chap. v, §§ 3, 4.
[270] Psychologische Analysen auf Physiologischer Grundlage. Theil ii,2te Hälfte, § 11. The whole section ought to be read.
[271] Professor Bain, in his chapter on 'Emotions of Self,' does scant justiceto the primitive nature of a large part of our self-feeling, and seems toreduce it to reflective self-estimation of this sober intellectual sort, whichcertainlymost of it is not. He says that when the attention is turnedinward upon self as a Personality, "we are putting forth towards ourselvesthe kind of exercise that properly accompanies our contemplation of otherpersons. We are accustomed to scrutinize the actions and conduct of thoseabout us, to set a highervalue upon one man than upon another, by comparingthe two; topity one in distress; to feelcomplacency towards a particularindividual; tocongratulate a man on some good fortune that itpleases us to see him gain; toadmire greatness or excellence as displayedby any of our fellows. All these exercises are intrinsically social, likeLove and Resentment; an isolated individual could never attain to them,nor exercise them. By what means, then, through what fiction [!] can weturn round and play them off upon self? Or how comes it that we obtainany satisfaction by putting self in the place of the other party? Perhapsthe simplest form of the reflected act is that expressed by Self-worth andSelf-estimation, based and begun upon observation of the ways and conductof our fellow-beings. We soon make comparisons among the individualsabout us; we see that one is stronger and does more work thananother, and, in consequence perhaps, receives more pay. We see oneputting forth perhaps more kindness than another, and in consequencereceiving more love. We see some individuals surpassing the rest in astonishingfeats, and drawing after them the gaze and admiration of a crowd.We acquire a series of fixed associations towards persons so situated; favorablein the case of the superior, and unfavorable to the inferior. To thestrong and laborious man we attach an estimate of greater reward, and feelthat to be in his place would be a happier lot than falls to others. Desiring,as we do, from the primary motives of our being, to possess good things,and observing these to come by a man's superior exertions, we feel a respectfor such exertion and a wish that it might be ours. We know that we alsoput forth exertions for our share of good things; and on witnessing others,we are apt to be reminded of ourselves and to make comparisons with ourselves,which comparisons derive their interest from the substantial consequences.Having thus once learned to look at other persons as performinglabors, greater or less, and as realizing fruits to accord; being,moreover, in all respects like our fellows,—we find it an exercise neitherdifficult nor unmeaning to contemplate self as doing work and receivingthe reward.... As we decide between one man and another,—which isworthier,... so we decide between self and all other men; being, however,in this decision under the bias of our own desires." A couple of pagesfarther on we read: "By the terms Self-complacency. Self-gratulation, isindicated a positive enjoyment in dwelling upon our own merits andbelongings. As in other modes, so here, the starting point is the contemplationof excellence or pleasing qualitiesin another person, accompaniedmore or less with fondness or love." Self-pity is also regarded by ProfessorBain, in this place, as an emotion diverted to ourselves from a more immediateobject, "in a manner that we may term fictitious and unreal.Still, as we can view self in the light of another person, we can feel towardsit the emotion of pity called forth by others in our situation."
This account of Professor Bain's is, it will be observed, a good specimenof the old-fashioned mode of explaining the several emotions as rapid calculationsof results, and the transfer of feeling from one object to another,associated by contiguity or similarity with the first. Zoological evolutionism,which came up since Professor Bain first wrote, has made us see, onthe contrary, that many emotions must beprimitively aroused by specialobjects. None are more worthy of being ranked primitive than the self-gratulationand humiliation attendant on our own successes and failures inthe main functions of life. We need no borrowed reflection for these feelings.Professor Bain's account applies to but that small fraction of ourself-feeling which reflective criticism can add to, or subtract from, thetotal mass.—Lotze has some pages on the modifications of our self-regardby universal judgments, in Microcosmus, book v, chap. v, § 5.
[272] "Also nur dadurch, dass ich ein Mannigfaltiges gegehener Vorstellungenineinem Bewusstsein verbinden kann, ist es möglich dass ich dieIdentität des Bewusstseins in diesenVorstellungen selbst vorstelle, d. h. dieanalytische Einheit der Apperception ist nur unter der Voraussetzung irgendeiner synthetischen möglich." In this passage (Kritik der reinen Vernunft,2te Aufl. § 16) Kant calls by the names of analytic and syntheticapperception what we here mean by objective and subjective synthesisrespectively. It were much to be desired that some one might invent agood pair of terms in which to record the distinction—those used in thetext are certainly very bad, but Kant's seem to me still worse. 'Categoricalunity' and 'transcendental synthesis' would also be good Kantian, buthardly good human, speech.
[273] So that we might say, by a sort of bad pun, "only a connected worldcan be known as disconnected." I say bad pun, because the point of viewshifts between the connectedness and the disconnectedness. The disconnectednessis of the realities known; the connectedness is of the knowledgeof them; and reality and knowledge of it are, from the psychologicalpoint of view held fast to in these pages, two different facts.
[274] Some subtle reader will object that the Thought cannot call any partof its Object 'I' and knit other parts on to it, without first knitting thatpart on toItself; and that it cannot knit it on to Itself without knowingItself;—so that our supposition (above,p. 304) that the Thought may conceivablyhave no immediate knowledge of Itself is thus overthrown. Towhich the reply is that we must take care not to be duped by words. ThewordsI andme signify nothing mysterious and unexampled—they are atbottom only names ofemphasis; and Thought is always emphasizingsomething. Within a tract of space which it cognizes, it contrasts aherewith athere; within a tract of time anow with athen; of a pair of thingsit calls onethis, the otherthat. I andthou, I andit, are distinctions exactlyon a par with these,—distinctions possible in an exclusivelyobjective field ofknowledge, the 'I' meaning for the Thought nothing but the bodily lifewhich it momentarily feels. The sense of my bodily existence, howeverobscurely recognized as such,may then be the absolute original of my consciousselfhood, the fundamental perception thatI am. All appropriationsmay be madeto it,by a Thought not at the moment immediately cognizedby itself. Whether these are not only logical possibilities but actual factsis something not yet dogmatically decided in the text.
[275] Metaphysik, § 245fin. This writer, who in his early work, the MedizinischePsychologie, was (to my reading) a strong defender of the Soul-Substancetheory, has written in §§ 243-5 of his Metaphysik the most beautifulcriticism of this theory which exists.
[276] On the empirical and transcendental conceptions of the self's unity,see Lotze, Metaphysic, § 244.
[277] Appendix to book i of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature.
[278] Herbart believed in the Soul, too; but for him the 'Self' of which weare 'conscious' is the empirical Self—not the soul.
[279] Compare again the remarks onpp. 158-162 above.
[280] System of Psychology (1884). vol. i, p. 114.
[281] 'Distinct only toobservation,' he adds. To whose observation? theoutside psychologist's, the Ego's, their own, or the plank's?Daraufkommt es an!
[282] Analysis, etc., J. S. Mill's Edition, vol. i, p. 331. The 'as it were'is delightfully characteristic of the school.
[283] J. Mill's Analysis, vol. ii, p. 175.
[284] Examination of Hamilton. 4th ed. p. 263.
[285] His chapter on the Psychological Theory of Mind is a beautiful case inpoint, and his concessions there have become so celebrated that they mustbe quoted for the reader's benefit. He ends the chapter with these words(loc. cit. p. 247): "The theory, therefore, which resolves Mind into a seriesof feelings, with a background of possibilities of feeling, can effectuallywithstand the most invidious of the arguments directed against it. Butgroundless as are the extrinsic objections, the theory has intrinsic difficultieswhich we have not set forth, and which it seems to me beyond thepower of metaphysical analysis to remove....
"The thread of consciousness which composes the mind's phenomenallife consist not only of present sensations, but likewise, in part, of memoriesand expectations. Now what are these? In themselves, they arepresent feelings, states of present consciousness, and in that respect not distinguishedfrom sensations. They all, moreover, resemble some given sensationsor feelings, of which we have previously had experience. But theyare attended with the peculiarity that each of them involves a belief inmore than its own present existence. A sensation involves only this; buta remembrance of sensation, even if not referred to any particular date, involvesthe suggestion and belief that a sensation, of which it is a copy orrepresentation, actually existed in the past; and an expectation involvesthe belief, more or less positive, that a sensation or other feeling to whichit directly refers will exist in the future. Nor can the phenomena involvedin these two states of consciousness be adequately expressed, withoutsaying that the belief they include is, that I myself formerly had, orthat I myself, and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensations rememberedor expected. The fact believed is, that the sensations did actually form, orwill hereafter form, part of the self-same series of states, or thread of consciousness,of which the remembrance or expectation of those sensations isthe part now present. If, therefore, we speak of the mind as a series offeelings we are obliged to complete the statement by calling it a series offeelings which is aware of itself as past and future; and we are reduced tothe alternative of believing that the mind, or Ego, is something differentfrom any series of feelings, or possibilities of them, or of accepting theparadox that something whichex hypothesi is but a series of feelings, canbe aware of itself as a series.
"The truth is, that we are here face to face with that final inexplicability,at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably arrive whenwe reach ultimate facts; and in general, one mode of stating it only appearsmore incomprehensible than another, because the whole of human languageis accommodated to the one, and is so incongruous with the otherthat it cannot be expressed in any terms which do not deny its truth. Thereal stumbling-block is perhaps not in any theory of the fact, but in the factitself. The true incomprehensibility perhaps is, that something which hasceased, or is not yet in existence, can still be, in a manner, present; that aseries of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or future, canbe gathered up, as it were, into a simple present conception, accompaniedby a belief of reality. I think by far the wisest thing we can do is to acceptthe inexplicable fact, without any theory of how it takes place; and whenwe are obliged to speak of it in terms which assume a theory, to use themwith a reservation as to their meaning."
In a later place in the same book (p. 561) Mill, speaking of what mayrightly be demanded of a theorist, says: "He is not entitled to frame atheory from one class of phenomena, extend it to another class whichit does not fit, and excuse himself by saying that if we cannot make it fit,it is because ultimate facts are inexplicable." The class of phenomenawhich the associationist school takes to frame its theory of the Ego are feelingsunaware of each other. The class of phenomena the Ego presents arefeelings of which the later ones are intensely aware of those that went before.The two classes do not 'fit,' and no exercise of ingenuity can evermake them fit. Noshuffling of unaware feelings can make them aware.To get the awareness we must openly beg it by postulating a new feelingwhich has it. This new feeling is no 'Theory' of the phenomena,but a simple statement of them; and as such I postulate in the text thepresent passing Thought as a psychic integer, with its knowledge of somuch that has gone before.
[286] Kritik d. reinen Vernunft, 2te Aufl. § 17.
[287] It must be noticed, in justice to what was said above onpage 274 ff.,that neither Kant nor his successors anywhere discriminate between thepresence of the apperceiving Ego to the combined object, and theawarenessby that Egoof its own presence and of its distinctness from what itapperceives. That the Object must be known to something whichthinks,and that it must be known to something whichthinks that it thinks, aretreated by them as identical necessities,—by what logic, does not appear.Kant tries to soften the jump in the reasoning by saying the thoughtof itselfon the part of the Ego need only bepotential—"the 'I think' mustbecapable of accompanying all other knowledge"—but a thought which isonly potential is actually no thought at all, which practically gives up thecase.
[288] "As regards the soul, now, or the 'I,' the 'thinker,' the whole drift ofKant's advance upon Hume and sensational psychology is towards thedemonstration that the subject of knowledge is anAgent." (G. S. Morris,Kant's Critique, etc. (Chicago, 1882), p. 224.)
[289] "In Kant's Prolegomena," says H. Cohen,—I do not myself find thepassage,—"it is expressly said that the problem is not to show how experiencearises (ensteht), but of what it consists (besteht)." (Kant's Theoried. Erfahrung (1871), p. 138.)
[290] The contrast between the Monism thus reached and our own psychologicalpoint of view can be exhibited schematically thus, the terms insquares standing for what, for us, are the ultimate irreducible data ofpsychological science, and the vincula above it symbolizing the reductionswhich post-Kantian idealism performs:
These reductions account for the ubiquitousness of the 'psychologist'sfallacy (bk. ii, ch. i, p. 32) in the modern monistic writings. Forus it isan unpardonable logical sin, when talking of a thought's knowledge (eitherof an object or of itself), to change the terms without warning, and, substitutingthe psychologist's knowledge therefor, still make as if we werecontinuing to talk of the same thing. For monistic idealism, this is thevery enfranchisement of philosophy, and of course cannot be too much indulgedin.
[291] T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, §§ 57, 61, 64.
[292]Loc. cit. § 64.
[293] E. Caird: Hegel (1883), p. 149.
[294] One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomime-state of mindand that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotionally considered, one and thesame thing. In the pantomime all common things are represented tohappen in impossible ways, people jump down each other's throats, housesturn inside out, old women become young men, everything 'passes intoits opposite' with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far fromproducing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder's mind. And so inthe Hegelian logic, relations elsewhere recognized under the insipid nameof distinctions (such as that between knower and object, many and one)must first be translated into impossibilities and contradictions, then 'transcended'and identified by miracle, ere the proper temper is induced forthoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show.
[295] The reader will please understand that I am quite willing to leave thehypothesis of the transcendental Ego as a substitute for the passingThought open to discussion ongeneral speculative grounds. Onlyin thisbook I prefer to stick by the common sense assumption that we have successiveconscious states, because all psychologists make it, and because onedoes not see how there can be a Psychology written which does not postulatesuch thoughts as its ultimate data. The data of all natural sciences becomein turn subjects of a critical treatment more refined than that whichthe sciences themselves accord; and so it may fare in the end with ourpassing Thought. We have ourselves seen (pp. 299-305) that thesensiblecertainty of its existence is less strong than is usually assumed. Myquarrel with the transcendental Egoists is mainly about theirgrounds fortheir belief. Did they consistently propose it as asubstitute for the passingThought, did they consistentlydeny the latter's existence, I should respecttheir position more. But so far as I can understand them, they habituallybelieve in the passing Thought also. They seem even to believe in theLockian stream of separate ideas, for the chief glory of the Ego in theirpages is always its power to 'overcome' this separateness and unite thenaturally disunited,'synthetizing,' 'connecting,' or 'relating' the ideastogether being used as synonyms, by transcendentalist writers, forknowingvarious objects at once. Not the being conscious at all, but the being consciousofmany things together is held to be the difficult thing, in our psychiclife, which only the wonder-working Ego can perform. But on whatslippery ground does one get the moment one changes the definite notionofknowing an object into the altogether vague one ofuniting or synthetizingthe ideas of its various parts!—In the chapter on Sensation we shall comeupon all this again.
[296] "When we compare the listless inactivity of the infant, slumberingfrom the moment at which he takes his milky food to the moment at whichhe wakes to require it again, with the restless energies of that mighty beingwhich he is to become in his maturer years, pouring truth after truth, inrapid and dazzling profusion, upon the world, or grasping in his single handthe destiny of empires, how few are the circumstances of resemblancewhich we can trace, of all that intelligence which is afterwards to be displayed;how little more is seen than what serves to give feeble motion tothe mere machinery of life!... Every age, if we may speak of manyages in the few years of human life, seems to be marked with a distinctcharacter. Each has its peculiar objects which excite lively affections; andin each, exertion is excited by affections, which in other periods terminatewithout inducing active desire. The boy finds a world in less space thanthat which bounds his visible horizon; he wanders over his range of fieldand exhausts his strength in the pursuit of objects which, in the years thatfollow, are seen only to be neglected; while to him the objects that areafterwards to absorb his whole soul are as indifferent as the objects of hispresent passions are destined then to appear.... How many opportunitiesmust every one have had of witnessing the progress of intellectualdecay, and the coldness that steals upon the once benevolent heart! Wequit our country, perhaps at an early period of life, and after an absence ofmany years we return with all the remembrances of past pleasure whichgrow more tender as they approach their objects. We eagerly seek him towhose paternal voice we have been accustomed to listen with the same reverenceas if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty,—who first ledus into knowledge, and whose image has been constantly joined in ourmind with all that veneration which does not forbid love. We find himsunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize us,—ignorantalike of the past and of the future, and living only in the sensibility ofanimal gratification. We seek the favorite companion of our childhood,whose tenderness of heart, etc.... We find him hardened into a man,meeting us scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of dissembled friendship—inhis general relations to the world careless of the miseryhe is not to feel....When we observe all this,... do we use only a metaphor of littlemeaning when we say of him that he is become a different person, and thathis mind and character are changed? In what does the identity consist?...The supposed test of identity, when applied to the mind in thesecases, completely fails. It neither affects, nor is affected, in the same mannerin the same circumstances. It therefore, if the test be a just one, isnot the same identical mind." (T. Brown: Lectures on the Philosophy ofthe Human Mind, 'on Mental Identity.')
[297] "Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which hismaid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silkstockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John's endued withsome degree of consciousness at every particular darning, they would havebeen sensible that they were the same individual pair of stockings both beforeand after the darning; and this sensation would have continued inthem through all the succession of darnings; and yet after the last of all,there was not perhaps one thread left of the first pair of stockings: butthey were grown to be silk stockings, as was said before." (Pope's MartinusScriblerus, quoted by Brown,ibid.)
[298] Hours of Work and Play, p. 100.
[299] For a careful study of the errors in narratives, see E. Gurney: Phantasmsof the Living, vol. i, pp. 126-158. In the Proceedings of theSociety for Psychical Research for May 1887 Mr. Richard Hodgson showsby an extraordinary array of instances how utterly inaccurate everyone'sdescription from memory of a rapid series of events is certain to be.
[300] See Josiah Royce (Mind, vol. 13, p. 244, and Proceedings of Am. Soc.of Psych. Research, vol. i, p. 366), for evidence that a certain sort of hallucinationof memory which he calls 'pseudo-presentiment' is no uncommonphenomenon.
[301] Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 85. The little that would be left of personalconsciousness ifall our senses stopped their work is ingenuouslyshown in the remark of the extraordinary anæsthetic youth whose caseProfessor Strümpell reports (in the Deutsches Archiv f. klin. Med., xxii,847, 1878). This boy, whom we shall later find instructive in many connections,was totally anæsthetic without and (so far as could be tested)within, save for the sight of one eye and the hearing of one ear. Whenhis eye was closed, he said: "Wenn ich nicht sehen kann, dabinich garnicht—I no longeram."
[302] "One can compare the state of the patient to nothing so well as tothat of a caterpillar, which, keeping all its caterpillar's ideas and remembrances,should suddenly become a butterfly with a butterfly's senses andsensations. Between the old and the new state, between the first self, thatof the caterpillar, and the second self, that of the butterfly, there is a deepscission, a complete rupture. The new feelings find no anterior series towhich they can knit themselves on; the patient can neither interpret noruse them; he does not recognize them; they are unknown. Hence twoconclusions, the first which consists in his saying,I no longer am; thesecond, somewhat later, which consists in his saying,I am another person."(H. Taine: de l'Intelligence, 3me édition (1878), p. 462).
[303] W. Griesinger: Mental Diseases, § 29.
[304] See the interesting case of 'old Stump' in the Proceedings of the Am.Soc. for Psych. Research, p. 552.
[305] De l'Intelligence, 3me édition (1878), vol. ii, note, p. 461. Krishaber'sbook (La Névropathie Cérébro-cardiaque, 1873) is full of similarobservations.
[306] Sudden alterations in outward fortune often produce such a changein the empiricalme as almost to amount to a pathological disturbance ofself-consciousness. When a poor man draws the big prize in a lottery, orunexpectedly inherits an estate; when a man high in fame is publiclydisgraced, a millionaire becomes a pauper, or a loving husband and fathersees his family perish at one fell swoop, there is temporarily such a rupturebetween all past habits, whether of an active or a passive kind, and theexigencies and possibilities of the new situation, that the individual mayfind no medium of continuity or association to carry him over from the onephase to the other of his life. Under these conditions mental derangementis no unfrequent result.
[307] The number of subjects who can do this with any fertility and exuberanceis relatively quite small.
[308] First in the Revue Scientifique for May 26, 1876, then in his book,Hypnotisme, Double Conscience, et Altérations de la Personnalité (Paris,1887).
[309] Der Hypnotismus (1884), pp. 109-15.
[310] Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, April 4,1888. Also, less complete, in Harper's Magazine, May 1860.
[311] Cf. Ribot's Diseases of Memory for cases. See also a large number ofthem in Forbes Winslow's Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind,chapters xiii-xvii.
[312] See the interesting account by M. J. Janet in the Revue Scientifique,May 19, 1888.
[313] Variations de la Personnalité (Paris, 1888).
[314]Op. cit. p. 84. In this work and in Dr. Azam's (cited on a previouspage), as well as in Prof. Th. Ribot's Maladies de la Personnalité (1885), thereader will find information and references relative to the other knowncases of the kind.
[315] His own brother's subject Wit...., although in her anæsthetic wakingstate she recollected nothing of either of her trances, yet remembered herdeeper trance (in which her sensibilities became perfect—see above,p. 207)when she was in her lighter trance. Nevertheless in the latter she was asanæsthetic as when awake. (Loc. cit. p. 619.)—It does not appear thatthere was any important difference in the sensibility of Félida X. betweenher two states—as far as one can judge from M. Azam's account she was tosome degree anæsthetic in both (op. cit. pp. 71, 96).—In the case of doublepersonality reported by M. Dufay (Revue Scientifique, vol. xviii, p. 69),the memory seems to have been best in the more anæsthetic condition.—Hypnoticsubjects made blind do not necessarily lose their visual ideas. Itappears, then, both that amnesias may occur without anæsthesias, and anæsthesiaswithout amnesias, though they may also occur in combination.Hypnotic subjects made blind by suggestion will tell you that they clearlyimagine the things which they can no longer see.
[316] A full account of the case, by Mr. R. Hodgson, will be found in theProceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for 1891.
[317] He had spent an afternoon in Boston, a night in New York, an afternoonin Newark, and ten days or more in Philadelphia, first in a certainhotel and next in a certain boarding-house, making no acquaintances, 'resting,'reading, and 'looking round.' I have unfortunately been unable toget independent corroboration of these details, as the hotel registers aredestroyed, and the boarding-house named by him has been pulled down.He forgets the name of the two ladies who kept it.
[318] The details of the case, it will be seen, are allcompatible with simulation.I can only say of that, that no one who has examined Mr. Bourne(including Dr. Read, Dr. Weir Mitchell, Dr. Guy Hinsdale, and Mr. R.Hodgson) practically doubts his ingrained honesty, nor, so far as I candiscover, do any of his personal acquaintances indulge in a sceptical view.
[319] The Watseka Wonder, by E. W. Stevens. Chicago, Religio-PhilosophicalPublishing House, 1887.
[320] My friend Mr. R. Hodgson informs me that he visited Watseka inApril 1890, and cross-examined the principal witnesses of this case. Hisconfidence in the original narrative was strengthened by what he learned;and various unpublished facts were ascertained, which increased the plausibilityof the spiritualistic interpretation of the phenomenon.
[321] See his highly important series of articles on Automatic Writing, etc.,in the Proceedings of the Soc. for Psych. Research, especially Article ii(May 1885). Compare also Dr. Maudsley's instructive article in Mind,vol. xiv, p. 161, and Luys's essay, 'Sur le Dédoublement,' etc., inl'Encéphale for 1889.
Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual presenceof selective attention has received hardly any noticefrom psychologists of the English empiricist school. TheGermans have explicitly treated of it, either as a faculty oras a resultant, but in the pages of such writers as Locke,Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the word hardlyoccurs, or if it does so, it is parenthetically and as if by inadvertence.[322]The motive of this ignoring of the phenomenonof attention is obvious enough. These writers are bent onshowing how the higher faculties of the mind are pureproducts of 'experience;' and experience is supposed to beof something simplygiven. Attention, implying a degreeof reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through thecircle of pure receptivity which constitutes 'experience,'and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of interferingwith the smoothness of the tale.
But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees howfalse a notion of experience that is which would make ittantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outwardorder. Millions of items of the outward order arepresent to my senses which never properly enter into myexperience. Why? Because they have nointerest for me.My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those itemswhich Inotice shape my mind—without selective interest,experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accentand emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground—intelligibleperspective, in a word. It varies in every[Pg 403]creature, but without it the consciousness of every creaturewould be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible forus even to conceive. Such an empiricist writer as Mr.Spencer, for example, regards the creature as absolutelypassive clay, upon which 'experience' rains down. Theclay will be impressed most deeply where the drops fallthickest, and so the final shape of the mind is moulded.Give time enough, and all sentient things ought, at thisrate, to end by assuming an identical mental constitution—for'experience,' the sole shaper, is a constant fact, and theorder of its items must end by being exactly reflected bythe passive mirror which we call the sentient organism.If such an account were true, a race of dogs bred for generations,say in the Vatican, with characters of visual shape,sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every varietyof form and combination, ought to discriminate beforelong the finest shades of these peculiar characters.In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, accomplishedconnoisseurs of sculpture. Anyone may judgeof the probability of this consummation. Surely an eternityof experience of the statues would leave the dog as inartisticas he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to knithis discriminations on to. Meanwhile the odors at the basesof the pedestals would have organized themselves in theconsciousness of this breed of dogs into a system of 'correspondences'to which the most hereditary caste ofcustodiwould never approximate, merely because to them, ashuman beings, the dog's interest in those smells wouldfor ever be an inscrutable mystery. These writers have,then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective interestmay, by laying its weighty index-finger on particularitems of experience, so accent them as to give to the leastfrequent associations far more power to shape our thoughtthan the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself,though its genesis is doubtless perfectlynatural, makes experiencemore than it is made by it.
Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possessionby the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out ofwhat seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains[Pg 404]of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousnessare of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some thingsin order to deal effectively with others, and is a conditionwhich has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter-brainedstate which in French is calleddistraction, andZerstreutheitin German.
We all know this latter state, even in its extreme degree.Most people probably fall several times a day into a fitof something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, thesounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attentionis dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, atonce, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if byanything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to theempty passing of time. In the dim background of ourmind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: gettingup, dressing ourselves, answering the person who hasspoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning.But somehow we cannotstart; thepensée de derrière latête fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our stateabout. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for weknow no reason why it should continue. But it does continue,pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—alsowithout reason that we can discover—an energy is given,something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselvestogether, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, thebackground-ideas become effective, and the wheels of lifego round again.
This curious state of inhibition can for a few moments beproduced at will by fixing the eyes on vacancy. Some personscan voluntarily empty their minds and 'think of nothing.'With many, as Professor Exner remarks of himself,this is the most efficacious means of falling asleep. It isdifficult not to suppose something like this scattered conditionof mind to be the usual state of brutes when notactively engaged in some pursuit. Fatigue, monotonousmechanical occupations that end by being automaticallycarried on, tend to produce it in men. It is not sleep; andyet when aroused from such a state, a person will oftenhardly be able to say what he has been thinking aboutSubjects of the hypnotic trance seem to lapse into it when[Pg 405]left to themselves; asked what they are thinking of, theyreply, 'of nothing particular'![323]
The abolition of this condition is what we call the awakeningof the attention. One principal object comes theninto the focus of consciousness, others are temporarily suppressed.The awakening may come about either by reasonof a stimulus from without, or in consequence of someunknown inner alteration; and the change it brings with itamounts to a concentration upon one single object withexclusion of aught besides, or to a condition anywhere betweenthis and the completely dispersed state.
The question ofthe 'span' of consciousness has often beenasked and answered—sometimesa priori, sometimes by experiment.This seems the proper place for us to touchupon it; and our answer, according to the principles laiddown inChapter IX, will not be difficult. The number ofthings we may attend to is altogether indefinite, dependingon the power of the individual intellect, on the form of theapprehension, and on what the things are. When apprehendedconceptually as a connected system, their numbermay be very large. But however numerous the things, theycan only be known in a single pulse of consciousness forwhich they form one complex 'object' (p. 276 ff.), so thatproperly speaking there is before the mind at no time aplurality ofideas, properly so called.
The 'unity of the soul' has been supposed by many[Pg 406]philosophers, who also believed in the distinct atomic natureof 'ideas,' to preclude the presence to it of more thanone objective fact, manifested in one idea, at a time. EvenDugald Stuart opines that everyminimum visibile of a picturedfigure
"constitutes just as distinct an object of attention to the mind as if itwere separated by an interval of empty space from the rest.... Itis impossible for the mind to attend to more than one of these points atonce; and as the perception of the figure implies a knowledge of therelative situation of the different points with respect to each other, wemust conclude that the perception of figure by the eye is the result ofa number of different acts of attention. These acts of attention, however,are performed with such rapidity, that the effect, with respect tous, is the same as if the perception were instantaneous."[324]
Such glaringly artificial views can only come from fantasticmetaphysics or from the ambiguity of the word 'idea,'which, standing sometimes for mental state and sometimesfor thing known, leads men to ascribe to the thing, notonly the unity which belongs to the mental state, but eventhe simplicity which is thought to reside in the Soul.
When the things are apprehended by thesenses, thenumber of them that can be attended to at once is small,"Pluribus intentus, minor est ad singula sensus."
"By Charles Bonnet the Mind is allowed to have a distinct notion ofsix objects at once; by Abraham Tucker the number is limited to four;while Destutt Tracy again amplifies it to six. The opinion of the firstand last of these philosophers" [continues Sir Wm. Hamilton] "seemsto me correct. You can easily make the experiments for yourselves,but you must beware of grouping the objects into classes. If youthrow a handful of marbles on the floor, you will find it difficult toview at once more than six, or seven at most, without confusion; butif you group them into twos, or threes, or fives, you can comprehend asmany groups as you can units; because the mind considers thesegroups only as units—it views them as wholes, and throws their partsout of consideration."[325]
Professor Jevons, repeating this observation, by countinginstantaneously beans thrown into a box, found thatthe number 6 was guessed correctly 120 times out of 147, 5correctly 102 times out of 107, and 4 and 3 always right.[326][Pg 407]It is obvious that such observations decide nothing at allabout our attention, properly so called. They rather measurein part the distinctness of our vision—especially of theprimary-memory-image[327]—in part the amount of associationin the individual between seen arrangements and the namesof numbers.[328]
Each number-name is a way of grasping the beans asone total object. In such a total object, all the parts convergeharmoniously to the one resultant concept; no singlebean has special discrepant associations of its own;and so, withpractice, they may grow quite numerous erewe fail to estimate them aright. But where the 'object' before[Pg 408]us breaks into parts disconnected with each other, andforming each as it were a separate object or system, notconceivable in union with the rest, it becomes harder toapprehend all these parts at once, and the mind tends tolet go of one whilst it attends to another. Still, withinlimits this can be done. M. Paulhan has experimentedcarefully on the matter by declaiming one poem aloudwhilst he repeated a different one mentally, or by writingone sentence whilst speaking another, or by performingcalculations on paper whilst reciting poetry.[329] He foundthat
"the most favorable condition for the doubling of the mind was itssimultaneous application to two easy and heterogeneous operations.Two operations of the same sort, two multiplications, two recitations, orthe reciting one poem and writing another, render the process moreuncertain and difficult."
The attention often, but not always, oscillates duringthese performances; and sometimes a word from one partof the task slips into another. I myself find when I try tosimultaneously recite one thing and write another that thebeginning of each word or segment of a phrase is what requiresthe attention. Once started, my pen runs on for aword or two as if by its own momentum. M. Paulhancompared the time occupied by the same two operationsdone simultaneously or in succession, and found that therewas often a considerable gain of time from doing themsimultaneously. For instance:
"I write the first four verses of Athalie, whilst reciting eleven ofMusset. The whole performance occupies 40 seconds. But recitingalone takes 22 and writing alone 31, or 53 altogether, so that there is adifference in favor of the simultaneous operations."
Or again:
"I multiply 421 312 212 by 2; the operation takes 6 seconds; therecitation of 4 verses also takes 6 seconds. But the two operationsdone at once only take 6 seconds, so that there is no loss of time fromcombining them."
Of course these time-measurements lack precision.With three systems of object (writing witheach hand whilstreciting) the operation became much more difficult.
If, then, by the original question, how many ideas orthings can we attend to at once, be meant how many entirelydisconnected systems or processes of conception can go onsimultaneously, the answer is,not easily more than one,unless the processes are very habitual; but then two, oreven three, without very much oscillation of the attention.Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in thestory of Julius Cæsar dictating four letters whilst he writesa fifth,[330] there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind fromone to the next, and no consequent gain of time. Withinany one of the systems the parts may be numberless, butwe attend to them collectively when we conceive the wholewhich they form.
When the things to be attended to are small sensations,and when the effort is to be exact in noting them, it isfound that attention to one interferes a good deal with theperception of the other. A good deal of fine work has beendone in this field, of which I must give some account.
It has long been noticed, when expectant attention isconcentrated upon one of two sensations, that the otherone is apt to be displaced from consciousness for a momentand to appear subsequent; although in reality the two mayhave been contemporaneous events. Thus, to use the stockexample of the books, the surgeon would sometimes seethe blood flow from the arm of the patient whom he wasbleeding,before he saw the instrument penetrate the skin.Similarly the smith may see the sparks flybefore he seesthe hammer smite the iron, etc. There is thus a certaindifficulty in perceiving the exactdate of two impressionswhen they do not interest our attention equally, and whenthey are of a disparate sort.
Professor Exner, whose experiments on theminimal perceptiblesuccession in time of two sensations we shall have toquote in another chapter, makes some noteworthy remarksabout the way in which the attention must beset to catchthe interval and the right order of the sensations, when thetime is exceeding small. The point was to tell whether[Pg 410]two signals were simultaneous or successive; and, if successive,which one of them came first.
The first way of attending which he found himself tofall into, was when the signals did not differ greatly—when,e.g., they were similar sounds heard each by a differentear. Here he lay in wait for thefirst signal, whicheverit might be, and identified it the next moment in memory.The second, which could then always be known by default,was often not clearly distinguished in itself. When thetime was too short, the first could not be isolated from thesecond at all.
The second way was to accommodate the attention for acertainsort of signal, and the next moment to become awarein memory of whether it came before or after its mate.
"This way brings great uncertainty with it. The impression notprepared for comes to us in the memory more weak than the other,obscure as it were, badly fixed in time. We tend to take the subjectivelystronger stimulus, that which we were intent upon, for the first,just as we are apt to take an objectively stronger stimulus to be thefirst. Still, it may happen otherwise. In the experiments from touchto sight it often seemed to me as if the impression for which the attentionwasnot prepared were there already when the other came."
Exner found himself employing this method oftenestwhen the impressions differed strongly.[331]
In such observations (which must not be confoundedwith those where the two signals were identical and theirsuccessiveness known as meredoubleness, without distinctionof which came first), it is obvious that each signal mustcombine stably in our perception with adifferent instant oftime. It is the simplest possible case of two discrepantconcepts simultaneously occupying the mind. Now the caseof the signals beingsimultaneous seems of a different sort.We must turn to Wundt for observations fit to cast a nearerlight thereon.
The reader will remember the reaction-time experimentsof which we treated inChapter III. It happened occasionallyin Wundt's experiments that the reaction-time wasreduced to zero or even assumed a negative value, which,being translated into common speech, means that the observer[Pg 411]was sometimes so intent upon the signal that hisreactionactually coincided in time with it, or even preceded it,instead of coming a fraction of a second after it, as in thenature of things it should. More will be said of these resultsanon. Meanwhile Wundt, in explaining them, saysthis:
"In generalwe have a very exact feeling of the simultaneity of twostimuli, if they do not differ much in strength. And in a series of experimentsin which a warning precedes, at a fixed interval, the stimulus,we involuntarily try to react, not only as promptly as possible,but also in such wise that our movement may coincide with the stimulusitself. We seek to make our own feelings of touch and innervation[muscular contraction] objectivelycontemporaneous with the signalwhich we hear; and experience shows that in many cases we approximatelysucceed. In these cases we have a distinct consciousness ofhearing the signal, reacting upon it, and feeling our reaction takeplace,—all at one and the same moment."[332]
In another place, Wundt adds:
"The difficulty of these observations and the comparative infrequencywith which the reaction-time can be made thus to disappear shows howhard it is, when our attention is intense, to keep it fixed even ontwodifferent ideas at once. Note besides that when this happens, onealways tries to bring the ideas into a certain connection, to grasp themas components of a certain complex representation. Thus in the experimentsin question, it has often seemed to me that I produced bymy own recording movement the sound which the ball made in droppingon the board."[333]
The 'difficulty,' in the cases of which Wundt speaks, isthat of forcing two non-simultaneous events into apparentcombination with the same instant of time. There is nodifficulty, as he admits, in so dividing our attention betweentworeally simultaneous impressions as to feel themto be such. The cases he describes are really cases ofanachronistic perception, of subjective time-displacement,to use his own term. Still more curious cases of it havebeen most carefully studied by him. They carry us a stepfarther in our research, so I will quote them, using as faras possible his exact words:
"The conditions become more complicated when we receive a seriesof impressions separated by distinct intervals, into the midst of which[Pg 412]a heterogeneous impression is suddenly brought. Then comes thequestion, with which member of the series do we perceive the additionalimpression to coincide? with that member with whose presence itreally coexists, or is there some aberration?... If the additionalstimulus belongs to a different sense very considerable aberrations mayoccur.
"The best way to experiment is with a number of visual impressions(which one can easily get from a moving object) for the series, andwith a sound as the disparate impression. Let, e.g., an index-handmove over a circular scale with uniform and sufficiently slow velocity,so that the impressions it gives will not fuse, but permit its position atany instant to be distinctly seen. Let the clockwork which turns ithave an arrangement which rings a bell once in every revolution, butat a point which can be varied, so that the observer need never knowin advance just when the bell-stroke takes place. In such observationsthree cases are possible. The bell-stroke can be perceived either exactlyat the moment to which the index points when it sounds—in thiscase there will be no time-displacement; or we can combine it with alater position of the index—...positive time-displacement, as weshall call it; or finally we can combine it with a position of the indexearlier than that at which the sound occurred—and this we will call anegative displacement. The most natural displacement would apparentlybe the positive, since for apperception a certain time is always required....But experience shows that the opposite is the case: ithappens most frequently that the sound appears earlier than its realdate—far less often coincident with it, or later. It should be observedthat in all these experiments it takes some time to get a distinctly perceivedcombination of the sound with a particular position of the index,and that a single revolution of the latter is never enough for thepurpose. The motion must go on long enough for the sounds themselvesto form a regular series—the outcome being a simultaneous perceptionof two distinct series of events, of which either may by changesin its rapidity modify the result. The first thing one remarks is thatthe sound belongs in a certain region of the scale; only gradually is itperceived to combine with a particular position of the index. But evena result gained by observation of many revolutions may be deficient incertainty, for accidental combinations of attention have a great influenceupon it. If we deliberately try to combine the bell-stroke withan arbitrarily chosen position of the index, we succeed without difficulty,provided this position be not too remote from the true one. If,again, we cover the whole scale, except a single division over which wemay see the index pass, we have a strong tendency to combine thebell-stroke with this actually seen position; and in so doing may easilyoverlook more than 1/4 of a second of time. Results, therefore, to be ofany value, must be drawn from long-continued and very numerous observations,in which such irregular oscillations of the attention neutralizeeach other according to the law of great numbers, and allow the[Pg 413]true laws to appear. Although my own experiments extend over manyyears (with interruptions), they are not even yet numerous enough to exhaustthe subject—still, they bring out the principal laws which theattention follows under such conditions."[334]
Wundt accordingly distinguishes thedirection from theamount of the apparent displacement in time of the bell-stroke.The direction depends on the rapidity of themovement of the index and (consequently) on that of thesuccession of the bell-strokes. The moment at which thebell struck was estimated by him with the least tendencyto error, when the revolutions took place once in a second.Faster than this,positive errors began to prevail; slower,negative ones almost always were present. On the otherhand, if the rapidity wentquickening, errors becamenegative;ifslowing, positive. The amount of error is, in general,the greater the slower the speed and its alterations.Finally, individual differences prevail, as well as differencesin the same individual at different times.[335]
Wundt's pupil von Tschisch has carried out these experimentson a still more elaborate scale,[336] using, not onlythe single bell-stroke, but 2, 3, 4, or 5 simultaneous impressions,so that the attention had to note the place of theindex at the moment when a whole group of things washappening. The single bell-stroke was always heard tooearly by von Tschisch—the displacement was invariably'negative.' As the other simultaneous impressions wereadded, the displacement first became zero and finally positive,i.e. the impressions were connected with a position ofthe index that was too late. This retardation was greaterwhen the simultaneous impressions were disparate (electrictactile stimuli on different places, simple touch-stimuli,different sounds) than when they were all of the same sort.The increment of retardation became relatively less witheach additional impression, so that it is probable that siximpressions would have given almost the same result asfive, which was the maximum number used by Herr von T.
Wundt explains all these results by his previous observationthat a reaction sometimes antedates the signal (seeabove,p. 411). The mind, he supposes, is so intent uponthe bell-strokes that its 'apperception' keeps ripeningperiodically after each stroke in anticipation of the next.Its most natural rate of ripening may be faster or slowerthan the rate at which the strokes come. If faster, then ithears the stroke too early; if slower, it hears it too late.The position of the index on the scale, meanwhile, is notedat the moment, early or late, at which the bell-stroke issubjectively heard. Substituting several impressions for[Pg 415]the single bell-stroke makes the ripening of the perceptionslower, and the index is seen too late. So, at least, do Iunderstand the explanations which Herren Wundt and v.Tschisch give.[337]
This is all I have to say about the difficulty of havingtwo discrepant concepts together, and about the number ofthings to which we can simultaneously attend.
The things to which we attend are said tointerest us.Our interest in them is supposed to be thecause of our attending.What makes an object interesting we shall seepresently; and later inquire in what sense interest maycause attention. Meanwhile
Attention may be divided into kinds in various ways.It is either to
a) Objects of sense (sensorial attention); or to
b) Ideal or represented objects (intellectual attention).It is either
c) Immediate; or
d) Derived: immediate, when the topic or stimulus isinteresting in itself, without relation to anything else; derived,when it owes its interest to association with someother immediately interesting thing. What I call derivedattention has been named 'apperceptive' attention. Furthermore,Attention may be either
e) Passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless; or
f) Active and voluntary.
Voluntary attention is always derived; we never make aneffort to attend to an object except for the sake of someremoteinterest which the effort will serve. But both sensorial andintellectual attention may be either passive or voluntary.
Inpassive immediate sensorial attention the stimulus is asense-impression, either very intense, voluminous, or sudden,—inwhich case it makes no difference what its nature[Pg 417]may be, whether sight, sound, smell, blow, or inner pain,—orelse it is aninstinctive stimulus, a perception which, byreason of its nature rather than its mere force, appeals tosome one of our normal congenital impulses and has adirectly exciting quality. In the chapter on Instinct weshall see how these stimuli differ from one animal to another,and what most of them are in man: strange things, movingthings, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, metallicthings, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.
Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimulicharacterizes the attention of childhood and youth. Inmature age we have generally selected those stimuli whichare connected with one or more so-called permanent interests,and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest.[338]But childhood is characterized by great active energy, andhas few organized interests by which to meet new impressionsand decide whether they are worthy of notice or not,and the consequence is that extreme mobility of the attentionwith which we are all familiar in children, and whichmakes their first lessons such rough affairs. Any strongsensation whatever produces accommodation of the organswhich perceive it, and absolute oblivion, for the time being,of the task in hand. This reflex and passive character ofthe attention which, as a French writer says, makes thechild seem to belong less to himself than to every objectwhich happens to catch his notice, is the first thing whichthe teacher must overcome. It never is overcome in somepeople, whose work, to the end of life, gets done in theinterstices of their mind-wandering.
The passive sensorial attention isderived when theimpression, without being either strong or of an instinctivelyexciting nature, is connected by previous experience andeducation with things that are so. These things may becalled themotives of the attention. The impression drawsan interest from them, or perhaps it even fuses into a singlecomplex object with them; the result is that it is broughtinto the focus of the mind. A faint tapper se is not aninteresting sound; it may well escape being discriminated[Pg 418]from the general rumor of the world. But when it is asignal, as that of a lover on the window-pane, it will hardlygo unperceived. Herbart writes:
"How a bit of bad grammar wounds the ear of the purist! How afalse note hurts the musician! or an offence against good manners theman of the world! How rapid is progress in a science when its firstprinciples have been so well impressed upon us that we reproduce themmentally with perfect distinctness and ease! How slow and uncertain, onthe other hand, is our learning of the principles themselves, whenfamiliarity with the still more elementary percepts connected with thesubject has not given us an adequate predisposition!—Apperceptiveattention may be plainly observed in very small children when, hearingthe speech of their elders, as yet unintelligible to them, they suddenlycatch a single known word here and there, and repeat it to themselves;yes! even in the dog who looks round at us when we speak of him andpronounce his name. Not far removed is the talent which mind-wanderingschool-boys display during the hours of instruction, of noticingevery moment in which the teacher tells a story. I remember classesin which, instruction being uninteresting, and discipline relaxed, a buzzingmurmur was always to be heard, which invariably stopped for aslong a time as an anecdote lasted. How could the boys, since theyseemed to hear nothing, notice when the anecdote began? Doubtlessmost of them always heard something of the teacher's talk; but most ofit had no connection with their previous knowledge and occupations,and therefore the separate words no sooner entered their consciousnessthan they fell out of it again; but, on the other hand, no sooner did thewords awaken old thoughts, forming strongly-connected series withwhich the new impression easily combined, than out of new and oldtogether a total interest resulted which drove the vagrant ideas belowthe threshold of consciousness, and brought for a while settled attentioninto their place."[339]
Passive intellectual attention is immediate when we followin thought a train of images exciting or interestingper se;derived, when the images are interesting only as means to aremote end, or merely because they are associated withsomething which makes them dear. Owing to the way inwhich immense numbers of real things become integratedinto single objects of thought for us, there is no clear lineto be drawn between immediate and derived attention ofan intellectual sort. When absorbed in intellectual attentionwe may become so inattentive to outer things as to be[Pg 419]'absent-minded,' 'abstracted,' or 'distraits.' All revery orconcentrated meditation is apt to throw us into this state.
"Archimedes, it is well known, was so absorbed in geometrical meditationthat he was first aware of the storming of Syracuse by his owndeath-wound, and his exclamation on the entrance of the Roman soldierswas:Noli turbare circulos meos! In like manner Joseph Scaliger,the most learned of men, when a Protestant student in Paris, was soengrossed in the study of Homer that he became aware of the massacreof St. Bartholomew, and of his own escape, only on the day subsequentto the catastrophe. The philosopher Carneades was habitually liable tofits of meditation so profound that, to prevent him sinking frominanition, his maid found it necessary to feed him like a child. Andit is reported of Newton that, while engaged in his mathematical researches,he sometimes forgot to dine. Cardan, one of the most illustriousof philosophers and mathematicians, was once, upon a journey,so lost in thought that he forgot both his way and the object of hisjourney. To the questions of his driver whether he should proceed, hemade no answer; and when he came to himself at nightfall, he was surprisedto find the carriage at a standstill, and directly under a gallows.The mathematician Vieta was sometimes so buried in meditation thatfor hours he bore more resemblance to a dead person than to a living,and was then wholly unconscious of everything going on around him.On the day of his marriage the great Budæus forgot everything in hisphilological speculations, and he was only awakened to the affairs of theexternal world by a tardy embassy from the marriage-party, who foundhim absorbed in the composition of hisCommentarii."[340]
The absorption may be so deep as not only to banishordinary sensations, but even the severest pain. Pascal,Wesley, Robert Hall, are said to have had this capacity.Dr. Carpenter says of himself that
"he has frequently begun a lecture whilst suffering neuralgic pain sosevere as to make him apprehend that he would find it impossible toproceed; yet no sooner has he by a determined effort fairly launchedhimself into the stream of thought, than he has found himself continuouslyborne along without the least distraction, until the end hascome, and the attention has been released; when the pain has recurredwith a force that has overmastered all resistance, making himwonder how he could have ever ceased to feel it."[341]
Dr. Carpenter speaks of launching himself by a determinedeffort. This effort characterizes what we called[Pg 420]active or voluntary attention. It is a feeling which every oneknows, but which most people would call quite indescribable.We get it in the sensorial sphere whenever we seekto catch an impression of extremefaintness, be it of sight,hearing, taste, smell, or touch; we get it whenever we seektodiscriminate a sensation merged in a mass of others thatare similar; we get it whenever weresist the attractions ofmore potent stimuli and keep our mind occupied withsome object that is naturally unimpressive. We get it inthe intellectual sphere under exactly similar conditions:as when we strive to sharpen and make distinct an ideawhich we but vaguely seem to have; or painfully discriminatea shade of meaning from its similars; or resolutelyhold fast to a thought so discordant with our impulsesthat, if left unaided, it would quickly yield place to imagesof an exciting and impassioned kind. All forms of attentiveeffort would be exercised at once by one whom wemight suppose at a dinner-party resolutely to listen to aneighbor giving him insipid and unwelcome advice in alow voice, whilst all around the guests were loudly laughingand talking about exciting and interesting things.
There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained formore than a few seconds at a time. What is called sustainedvoluntary attention is a repetition of successive effortswhich bring back the topic to the mind.[342] The topic oncebrought back, if a congenial one,develops; and if its developmentis interesting it engages the attention passivelyfor a time. Dr. Carpenter, a moment back, described thestream of thought, once entered, as 'bearing him along.'This passive interest may be short or long. As soon as itflags, the attention is diverted by some irrelevant thing, andthen a voluntary effort may bring it back to the topicagain; and so on, under favorable conditions, for hours together.During all this time, however, note that it is not[Pg 421]an identicalobject in the psychological sense (p. 275), but asuccession of mutually related objects forming an identicaltopic only, upon which the attention is fixed.No one canpossibly attend continuously to an object that does not change.
Now there are always some objects that for the timebeingwill not develop. They simplygo out; and to keepthe mind upon anything related to them requires such incessantlyrenewed effort that the most resolute Will ere longgives out and lets its thoughts follow the more stimulatingsolicitations after it has withstood them for what length oftime it can. There are topics known to every man fromwhich he shies like a frightened horse, and which to get aglimpse of is to shun. Such are his ebbing assets to thespendthrift in full career. But why single out the spendthriftwhen to every man actuated by passion the thoughtof interests which negate the passion can hardly for morethan a fleeting instant stay before the mind? It is like'memento mori' in the heyday of the pride of life. Naturerises at such suggestions, and excludes them from theview:—How long, O healthy reader, can you now continuethinking of your tomb?—In milder instances the difficultyis as great, especially when the brain is fagged. Onesnatches at any and every passing pretext, no matter howtrivial or external, to escape from the odiousness of thematter in hand. I know a person, for example, who willpoke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust-specks fromthe floor, arrange his table, snatch up the newspaper, takedown any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, wastethe morninganyhow, in short, and all without premeditation,—simplybecause the only thing heought to attend toIs the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logicwhich he detests. Anything butthat!
Once more, the object must change. When it is one ofsight, it will actually become invisible; when of hearing,inaudible,—if we attend to it too unmovingly. Helmholtz,who has put his sensorial attention to the severest tests,by using his eyes on objects which in common life are expresslyoverlooked, makes some interesting remarks onthis point in his chapter on retinal rivalry.[343] The phenomenon[Pg 422]called by that name is this, that if we look witheach eye upon a different picture (as in the annexed stereoscopicslide), sometimes one picture, sometimes the other,or parts of both, will come to consciousness, but hardlyever both combined. Helmholtz now says:
"I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and nowto the other system of lines; and that then this system remains visiblealone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes.This happens, for example, whenever I try to count the lines first ofone and then of the other system.... But it is extremely hard tochain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless weassociate with our looking some distinct purpose which keeps the activityof the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting thelines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of theattention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstancesattainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is towander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object isover, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite ofour will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the sameobject, we must seek constantly to find out something new about thelatter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away."
And again criticising an author who had treated of attentionas an activity absolutely subject to the consciouswill, Helmholtz writes:
"This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; butone without training cannot so easily execute the intention of makingthem converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that oflooking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now[Pg 423]just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadilyfixed upon a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted,and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way.But wecan set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interestin it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relationof attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediatecontrol."
These words of Helmholtz are of fundamental importance.And if true of sensorial attention, how much moretrue are they of the intellectual variety! Theconditio sinequâ non of sustained attention to a given topic of thoughtis that we should roll it over and over incessantly and considerdifferent aspects and relations of it in turn. Only inpathological states will a fixed and ever monotonously recurringidea possess the mind.
And now we can see why it is that what is called sustainedattention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions andthe fresher and more original the mind. In such minds,subjects bud and sprout and grow. At every moment, theyplease by a new consequence and rivet the attention afresh.But an intellect unfurnished with materials, stagnant, unoriginal,will hardly be likely to consider any subject long.A glance exhausts its possibilities of interest. Geniusesare commonly believed to excel other men in their powerof sustained attention.[344] In most of them, it is to be feared,the so-called 'power' is of the passive sort. Their ideascoruscate, every subject branches infinitely before theirfertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt.But itis their genius making them attentive, not their attentionmaking geniuses of them. And, when we come down tothe root of the matter, we see that they differ from ordinarymen less in the character of their attention than in thenature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed.In the genius, these form a concatenated series, suggesting[Pg 424]each other mutually by some rational law. Therefore wecall the attention 'sustained' and the topic of meditationfor hours 'the same.' In the common man the series isfor the most part incoherent, the objects have no rationalbond, and we call the attention wandering and unfixed.
It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent aman from acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and thatmoderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which wemay best expect, here as elsewhere, the virtues of the will,strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attentioncome by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer onedoes attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. Andthe faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention,over and over again, is the very root of judgment,character, and will. No one iscompos sui if he have it not.An education which should improve this faculty would bethe educationpar excellence. But it is easier to define thisideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.The only general pedagogic maxim bearing on attention isthat the more interest the child has in advance in the subject,the better he will attend. Induct him therefore insuch a way as to knit each new thing on to some acquisitionalready there; and if possible awaken curiosity, sothat the new thing shall seem to come as an answer, orpart of an answer, to a question pre-existing in his mind.
At present having described the varieties, let us turn to
Its remote effects are too incalculable to be recorded.The practical and theoretical life of whole species, as wellas of individual beings, results from the selection which thehabitual direction of their attention involves. InChaptersXIV andXV some of these consequences will come to light.Suffice it meanwhile that each of us literallychooses, by hisways of attending to things, what sort of a universe heshall appear to himself to inhabit.
The immediate effects of attention are to make us:
a) perceive—
b) conceive—
c) distinguish—
d) remember—
better than otherwise we could—both more successivethings and each thing more clearly. It also
(e) shortens 'reaction-time.'
a andb. Most people would say that a sensation attendedto becomes stronger than it otherwise would be.This point is, however, not quite plain, and has occasionedsome discussion.[345] From the strength or intensity of asensation must be distinguished its clearness; and to increasethis is, for some psychologists, the utmost thatattention can do. When the facts are surveyed, however,it must be admitted that to some extent the relative intensityof two sensations may be changed when one of them isattended to and the other not. Every artist knows how hecan make a scene before his eyes appear warmer or colderin color, according to the way he sets his attention. Iffor warm, he soon begins tosee the red color start out ofeverything; if for cold, the blue. Similarly in listening forcertain notes in a chord, or overtones in a musical sound,the one we attend to sounds probably a little more loud aswell as more emphatic than it did before. When we mentallybreak a series of monotonous strokes into a rhythm,by accentuating every second or third one, etc., the strokeon which the stress of attention is laid seems to becomestronger as well as more emphatic. The increased visibilityof optical after-images and of double images, whichclose attention brings about, can hardly be interpretedotherwise than as a real strengthening of the retinalsensations themselves. And this view is rendered particularlyprobable by the fact that an imagined visualobject may, if attention be concentrated upon it longenough, acquire before the mind's eye almost the brilliancyof reality, and (in the case of certain exceptionallygifted observers) leave a negative after-image of itself whenit passes away (see Chapter XVIII). Confident expectationof a certain intensity or quality of impression will oftenmake us sensibly see or hear it in an object which really[Pg 426]falls far short of it. In face of such facts it is rash to saythat attention cannot make a sense-impression more intense.
But, on the other hand, the intensification which may bebrought about seems never to lead the judgment astray.As we rightly perceive and name the same color undervarious lights, the same sound at various distances; so weseem to make an analogous sort of allowance for the varyingamounts of attention with which objects are viewed;and whatever changes of feeling the attention may bringwe charge, as it were, to the attention's account, and stillperceive and conceive the object as the same.
"A gray paper appears to us no lighter, the pendulum-beat of aclock no louder, no matter how much we increase the strain of our attentionupon them. No one, by doing this, can make the gray paperlook white, or the stroke of the pendulum sound like the blow of astrong hammer,—everyone, on the contrary, feels the increase as thatof his own conscious activity turned upon the thing."[346]
Were it otherwise, we should not be able to noteintensitiesby attending to them. Weak impressions would, asStumpf says,[347] become stronger by the very fact of beingobserved.
"I should not be able to observe faint sounds at all, but only suchas appeared to me of maximal strength, or at least of a strength thatincreased with the amount of my observation. In reality, however, Ican, with steadily increasing attention, follow a diminuendo perfectlywell."
The subject is one which would well repay exact experiment,if methods could be devised. Meanwhile there is noquestion whatever that attention augments theclearness ofall that we perceive or conceive by its aid. But what ismeant by clearness here?
c. Clearness, so far as attention produces it,means distinctionfrom other things andinternal analysis or subdivision.These are essentially products of intellectualdiscrimination,involving comparison, memory, and perception of variousrelations. The attentionper se does not distinguish andanalyze and relate. The most we can say is that it is a[Pg 427]condition of our doing so. And as these processes are tobe described later, the clearness they produce had betternot be farther discussed here. The important point to noticehere is that it is not attention'simmediate fruit.[348]
d. Whatever future conclusion we may reach as tothis, we cannot deny thatan object once attended to will remainin the memory, whilst one inattentively allowed to passwill leave no traces behind. Already in Chapter VI (seepp. 163 ff.) we discussed whether certain states of mindwere 'unconscious,' or whether they were not rather statesto which no attention had been paid, and of whose passagerecollection could afterwards find no vestiges. DugaldStewart says:[349] "The connection between attention andmemory has been remarked by many authors." He quotesQuintilian, Locke, and Helvetius; and goes on at greatlength to explain the phenomena of 'secondary automatism'(see above,p. 114 ff.) by the presence of a mental actiongrown so inattentive as to preserve no memory of itself.In our chapter on Memory, later on, the point will comeup again.
e) Under this head, theshortening of reaction-time, thereis a good deal to be said of Attention's effects. SinceWundt has probably worked over the subject more thoroughlythan any other investigator and made it peculiarlyhis own, what follows had better, as far as possible, be inhis words. The reader will remember the method and resultsof experimentation on 'reaction-time,' as given inChapter III.
The facts I proceed to quote may also be taken as asupplement to that chapter. Wundt writes:
"When we wait with strained attention for a stimulus, it will oftenhappen that instead of registering the stimulus, we react upon someentirely different impression,—and this not through confounding theone with the other. On the contrary, we are perfectly well aware atthe moment of making the movement that we respond to the wrongstimulus. Sometimes even, though not so often, the latter may be another[Pg 428]kind of sensation altogether,—one may, for example, in experimentingwith sound, register a flash of light, produced either byaccident or design. We cannot well explain these results otherwisethan by assuming that the strain of the attention towards the impressionwe expect coexists with a preparatory innervation of the motorcentre for the reaction, which innervation the slightest shock thensuffices to turn into an actual discharge. This shock may be given byany chance impression, even by one to which we never intended to respond.When the preparatory innervation has once reached this pitchof intensity, the time that intervenes between the stimulus and thecontraction of the muscles which react, may become vanishinglysmall."[350]
"The perception of an impression is facilitated when the impressionis preceded by a warning which announces beforehand that it isabout to occur. This case is realized whenever several stimuli followeach other at equal intervals,—when, e.g. we note pendulum movementsby the eye, or pendulum-strokes by the ear. Each single stroke formshere the signal for the next, which is thus met by a fully prepared attention.The same thing happens when the stimulus to be perceived ispreceded, at a certain interval, by a single warning: the time isalways notably shortened.... I have made comparative observationson reaction-time with and without a warning signal. The impressionto be reacted on was the sound made by the dropping of aball on the board of the 'drop apparatus.'... In a first series nowarning preceded the stroke of the ball; in the second, the noise madeby the apparatus in liberating the ball served as a signal.... Hereare the averages of two series of such experiments:
Height of Fall. Average. Mean Error. No. of Expts. 25 cm. No warning 0.253 0.051 13 Warning 0.076 0.060 17 5 cm. No warning 0.266 0.036 14 Warning 0.175 0.035 17 "... In a long series of experiments, (the interval between warningand stimulus remaining the same) the reaction-time grows less andless, and it is possible occasionally to reduce it to a vanishing quantity(a few thousandths of a second), to zero, or even to a negative value.[351]...The only ground that we can assign for this phenomenon isthepreparation (vorbereitende Spannung) of the attention. It is easy tounderstand that the reaction-time should be shortened by this means;but that it should sometimes sink to zero and even assume negativevalues, may appear surprising. Nevertheless this latter case is alsoexplained by what happens in the simple reaction-time experiments"just referred to, in which, "when the strain of the attention has reached[Pg 429]its climax, the movement we stand ready to execute escapes from thecontrol of on will, and we register a wrong signal. In these other experiments,in which a warning foretells the moment of the stimulus, itis also plain that attention accommodates itself so exactly to the latter'sreception thatno sooner is it objectively given than it is fullyapperceived, and with the apperception the motor discharge coincides."[352]
Usually, when the impression is fully anticipated, attentionprepares the motor centres so completely for bothstimulus and reaction that the only time lost is that of thephysiological conduction downwards. But even this intervalmay disappear, i.e. the stimulus and reaction may becomeobjectively contemporaneous; or more remarkablestill, the reaction may be discharged before the stimulus hasactually occurred.[353] Wundt, as we saw some pages back(p. 411), explains this by the effort of the mind so to reactthat we may feel our own movement and the signal whichprompts it, both at the same instant. As the execution ofthe movement must precede our feeling of it, so it mustalso precede the stimulus, if that and our movement are tobe felt at once.
The peculiar theoretic interest of these experimentslies in theirshowing expectant attention and sensation to becontinuous or identical processes, since they may have identicalmotor effects. Although other exceptional observationsshow them likewise to be continuoussubjectively, Wundt'sexperiments do not: he seems never, at the moment ofreacting prematurely, to have been misled into the beliefthat the real stimulus was there.
As concentrated attention accelerates perception, so,conversely, perception of a stimulus isretarded by anythingwhich either baffles or distracts the attention with which weawait it.
"If, e.g., we make reactions on a sound in such a way that weakand strong stimuli irregularly alternate so that the observer can neverexpect a determinate strength with any certainty, the reaction-time forall the various signals is increased,—and so is the average error. I[Pg 430]append two examples.... In Series I a strong and a weak soundalternated regularly, so that the intensity was each time known in advance.In II they came irregularly.
I.Regular Alternation. Average Time. Average Error. No. of Expts. Strong sound 0.116" 0.010" 18 Weak sound 0.127" 0.012" 9 II.Irregular Alternation. Strong sound 0.189" 0.038" 9 Weak sound 0.298" 0.076" 15 "Still greater is the increase of the time when, unexpectedly into aseries of strong impressions, a weak one is interpolated, orvice versâ.In this way I have seen the time of reaction upon a sound so weak asto be barely perceived rise to 0.4" or 0.5", and for a strong sound to0 25". It is also matter of general experience that a stimulus expected ina general way, but for whose intensity attention cannot be adapted inadvance, demands a longer reaction-time. In such cases ... thereason for the difference can only lie in the fact that wherever a preparationof the attention is impossible, the time of both perception andvolition is prolonged. Perhaps also the conspicuously large reaction-timeswhich are got with stimuli so faint as to be just perceptible maybe explained by the attention tending always to adapt itself for somethingmore than this minimal amount of stimulus, so that a state ensuessimilar to that in the case of unexpected stimuli.... Stillmore than by previously unknown stimuli is the reaction-timeprolonged bywholly unexpected impressions. This is sometimes accidentallybrought about, when the observer's attention, instead of beingconcentrated on the coming signal, is dispersed. It can be realizedpurposely by suddenly thrusting into a long series of equidistantstimuli a much shorter interval which the observer does not expect.The mental effect here is like that of being startled;—often the startlingis outwardly visible. The time of reaction may then easily be lengthenedto one quarter of a second with strong signals, or with weak onesto a half-second. Slighter, but still very noticeable, is the retardationwhen the experiment is so arranged that the observer, ignorant whetherthe stimulus is to be an impression of light, sound, or touch, cannotkeep his attention turned to any particular sense-organ in advance.One notices then at the same time a peculiar unrest, as the feeling ofstrain which accompanies the attention keeps vacillating between theseveral senses.
"Complications of another sort arise when what is registered is animpression anticipated both in point of quality and strength, but accompaniedby other stimuli which make the concentration of the attentiondifficult. The reaction-time is here always more or less prolonged.The simplest case of the sort is where a momentary impression is registeredin the midst of another, and continuous, sensorial-stimulation ofconsiderable strength. The continuous stimulus may belong to the[Pg 431]same sense as the stimulus to be reacted on, or to another. When it isof the same sense, the retardation it causes may be partly due to thedistraction of the attention by it, but partly also to the fact that thestimulus to be reacted on stands out less strongly than if alone, andpractically becomes a less intense sensation. But other factors in realityare present; for we find the reaction-time more prolonged by the concomitantstimulation when the stimulus is weak than when it is strongI made experiments in which the principal impression, or signal for reaction,was a bell-stroke whose strength could be graduated by a springagainst the hammer with a movable counterpoise. Each set of observationscomprised two series; in one of which the bell-stroke was registeredin the ordinary way, whilst in the other a toothed wheel belongingto the chronometric apparatus made during the entire experiment asteady noise against a metal spring. In one half of the latter series (A)the bell-stroke was only moderately strong, so that the accompanyingnoise diminished it considerably, without, however, making it indistinguishable.In the other half (B) the bell-sound was so loud as to beheard with perfect distinctness above the noise.
Mean. Maximum. Minimum. No. of Experiments. A Without noise 0.189 0.214 0.156 21 (Bell-stroke With noise 0.313 0.499 0.183 16 moderate) B Without noise 0.158 0.206 0.133 20 (Bell-stroke With noise 0.203 0.295 0.140 19 loud) "Since, in these experiments, the sound B even with noise made aconsiderably stronger impression than the sound A without, we mustsee in the figures a direct influence of the disturbing noise on the processof reaction. This influence is freed from mixture with other factorswhen the momentary stimulus and the concomitant disturbance appealto different senses. I chose, to test this, sight and hearing. The momentarysignal was an induction-spark leaping from one platinum pointto another against a dark background. The steady stimulation was thenoise above described.
Spark. Mean. Maximum. Minimum. No. of Expts. Without noise 0.222 0.284 0.158 20 With noise 0.300 0.390 0.250 18 "When one reflects that in the experiments with one and the samesense the relative intensity of the signal is always depressed [which byitself is a retarding condition] the amount of retardation in these lastobservations makes it probable thatthe disturbing influence upon attentionis greater when the stimuli are disparate than when they belongto the same sense. One does not, in fact, find it particularly hard toregister immediately, when the bell rings in the midst of the noise; butwhen the spark is the signal one has a feeling of being coerced, as oneturns away from the noise towards it. This fact is immediately connected[Pg 432]with other properties of our attention. The effort of the latteris accompanied by various corporeal sensations, according to the sensewhich is engaged. The innervation which exists during the effort ofattention is therefore probably a different one for each sense-organ."[354]
Wundt then, after some theoretical remarks which weneed not quote now, gives a table of retardations, as follows:
| Retardation. | ||
| 1. | Unexpected strength of impression: | |
| a) Unexpectedly strong sound | 0.073 | |
| b) Unexpectedly weak sound | 0.171 | |
| 2. | Interference by like stimulus (sound by sound) | 0.045[355] |
| 3. | Interference by unlike stimulus (light by sound) | 0.078 |
It seems probable, from these results obtained with elementaryprocesses of mind, that all processes, even thehigher ones of reminiscence, reasoning, etc., whenever attentionis concentrated upon them instead of being diffusedand languid, are thereby more rapidly performed.[356]
Still more interesting reaction-time observations havebeen made by Münsterberg. The reader will recollect thefact noted in Chapter III (p. 93) that reaction-time isshorter when one concentrates his attention on the expectedmovement than when one concentrates it on the expectedsignal. Herr Münsterberg found that this is equally thecase when the reaction is no simple reflex, but can takeplace only after an intellectual operation. In a series ofexperiments the five fingers were used to react with, and[Pg 433]the reacter had to use a different finger according as thesignal was of one sort or another. Thus when a word inthe nominative case was called out he used the thumb, forthe dative he used another finger; similarly adjectives,substantives, pronouns, numerals, etc., or, again, towns,rivers, beasts, plants, elements; or poets, musicians, philosophers,etc., were co-ordinated each with its finger, sothat when a word belonging to either of these classes wasmentioned, a particular finger and no other had to performthe reaction. In a second series of experiments the reactionconsisted in the utterance of a word in answer to aquestion, such as "name an edible fish," etc.; or "namethe first drama of Schiller," etc.; or "which is greater,Hume or Kant?" etc.; or (first naming apples and cherries,and several other fruits) "which do you prefer, apples orcherries?" etc.; or "which is Goethe's finest drama?" etc.;or "which letter comes the later in the alphabet, the letterL or the first letter of the most beautiful tree?" etc.; or"which is less, 15 or 20minus 8?"[357] etc. etc. etc. Even inthis series of reactionsthe time was much quicker token thereacter turned his attention in advance towards the answer thanwhen he turned it towards the question. The shorter reaction-timewas seldom more than one fifth of a second; thelonger, from four to eight times as long.
To understand such results, one must bear in mind thatin these experiments the reacter always knew in advancein a general way thekind of question which he was to receive,and consequently thesphere within which his possibleanswer lay.[358] In turning his attention, therefore, from theoutset towards the answer, those brain-processes in himwhich were connected with this entire 'sphere' were keptsub-excited, and the question could then discharge with aminimum amount of lost time that particular answer out ofthe 'sphere' which belonged especially to it. When, on thecontrary, the attention was kept looking towards the questionexclusively and averted from the possible reply, all[Pg 434]this preliminary sub-excitement of motor tracts failed tooccur, and the entire process of answering had to be gonethrough withafter the question was heard. No wonderthat the time was prolonged. It is a beautiful example ofthe summation of stimulations, and of the way in whichexpectant attention, even when not very strongly focalized,will prepare the motor centres, and shorten the work whicha stimulus has to perform on them, in order to produce agiven effect when it comes.
We have now a sufficient number of facts to warrant ourconsidering this more recondite question. And two physiologicalprocesses, of which we have got a glimpse, immediatelysuggest themselves as possibly forming in combinationa complete reply. I mean
1.The accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs;and
2.The anticipatory preparation from within of the ideationalcentres concerned with the object to which the attention ispaid.
1. The sense-organs and the bodily muscles which favortheir exercise are adjusted most energetically in sensorialattention, whether immediate and reflex, or derived. Butthere are good grounds for believing that even intellectualattention, attention to theidea of a sensible object, is alsoaccompanied with some degree of excitement of the sense-organsto which the object appeals. The preparation ofthe ideational centres exists, on the other hand, whereverour interest in the object—be it sensible or ideal—isderivedfrom, or in any way connected with, other interests,or the presence of other objects, in the mind. It exists aswell when the attention thus derived is classed as passiveas when it is classed as voluntary. So that on the wholewe may confidently conclude—since in mature life we neverattend to anything without our interest in it being in somedegree derived from its connection with other objects—thatthe two processes of sensorial adjustment and ideational preparationprobably coexist in all our concrete attentive acts.
The two points must now be proved in more detail.First, as respects the sensorial adjustment.
That it is present when we attend tosensible things isobvious. When we look or listen we accommodate oureyes and ears involuntarily, and we turn our head and bodyas well; when we taste or smell we adjust the tongue, lips,and respiration to the object; in feeling a surface we movethe palpatory organ in a suitable way; in all these acts, besidesmaking involuntary muscular contractions of a positivesort, we inhibit others which might interfere with theresult—we close the eyes in tasting, suspend the respirationin listening, etc. The result is a more or less massive organicfeeling that attention is going on. This organic feelingcomes, in the way described onpage 302, to be contrastedwith that of the objects which it accompanies, andregarded as peculiarly ours, whilst the objects form the not-me.We treat it as a sense of ourown activity, althoughit comes in to us from our organs after they are accommodated,just as the feeling of any object does. Any object,ifimmediately exciting, causes a reflex accommodation ofthe sense-organ, and this has two results—first, the object'sincrease in clearness; and second, the feeling of activity inquestion. Both are sensations of an 'afferent' sort.
But inintellectual attention, as we have already seen,(p. 300), similar feelings of activity occur. Fechner was thefirst, I believe, to analyze these feelings, and discriminatethem from the stronger ones just named. He writes:
"When we transfer the attention from objects of one sense to thoseof another, we have an indescribable feeling (though at the same timeone perfectly determinate, and reproducible at pleasure), of altereddirection or differently localized tension (Spannung). We feel a strainforward in the eyes, one directed sidewise in the ears, increasing withthe degree of our attention, and changing according as we look at anobject carefully, or listen to something attentively; and we speak accordinglyofstraining the attention. The difference is most plainlyfelt when the attention oscillates rapidly between eye and ear; and thefeeling localizes itself with most decided difference in regard to thevarious sense-organs, according as we wish to discriminate a thing delicatelyby touch, taste, or smell.
"But now I have, when I try to vividly recall a picture of memoryor fancy, a feeling perfectly analogous to that which I experience when Iseek to apprehend a thing keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous feeling[Pg 436]is very differently localized. While in sharpest possible attention toreal objects (as well as to after-images) the strain is plainly forwards,and when the attention changes from one sense to another only alters itsdirection between the several external sense-organs, leaving the rest ofthe head free from strain, the case is different in memory or fancy, forhere the feeling withdraws entirely from the external sense-organs, andseems rather to take refuge in that part of the head which the brainfills; if I wish, for example, to recall a place or person it will arise beforeme with vividness, not according as I strain my attention forwards,but rather in proportion as I, so to speak, retract it backwards."[359]
In myself the 'backward retraction' which is felt duringattention to ideas of memory, etc., seems to be principallyconstituted by the feeling of an actual rolling outwards andupwards of the eyeballs, such as occurs in sleep, and is theexact opposite of their behavior when we look at a physicalthing. I have already spoken of this feeling onpage 300.[360][Pg 437]The reader who doubts the presence of these organic feelingsis requested to read the whole of that passage again.
It has been said, however, that we may attend to anobject on the periphery of the visual field and yet notaccommodate the eye for it. Teachers thus notice the actsof children in the school-room at whom they appear not tobe looking. Women in general train their peripheral visualattention more than men. This would be an objection totheinvariable and universal presence of movements of adjustmentas ingredients of the attentive process. Usually,as is well known, no object lying in the marginal portionsof the field of vision can catch our attention without at thesame time 'catching our eye'—that is, fatally provokingsuch movements of rotation and accommodation as willfocus its image on the fovea, or point of greatest sensibility.Practice, however, enables us,with effort, to attend to amarginal object whilst keeping the eyes immovable. Theobject under these circumstances never becomes perfectlydistinct—the place of its image on the retina makes distinctnessimpossible—but (as anyone can satisfy himself bytrying) we become more vividly conscious of it than we werebefore the effort was made. Helmholtz states the fact sostrikingly that I will quote his observation in full. He wastrying to combine in a single solid percept pairs of stereoscopicpictures illuminated instantaneously by the electricspark. The pictures were in a dark box which the sparkfrom time to time lighted up; and, to keep the eyes fromwandering betweenwhiles, a pin-hole was pricked throughthe middle of each picture, through which the light of theroom came, so that each eye had presented to it during thedark intervals a single bright point. With parallel opticalaxes the points combined into a single image; and theslightest movement of the eyeballs was betrayed by thisimage at once becoming double. Helmholtz now foundthat simple linear figures could, when the eyes were thuskept immovable, be perceived as solids at a single flash ofthe spark. But when the figures were complicated photographs,many successive flashes were required to grasptheir totality.
"Now it is interesting," he says, "to find that, although we keepsteadily fixating the pin-holes and never allow their combined image tobreak into two, we can, nevertheless, before the spark comes, keep ourattention voluntarily turned to any particular portion we please of thedark field, so as then, when the spark comes, to receive an impressiononly from such parts of the picture as lie in this region. In this respect,then, our attention is quite independent of the position and accommodationof the eyes, and of any known alteration in these organs; andfree to direct itself by a conscious and voluntary effort upon any selectedportion of a dark and undifferenced field of view. This is one of themost important observations for a future theory of attention."[361]
Hering, however, adds the following detail:
"Whilst attending to the marginal object we must always," he says,"attend at the same time to the object directly fixated. If even for asingle instant we let the latter slip out of our mind, our eye movestowards the former, as may be easily recognized by the after-imagesproduced, or by the muscular sounds heard. The case is then lessproperly to be called one of translocation, than one of unusually widedispersion, of the attention, in which dispersion the largest share stillfalls upon the thing directly looked at,"[362]
and consequently directly accommodated for. Accommodationexists here, then, as it does elsewhere, and without itwe should lose a part of our sense of attentive activity. Infact, thestrain of that activity (which is remarkably great inthe experiment) is due in part to unusually strong contractionsof the muscles needed to keep the eyeballs still, whichproduce unwonted feelings of pressure in those organs.
2. But if the peripheral part of the picture in this experimentbe not physically accommodated for, what is meantby its sharing our attention? What happens when we'distribute' or 'disperse' the latter upon a thing for whichwe remain unwilling to 'adjust'? This leads us to thatsecond feature in the process, the 'ideational preparation'of which we spoke.The effort to attend to the marginalregion of the picture consists in nothing more nor less than theeffort to form as clear an idea as is possible of what is thereportrayed. The idea is to come to the help of the sensationand make it more distinct. It comes with effort, and sucha mode of coming is the remaining part of what we know as[Pg 439]our attention's 'strain' under the circumstances. Let usshow how universally present in our acts of attention thisreinforcing imagination, this inward reproduction, this anticipatorythinking of the thing we attend to, is.
It must as a matter of course be present when the attentionis of the intellectual variety, for the thing attended tothenis nothing but an idea, an inward reproduction or conception.If then we prove ideal construction of the objectto be present insensorial attention, it will be present everywhere.When, however, sensorial attention is at its height,it is impossible to tell how much of the percept comes fromwithout and how much from within; but if we find that thepreparation we make for it always partly consists of thecreation of an imaginary duplicate of the object in the mind,which shall stand ready to receive the outward impressionas if in a matrix, that will be quite enough to establish thepoint in dispute.
In Wundt's and Exner's experiments quoted above, thelying in wait for the impressions, and the preparation toreact, consist of nothing but the anticipatory imaginationof what the impressions or the reactions are to be. Wherethe stimulus is unknown and the reaction undetermined,time is lost, because no stable image can under such circumstancesbe formed in advance. But where both natureand time of signal and reaction are foretold, so completelydoes the expectant attention consist in premonitory imaginationthat, as we have seen (Footnote 273;pp. 373,377), it maymimic the intensity of reality, or at any rate producereality's motor effects. It is impossible to read Wundt'sand Exner's pages of description and not to interpret the'Apperception' and 'Spannung' and other terms as equivalentsofimagination. With Wundt, in particular, the wordApperception (which he sets great store by) is quite interchangeablewith both imagination and attention. All threeare names for the excitement from within of ideationalbrain-centres, for which Mr. Lewes's name ofpreperceptionseems the best possible designation.
Where the impression to be caught is very weak, theway not to miss it is to sharpen our attention for it by preliminarycontact with it in a stronger form.
"If we wish to begin to observe overtones, it is advisable, justbefore the sound which is to be analyzed, to sound very softly the noteof which we are in search.... The piano and harmonium are wellfitted for this use, as both give overtones that are strong. Strike uponthe piano first theg' [of a certain musical example previously given inthe text]; then, when its vibrations have objectively ceased, strikepowerfully the notec, in whose soundg' is the third overtone, and keepyour attention steadily bent upon the pitch of the just heardg'; youwill now hear this tone sounding in the midst of thec.... If youplace the resonator which corresponds to a certain overtone, for exampleg' of the soundc, against your ear, and then make the notecsound, you will hearg' much strengthened by the resonator.... Thisstrengthening by the resonator can be used to make the naked earattentive to the sound which it is to catch. For when the resonatoris gradually removed, theg' grows weaker; but the attention, oncedirected to it, holds it now more easily fast, and the observer hears thetoneg' now in the natural unaltered sound of the note with his unaidedear."[363]
Wundt, commenting on experiences of this sort, saysthat
"on carefully observing, one will always find that one tries first torecall the image in memory of the tone to be heard, and that then onehears it in the total sound. The same thing is to be noticed in weak orfugitive visual impressions. Illuminate a drawing by electric sparksseparated by considerable intervals, and after the first, and often afterthe second and third spark, hardly anything will be recognized. Butthe confused image is held fast in memory; each successive illuminationcompletes it; and so at last we attain to a clearer perception. Theprimary motive to this inward activity proceeds usually from the outerimpression itself. We hear a sound in which, from certain associations,we suspect a certain overtone; the next thing is to recall the overtonein memory; and finally we catch it in the sound we hear. Or perhapswe see some mineral substance we have met before; the impressionawakens the memory-image, which again more or less completely meltswith the impression itself. In this way every idea takes a certain timeto penetrate to the focus of consciousness. And during this time wealways find in ourselves the peculiarfeeling of attention.... Thephenomena show that anadaptation of attention to the impression takesplace. The surprise which unexpected impressions give us is due essentiallyto the fact that our attention, at the moment when the impressionoccurs, is not accommodated for it. The accommodation itself is of thedouble sort, relating as it does to the intensity as well as to the qualityof the stimulus. Different qualities of impression require disparate[Pg 441]adaptations. And we remark that our feeling of thestrain of ourinward attentiveness increases with every increase in the strength ofthe impressions on whose perception we are intent."[364]
The natural way of conceiving all this is under the symbolicform of a brain-cell played upon from two directions.Whilst the object excites it from without, other brain-cells,or perhaps spiritual forces, arouse it from within. The latterinfluence is the 'adaptation of the attention.'The plenaryenergy of the brain-cell demands the co-operation of both factors:not when merely present, but when both present andattended to, is the object fully perceived.
A few additional experiences will now be perfectly clear.Helmholtz, for instance, adds this observation to the passagewe quoted a while ago concerning the stereoscopicpictures lit by the electric spark.
"These experiments," he says, "are interesting as regards the partwhich attention plays in the matter of double images.... For inpictures so simple that it is relatively difficult for me to see them double,I can succeed in seeing them double, even when the illumination is onlyinstantaneous, the moment I strive toimagine in a lively way howthey ought then to look. The influence of attention is here pure; forall eye movements are shut out."[365]
In another place[366] the same writer says:
"When I have before my eyes a pair of stereoscopic drawings whichare hard to combine, it is difficult to bring the lines and points thatcorrespond, to cover each other, and with every little motion of the eyesthey glide apart.But if I chance to gain a lively mental image (Anschauungsbild)of the represented solid form (a thing that often occursby lucky chance), I then move my two eyes with perfect certainty overthe figure without the picture separating again."
Again, writing of retinal rivalry, Helmholtz says:
"It is not a trial of strength between two sensations, but dependson our fixing or failing to fix the attention. Indeed, there is scarcelyany phenomenon so well fitted for the study of the causes which arecapable of determining the attention. It is not enough to form theconscious intention of seeing first with one eye and then with the other;we must form as clear a notion as possible of what we expect to see.Then it will actually appear."[367]
In figures 37 and 38, where the result is ambiguous,we can make the change from one apparent form tothe other by imagining strongly in advance the form wewish to see. Similarly in those puzzles where certain linesin a picture form by their combination an object that hasno connection with what the picture ostensibly represents;or indeed in every case where an object is inconspicuousand hard to discern from the background; we may not beable to see it for a long time; but, having once seen it, wecan attend to it again whenever we like, on account of themental duplicate of it which our imagination now bears. Inthe meaningless French words 'pas de lieu Rhône que nous,'who can recognize immediately the English 'paddle yourown canoe'?[368] But who that has once noticed the identitycan fail to have it arrest his attention again? When watchingfor the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled withits image that at every moment we think we hear the longed-foror dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Everystir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitivehis pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarilytaken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol.The image in the mindis the attention; thepreperception,as Mr. Lewes calls it, is half of the perception of the looked-forthing.[369]
It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for thoseaspects of things which they have already been taught todiscern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after ithas once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousandcould ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetryand the arts, some one has to come and tell us what aspectswe may single out, and what effects we may admire, beforeour æsthetic nature can 'dilate' to its full extent and never'with the wrong emotion.' In kindergarten instruction oneof the exercises is to make the children see how manyfeatures they can point out in such an object as a flower or[Pg 444]a stuffed bird. They readily name the features they knowalready, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may lookfor hours without distinguishing nostrils, claws, scales, etc.,until their attention is called to these details; thereafter,however, they see them every time. In short,the onlythings which we commonly see are those which we preperceive.and the only things which we preperceive are those whichhave been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into ourmind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectuallylost in the midst of the world.
Organic adjustment, then, and ideational preparation orpreperception are concerned in all attentive acts. An interestingtheory is defended by no less authorities than ProfessorsBain[370] and Ribot,[371] and still more ably advocated by Mr. N.Lange,[372] who will have it that the ideational preparationitself is a consequence of muscular adjustment, so that thelatter may be called the essence of the attentive processthroughout. This at least is what the theory of theseauthors practically amounts to, though the former two donot state it in just these terms. The proof consists in theexhibition of cases of intellectual attention which organicadjustment accompanies, or of objects in thinking which wehave to execute a movement. Thus Lange says that whenhe tries to imagine a certain colored circle, he finds himselffirst making with his eyes the movement to which the circlecorresponds, andthen imagining the color, etc., as a consequenceof the movement.
"Let my reader," he adds, "close his eyes and think of an extendedobject, for instance apencil. He will easily notice that he first makesa slight movement [of the eyes] corresponding to the straight line, andthat he often gets a weak feeling of innervation of the hand as if touchingthe pencil's surface. So, in thinking of a certain sound, we turntowards its direction or repeat muscularly its rhythm, or articulate animitation of it."[373]
But it is one thing to point out the presence of muscularcontractions as constant concomitants of our thoughts,and another thing to say, with Herr Lange, that thought ismade possible by muscular contraction alone. It may wellbe that where the object of thought consists of two parts,one perceived by movement and another not, the part perceivedby movement is habitually called up first and fixedin the mind by the movement's execution, whilst the otherpart comes secondarily as the movement's mere associate.But even were this the rule with all men (which I doubt[374]),it would only be a practical habit, not an ultimate necessity.In the chapter on the Will we shall learn that movementsthemselves are results of images coming before the mind,images sometimes of feelings in the moving part, sometimesof the movement's effects on eye and ear, and sometimes(if the movement be originally reflex or instinctive),of its natural stimulus or exciting cause. It is, in truth,contrary to all wider and deeper analogies to deny that anyquality of feeling whatever can directly rise up in the formof an idea, and to assert that only ideas of movement cancall other ideas to the mind.
So much for adjustment and preperception. The onlythird process I can think of as always present is the inhibitionof irrelevant movements and ideas. This seems, however,to be a feature incidental to voluntary attention ratherthan the essential feature of attention at large,[375] and need[Pg 446]not concern us particularly now. Noting merely the intimateconnection which our account so far establishes betweenattention, on the one hand, and imagination, discrimination,and memory, on the other, let us draw a couple ofpractical inferences, and then pass to the more speculativeproblem that remains.
The practical inferences are pedagogic. First,tostrengthen attention in children who care nothing for the subjectthey are studying and let their wits go wool-gathering.The interest here must be 'derived' from something thatthe teacher associates with the task, a reward or a punishmentif nothing less external comes to mind. Prof. Ribotsays:
"A child refuses to read; he is incapable of keeping his mind fixedon the letters, which have no attraction for him; but he looks with avidityupon the pictures contained in a book. 'What do they mean?' heasks. The father replies: 'When you can read, the book will tell you.'After several colloquies like this, the child resigns himself and falls towork, first slackly, then the habit grows, and finally he shows an ardorwhich has to be restrained. This is a case of the genesis of voluntaryattention. An artificial and indirect desire has to be grafted on a naturaland direct one. Reading has no immediate attractiveness, but ithas a borrowed one, and that is enough. The child is caught in thewheelwork, the first step is made."
I take another example, from M. B. Perez:[376]
"A child of six years, habitually prone to mind-wandering, satdown one day to the piano of his own accord to repeat an air by whichhis mother had been charmed. His exercises lasted an hour. Thesame child at the age of seven, seeing his brother busy with tasks invacation, went and sat at his father's desk. 'What are you doing there?'his nurse said, surprised at so finding him. 'I am,' said the child,'learning a page of German; it isn't very amusing, but it is for anagreeable surprise to mamma.'"
Here, again, a birth of voluntary attention, grafted thistime on a sympathetic instead of a selfish sentiment likethat of the first example. The piano, the German, awaken[Pg 447]no spontaneous attention; but they arouse and maintain itby borrowing a force from elsewhere.[377]
Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later agemay trouble uswhilst reading or listening to a discourse. Ifattention be the reproduction of the sensation from within,the habit of reading not merely with the eye, and of listeningnot merely with the ear, but of articulating to one's selfthe words seen or heard, ought to deepen one's attention tothe latter. Experience shows that this is the case. I cankeep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon aconversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself thewords than if I simply hear them; and I find a number ofmy students who report benefit from voluntarily adoptinga similar course.[378]
Second,a teacher who wishes to engage the attention of hisclass must knit his novelties on to things of which they alreadyhave preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily attendedto by the mind and helps to hold in turn the new,forming, in Herbartian phraseology, an 'Apperceptionsmasse'for it. Of course it is in every case a very delicateproblem to know what 'Apperceptionsmasse' to use.Psychology can only lay down the general rule.
When, a few pages back, I symbolized the 'ideationalpreparation' element in attention by a brain-cell playedupon from within, I added 'by other brain-cells, or bysome spiritual force,' without deciding which. The question'which?' is one of those central psychologic mysterieswhich part the schools. When we reflect that theturnings of our attention form the nucleus of our innerself; when we see (as in the chapter on the Will weshall see) that volition is nothing but attention; when webelieve that our autonomy in the midst of nature dependson our not being pure effect, but a cause,—
Principium quoddam quod fati fœdera rumpat,
Ex infinito ne causant causa sequatur—
we must admit that the question whether attention involvesuch a principle of spiritual activity or not is metaphysicalas well as psychological, and is well worthy of all the painswe can bestow on its solution. It is in fact the pivotalquestion of metaphysics, the very hinge on which ourpicture of the world shall swing from materialism, fatalism,monism, towards spiritualism, freedom, pluralism,—or elsethe other way.
It goes back to the automaton-theory. If feeling is aninert accompaniment, then of course the brain-cell can beplayed upon only by other brain-cells, and the attentionwhich we give at any time to any subject, whether in theform of sensory adaptation or of 'preperception,' is thefatally predeterminedeffect of exclusively material laws.If, on the other hand, the feeling which coexists with thebrain-cells' activity reacts dynamically upon that activity,furthering or checking it, then the attention is in part, atleast, acause. It does not necessarily follow, of course,that this reactive feeling should be 'free' in the sense ofhaving its amount and direction undetermined in advance,for it might very well be predetermined in all these particulars.If it were so, our attention would not bemateriallydetermined, nor yet would it be 'free' in thesense of being spontaneous or unpredictable in advance.The question is of course a purely speculative one, for wehave no means of objectively ascertaining whether our feelingsreact on our nerve-processes or not; and those whoanswer the question in either way do so in consequenceof general analogies and presumptions drawn from otherfields. As mereconceptions, the effect-theory and the cause-theoryof attention are equally clear; and whoever affirmseither conception to be true must do so on metaphysical oruniversal rather than on scientific or particular grounds.
As regardsimmediate sensorial attention hardly any oneis tempted to regard it as anything but an effect.[379] We[Pg 449]are 'evolved' so as to respond to special stimuli by specialaccommodative acts which produce clear perceptions onthe one hand in us, and on the other hand such feelings ofinner activity as were above described. The accommodationand the resultant feelingare the attention. We don'tbestow it, the object draws it from us. The object has theinitiative, not the mind.
Derived attention, where there is no voluntary effort, seemsalso most plausibly to be a mere effect. The object againtakes the initiative and draws our attention to itself, notby reason of its own intrinsic interest, but because it isconnected with some other interesting thing. Its brain-processis connected with another that is either excited, ortending to be excited, and the liability to share the excitementand become aroused is the liability to 'preperception'in which the attention consists. If I have received aninsult, I may not be actively thinking of it all the time, yetthe thought of it is in such a state of heightened irritability,that the place where I received it or the man whoinflicted it cannot be mentioned in my hearing without myattention bounding, as it were, in that direction, as the imaginationof the whole transaction revives. Where such astirring-up occurs, organic adjustment must exist as well,and the ideas must innervate to some degree the muscles.Thus the whole process of involuntary derived attention is[Pg 450]accounted for if we grant that there is something interestingenough to arouse and fix the thought of whatever maybe connected with it. This fixingis the attention; and itcarries with it a vague sense of activity going on, and ofacquiescence, furtherance, and adoption, which makes usfeel the activity to be our own.
This reinforcement of ideas and impressions by the pre-existingcontents of the mind was what Herbart had inmind when he gave the name ofapperceptive attention to thevariety we describe. We easily see now why the lover's tapshould be heard—it finds a nerve-centre half ready in advanceto explode. We see how we can attend to a companion'svoice in the midst of noises which pass unnoticedthough objectively much louder than the words we hear.Each word isdoubly awakened; once from without by thelips of the talker, but already before that from within bythe premonitory processes irradiating from the previouswords, and by the dim arousal of all processes that areconnected with the 'topic' of the talk. The irrelevantnoises, on the other hand, are awakened only once. Theyform an unconnected train. The boys at school, inattentiveto the teacher except when he begins an anecdote, andthen all pricking up their ears, are as easily explained.The words of the anecdote shoot into association with excitingobjects which react and fix them; the other words donot. Similarly with the grammar heard by the purist andHerbart's other examples quoted onpage 418.
Even where the attention is voluntary, it is possible toconceive of it as an effect, and not a cause, a product andnot an agent. The things we attend tocome to us by theirown laws. Attentioncreates no idea; an idea must alreadybe there before we can attend to it. Attention only fixesand retains what the ordinary laws of association bring 'beforethe footlights' of consciousness. But the moment weadmit this we see that the attentionper se, thefeeling of attendingneed no more fix and retain the ideas than it needbring them. The associates which bring them also fix themby the interest which they lend. In short, voluntary andinvoluntary attention may be essentially the same. It istrue that where the ideas are intrinsically very unwelcome[Pg 451]and the effort to attend to them is great, it seems to us asif the frequent renewal of the effort were the very cause bywhich they are held fast, and we naturally think of the effortas an original force. In fact it is only to theeffort toattend, not to the mereattending, that we are seriouslytempted to ascribe spontaneous power. We think we canmake more of itif we will; and the amount which we makedoes not seem a fixed function of the ideas themselves, asit would necessarily have to be if our effort were an effectand not a spiritual force. But even here it is possible toconceive the facts mechanically and to regard the effort asa mere effect.
Effort is felt only where there is a conflict of interestsin the mind. The idea A may be intrinsically exciting tous. The idea Z may derive its interest from associationwith some remoter good. A may be our sweetheart, Zmay be some condition of our soul's salvation. Underthese circumstances, if we succeed in attending to Z at all itis always with expenditure of effort. The 'ideational preparation,'the 'preperception' of A keeps going on of its ownaccord, whilst that of Z needs incessant pulses of voluntaryreinforcement—that is, we have thefeeling of voluntary reinforcement(or effort) at each successive moment in whichthe thought of Z flares brightly up in our mind. Dynamically,however, that may mean only this: that the associativeprocesses which make Z triumph are really thestronger, and in A's absence would make us give a 'passive'and unimpeded attention to Z; but, so long as A is present,some of of their force is used to inhibit the processes concernedwith A. Such inhibition is a partial neutralizationof the brain-energy which would otherwise be availablefor fluent thought. But what is lost for thought is convertedinto feeling, in this case into the peculiar feeling ofeffort, difficulty, or strain.
The stream of our thought is like a river. On thewhole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift ofthings is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attentionis the rule. But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, alog-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, andmakes things temporarily move the other way. If a real[Pg 452]river could feel, it would feel these eddies and set-backs asplaces of effort. "I am here flowing," it would say, "in thedirection of greatest resistance, instead of flowing, as usual,in the direction of least. My effort is what enables me to performthis feat." Really, the effort would only be a passive indexthat the feat was being performed. The agent would allthe while be the total downward drift of the rest of the water,forcingsome of it upwards in this spot; and although,onthe average, the direction of least resistance is downwards,that would be no reason for its not being upwards nowand then. Just so with our voluntary acts of attention.They are momentary arrests, coupled with a peculiar feeling,of portions of the stream. But the arresting force,instead of being this peculiar feeling itself, may be nothingbut the processes by which the collision is produced. Thefeeling of effort may be 'an accompaniment,' as Mr. Bradleysays, 'more or less superfluous,' and no more contributeto the result than the pain in a man's finger, when a hammerfalls on it, contributes to the hammer's weight. Thusthe notion that our effort in attending is an original faculty,a force additional to the others of which brain and mindare the seat, may be an abject superstition. Attention mayhave to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, likemany a verbal phantom, like many an idol of the tribe. Itmay be an excrescence on Psychology. No need of it todrag ideas before consciousness or fix them, when we seehow perfectly they drag and fix each other there.
I have stated the effect-theory as persuasively as I can.[380]It is a clear, strong, well-equipped conception, and like allsuch, is fitted to carry conviction, where there is no contraryproof. The feeling of effort certainlymay be an inertaccompaniment and not the active element which it seems.No measurements are as yet performed (it is safe to saynone ever will be performed) which can show that it contributesenergy to the result. Wemay then regard attentionas a superfluity, or a 'Luxus,' and dogmatize against[Pg 453]its causal function with no feeling in our hearts but one ofpride that we are applying Occam's razor to an entity thathas multiplied itself 'beyond necessity.'
But Occam's razor, though a very good rule of method,is certainly no law of nature. The laws of stimulation andof association may well be indispensable actors in all attention'sperformances, and may even be a good enough'stock-company' to carry on many performances withoutaid; and yet theymay at times simply form the backgroundfor a 'star-performer,' who is no more their 'inert accompaniment'or their 'incidental product' than Hamlet isHoratio's and Ophelia's. Such a star-performer would bethe voluntary effort to attend, if it were an original psychicforce. Naturemay, I say, indulge in these complications;and the conception that she has done so in this case is, Ithink, just as clear (if not as 'parsimonious' logically) as theconception that she has not. To justify this assertion,letus ask just what the effort to attend would effect if it were anoriginal force.
It would deepen and prolong the stay in consciousnessof innumerable ideas which else would fade more quicklyaway. The delay thus gained might not be more than asecond in duration—but that second might becritical; forin the constant rising and falling of considerations in themind, where two associated systems of them are nearly inequilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or lessof attention at the outset, whether one system shall gainforce to occupy the field and develop itself, and excludethe other, or be excluded itself by the other. When developed,it may make us act; and that act may seal our doom.When we come to the chapter on the Will, we shall see thatthe whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amountof attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rivalmotor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of reality,the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, dependson our sense that in it things arereally being decided fromone moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattlingoff of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. Thisappearance, which makes life and history tingle with sucha tragic zest,may not be an illusion. As we grant to[Pg 454]the advocate of the mechanical theory that it may be one,so he must grant to us that it maynot. And the result istwo conceptions of possibility face to face with no factsdefinitely enough known to stand as arbiter between them.
Under these circumstances, one can leave the questionopen whilst waiting for light, or one can do what most speculativeminds do, that is, look to one's general philosophyto incline the beam. The believers in mechanism do sowithout hesitation, and they ought not to refuse a similarprivilege to the believers in a spiritual force. I count myselfamong the latter, but as my reasons are ethical theyare hardly suited for introduction into a psychologicalwork.[381] The last word of psychology here is ignorance, forthe 'forces' engaged are certainly too delicate and numerousto be followed in detail. Meanwhile, in view of the strangearrogance with which the wildest materialistic speculationspersist in calling themselves 'science,' it is well to recalljust what the reasoning is, by which the effect-theory ofattention is confirmed. It is an argument from analogy,drawn from rivers, reflex actions and other material phenomenawhere no consciousnessappears to exist at all, andextended to cases where consciousness seems the phenomenon'sessential feature.The consciousness doesn't count,these reasoners say; it doesn't exist for science, it isnil;you mustn't think about it at all. The intensely recklesscharacter of all this needs no comment. It is making the mechanicaltheory trueper fas aut nefas. For the sake of thattheory we make inductions from phenomena to others thatare startlinglyunlike them; and we assume that a complicationwhich Nature has introduced (the presence of feelingand of effort, namely) is not worthy of scientific recognitionat all. Such conduct may conceivably bewise, though Idoubt it; but scientific, as contrasted with metaphysical,it cannot seriously be called.[382]
Having spoken fully of attention, let me add a wordaboutinattention.
We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise ofthe city streets, or the roaring of the brook near thehouse; and even the din of a foundry or factory willnot mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they havebeen there long enough. When we first put on spectacles,especially if they be of certain curvatures, the bright reflectionsthey give of the windows, etc., mixing with the fieldof view, are very disturbing. In a few days we ignore themaltogether. Various entoptic images,muscæ volitantes, etc.,although constantly present, are hardly ever known. Thepressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating of our heartsand arteries, our breathing, certain steadfast bodily pains,habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples fromother senses, of the same lapse into unconsciousness of anytoo unchanging content—a lapse which Hobbes has expressedin the well-known phrase, "Semper idem sentireac non sentire ad idem revertunt."
The cause of the unconsciousness is certainly not themere blunting of the sense-organs. Were the sensationimportant, we should notice it well enough; and we can atany moment notice it by expressly throwing our attentionupon it,[383] provided it have not become so inveterate that inattentionto it is ingrained in our very constitution, as in thecase of themuscæ volitantes the double retinal images, etc.But even in these cases artificial conditions of observationand patience soon give us command of the impressionwhich we seek. The inattentiveness must then be a habitgrounded on higher conditions than mere sensorial fatigue.
Helmholtz has formulated a general law of inattentionwhich we shall have to study in the next chapter butone. Helmholtz's law is that we leave all impressions unnoticedwhich are valueless to us as signs by which todiscriminatethings. At most such impressions fuse with theirconsorts into an aggregate effect. The upper partial toneswhich make human voices differ make them differ as wholesonly—we cannot dissociate the tones themselves. Theodors which form integral parts of the characteristic tasteof certain substances, meat, fish, cheese, butter, wine, donot come as odors to our attention. The various muscularand tactile feelings that make up the perception of theattributes 'wet,' 'elastic,' 'doughy,' etc., are not singled outseparately for what they are. And all this is due to an inveteratehabit we have contracted, of passing from themimmediately to their import and letting their substantivenature alone. They have formed connections in the mindwhich it is now difficult to break; they are constituents ofprocesses which it is hard to arrest, and which differ altogetherfrom what the processes of catching the attentionwould be. In the cases Helmholtz has in mind, not onlywe but our ancestors have formed these habits. In thecases we started from, however, of the mill-wheel, thespectacles, the factory din, the tight shoes, etc., the habitsof inattention are more recent, and the manner of theirgenesis seems susceptible, hypothetically at least, of beingtraced.
Howcan impressions that are not needed by the intellectbe thus shunted off from all relation to the rest ofconsciousness? Professor G. E. Müller has made a plausiblereply to this question, and most of what follows isborrowed from him.[384] He begins with the fact that
"When we first come out of a mill or factory, in which we have remainedlong enough to get wonted to the noise, we feel as if somethingwerelacking. Our total feeling of existence is different from what itwas when we were in the mill.... A friend writes to me: 'I have inmy room a little clock which does not run quite twenty-four hours withoutwinding. In consequence of this, it often stops. So soon as thishappens, I notice it, whereas I naturally fail to notice it when going.[Pg 457]When this first began to happen, there was this modification: I suddenlyfelt an undefined uneasiness or sort of void, without being able tosay what was the matter; and only after some consideration did I findthe cause in the stopping of the clock.'"
That the stopping of an unfelt stimulus may itself befelt is a well-known fact: the sleeper in church who wakeswhen the sermon ends; the miller who does the same whenhis wheel stands still, are stock examples. Now (sinceevery impression falling on the nervous system must propagateitself somewhither), Müller suggests that impressionswhich come to us when the thought-centres are preoccupiedwith other matters may thereby be blocked or inhibitedfrom invading these centres, and may then overflow intolower paths of discharge. And he farther suggests that ifthis process recur often enough, the side-track thus createdwill grow so permeable as to be used, no matter what maybe going on in the centres above. In the acquired inattentionmentioned, the constant stimulus always causeddisturbanceat first; and consciousness of it was extrudedsuccessfully only when the brain wasstrongly excited aboutother things. Gradually the extrusion became easier, andat last automatic.
The side-tracks which thus learn to draft off the stimulationsthat interfere with thought cannot be assigned withany precision. They probably terminate in organic processes,or insignificant muscular contractions which, whenstopped by the cessation of their instigating cause, immediatelygive us the feeling that something is gone from ourexistence (as Müller says), or (as his friend puts it) the feelingof a void.[385]
Müller's suggestion awakens another. It is a well-knownfact that persons striving to keep their attention ona difficult subject will resort to movements of various unmeaningkinds, such as pacing the room, drumming withthe fingers, playing with keys or watch-chain, scratching[Pg 458]head, pulling mustache, vibrating foot, or what not, accordingto the individual. There is an anecdote of Sir W. Scott,when a boy, rising to the head of his class by cutting offfrom the jacket of the usual head-boy a button which thelatter was in the habit of twirling in his fingers during thelesson. The button gone, its owner's power of recitingalso departed.—Now much of this activity is unquestionablydue to the overflow of emotional excitement during anxiousand concentrated thought. It drains away nerve-currentswhich if pent up within the thought-centres would verylikely make the confusion there worse confounded. Butmay it not also be a means of drafting off all the irrelevantsensations of the moment, and so keeping the attentionmore exclusively concentrated upon its inner task? Eachindividual usually has his own peculiar habitual movementof this sort. A downward nerve-path is thus kept constantlyopen during concentrated thought; and as it seemsto be a law of frequent (if not of universal) application, thatincidental stimuli tend to discharge through paths that arealready discharging rather than through others, the wholearrangement might protect the thought-centres from interferencefrom without. Were this the truerationale of thesepeculiar movements, we should have to suppose that thesensations produced by each phase of the movement itselfare also drafted off immediately by the next phase and helpto keep the circular process agoing. I offer the suggestionfor what it is worth; the connection of the movements themselveswith the continued effort of attention is certainly agenuine and curious fact.
[322] Bain mentions attention in the Senses and the Intellect, p. 558, andeven gives a theory of it on pp. 370-374 of the Emotions of the Will. Ishall recur to this theory later on.
[323] "The first and most important, but also the most difficult, task at theoutset of an education is to overcome gradually the inattentive dispersionof mind which shows itself wherever the organic life preponderates overthe intellectual. The training of animals ... must be in the first instancebased on the awakening of attention (cf. Adrian Leonard,Essai surl'Education des Animaux, Lille, 1842), that is to say, we must seek to makethem gradually perceive separately things which, if left to themselves,would not be attended to, because they would fuse with a great sum ofother sensorial stimuli to a confused total impression of which each separateitem only darkens and interferes with the rest. Similarly at first with thehuman child. The enormous difficulties of deaf-mute- and especially ofidiot-instruction is principally due to the slow and painful manner inwhich we succeed in bringing out from the general confusion of perceptionsingle items with sufficient sharpness." (Waitz, Lehrb. d. Psychol., p. 632.)
[324] Elements, part i, chap. ii,fin.
[325] Lectures on Metaphysics, lecture xiv.
[326] Nature, vol. iii, p. 281 (1871).
[327] If a lot of dots or strokes on a piece of paper be exhibited for a momentto a person innormal condition, with the request that he say howmany are there, he will find that they break into groups in his mind's eye,and that whilst he is analyzing and counting one group in his memory theothers dissolve. In short, the impression made by the dots changes rapidlyinto something else. In thetrance-subject, on the contrary, it seems tostick; I find that persons in the hypnotic state easily count the dots inthe mind's eye so long as they do not much exceed twenty in number.
[328] Mr. Cattell made Jevons's experiment in a much more precise way(Philosophische Studien, iii, 121 ff.). Cards were ruled with short lines,varying in number from four to fifteen, and exposed to the eye for a hundredthof a second. When the number was but four or five, no mistakesas a rule were made. For higher numbers the tendency was to under- ratherthan to over-estimate. Similar experiments were tried with lettersand figures, and gave the same result. When the letters formed familiarwords, three times as many of them could be named as when their combinationwas meaningless. If the words formed a sentence, twice as manyof them could be caught as when they had no connection. "The sentencewas then apprehended as a whole. If not apprehended thus, almost nothingis apprehended of the several words; but if the sentence as a whole isapprehended, then the words appear very distinct."—Wundt and his pupilDietze had tried similar experiments on rapidly repeated strokes of sound.Wundt made them follow each other in groups, and found that groups oftwelve strokes at most could be recognized and identified when they succeededeach other at the most favorable rate, namely, from three to fivetenths of a second (Phys. Psych., ii, 215). Dietze found that by mentallysubdividing the groups into sub-groups as one listened, as many as fortystrokes could be identified as a whole. They were then grasped as eightsub-groups of five, or as five of eight strokes each. (Philosophische Studien,ii, 362.)—Later in Wundt's Laboratory, Bechterew made observations ontwosimultaneously elapsing series of metronome strokes, of which one containedone stroke more than the other. The most favorable rate of successionwas 0.3 sec., and he then discriminated a group of 18 from one of18 + 1, apparently. (Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, 272.)
[329] Revue Scientifique, vol. 39, p. 684 (May 28, 1887).
[330] Cf. Chr. Wolff: Psychologia Empirica, § 245. Wolff's account of thephenomena of attention is in general excellent.
[331] Pflüger's Archiv, xi, 429-31.
[332] Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. ii, pp. 238-40.
[333]Ib. p. 262.
[334] Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. ii, 264-6.
[335] This was the original 'personal equation' observation of Bessel. AnObserver looked through his equatorial telescope to note the moment atwhich a star crossed the meridian, the latter being marked in the telescopicfield of view by a visible thread, beside which other equidistant threadsappear. "Before the star reached the thread he looked at the clock, andthen, with eye at telescope, counted the seconds by the beat of the pendulum.Since the star seldom passed the meridian at the exact moment of abeat, the observer, in order to estimate fractions, had to note its positionat the stroke before and at the stroke after the passage, and to divide thetime as the meridian-line seemed to divide the space. If, e.g., one hadcounted 20 seconds, and at the 21st the star seemed removed byac fromthe meridian-threadc, whilst at the 22d it was at the distancebc; then, ifac: bc:: 1: 2, the star would have passed at 21 1/8 seconds. The conditionsresemble those in our experiment: the star is the index-hand, the threadsare the scale; and a time-displacement is to be expected, which with highrapidities may be positive, and negative with low. The astronomic observationsdo not permit us to measure its absolute amount; but that it existsis made certain by the fact than after all other possible errors are eliminated,there still remains between different observers a personal differencewhich is often much larger than that between mere reaction-times, amounting ...sometimes to more than a second." (Op. cit. p. 270.)
[336] Philosophische Studien, ii, 601.
[337] Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. ii, 273-4; 3d ed. ii, 339; PhilosophischeStudien, ii, 621 ff.—I know that I am stupid, but I confess I find thesetheoretical statements, especially Wundt's, a little hazy. Herr v. Tschischconsiders it impossible that the perception of the index's position shouldcome in too late, and says it demands no particular attention (p. 622). Itseems, however, that this can hardly be the case. Both observers speak ofthe difficulty of seeing the index at the right moment. The case is quitedifferent from that of distributing the attention impartially over simultaneousmomentary sensations. The bell or other signal gives a momentarysensation, the index a continuous one, of motion. To note any onepositionof the latter is tointerrupt this sensation of motion and to substitute anentirely different percept—one, namely, of position—for it, during a timehowever brief. This involves a sudden change in the manner of attendingto the revolutions of the index; which changeought to take place neithersooner nor later than the momentary impression, andfix the index as it isthen and there visible. Now this is not a case of simply getting two sensationsat once and so feeling them—which would be an harmonious act;but ofstopping one and changing it into another, whilst we simultaneouslyget a third. Two of these acts are discrepant, and the whole three ratherinterfere with each other. It becomes hard to 'fix' the index at the veryinstant that we catch the momentary impression; so we fall into a way offixing it either at the last possible moment before, or at the first possiblemoment after, the impression comes.
This at least seems to me the more probable state of affairs. If we fixthe index before the impression really comes, that means that we perceiveit too late. But why do we fix itbefore when the impressions come slowand simple, andafter when they come rapid and complex? And whyunder certain conditions is there no displacement at all? The answerwhich suggests itself is that when there is just enough leisure between theimpressions for the attention to adapt itself comfortably both to them andto the index (one second in W.'s experiments), it carries on the two processesat once; when the leisure is excessive, the attention, following itsown laws of ripening, and beingready to note the index before the otherimpression comes, notes itthen, since that is the moment of easiest action,whilst the impression, which comes a moment later, interferes with notingit again; and finally, that when the leisure is insufficient, the momentaryimpressions, being the more fixed data, are attended to first, and the indexis fixed a little later on. The noting of the index at too early a momentwould be the noting of a real fact, with its analogue in many other rhythmicalexperiences. In reaction-time experiments, for example, when, in aregularly recurring series, the stimulus is once in a while omitted, the observersometimes reacts as if it came. Here, as Wundt somewhere observes,we catch ourselves acting merely because our inward preparation is complete.The 'fixing' of the index is a sort of action; so that my interpretationtallies with facts recognized elsewhere; but Wundt's explanation (ifI understand it) of the experiments requires us to believe that an observerlike v. Tschisch shall steadily and without exception get an hallucinationof a bell-stroke before the latter occurs, andnot hear the real bell-stroke afterwards.I doubt whether this is possible, and I can think of no analogueto it in the rest of our experience. The whole subject deserves to be goneover again. To Wundt is due the highest credit for his patience in workingout the facts. His explanation of them in his earlier work (Vorlesungenüb. Menschen und Thierseele, i, 37-42, 365-371) consisted merely in theappeal to the unity of consciousness, and may be considered quite crude.
[338] Note that the permanent interests are themselves grounded in certainobjects and relations in which our interest is immediate and instinctive.
[339] Herbart: Psychologie als Wissenschaft, § 128.
[340] Sir W. Hamilton. Metaphysics, lecture xiv.
[341] Mental Physiol., § 124. The oft-cited case of soldiers not perceivingthat they are wounded is of an analogous sort.
[342] Prof. J. M. Cattell made experiments to which we shall refer furtheron, on the degree to which reaction-times might be shortened by distractingor voluntarily concentrating the attention. He says of the latter seriesthat "the averages show that the attention can be kept strained, that is, thecentres kept in a state of unstable equilibrium, for one second" (Mind, xi,240).
[343] Physiologische Optik, § 32.
[344] "'Genius,' says Helvetius, 'is nothing but a continued attention (uneattention suivie).' 'Genius,' says Buffon, 'is only a protracted patience(une longue patience).' 'In the exact sciences, at least,' says Cuvier, 'itis the patience of a sound intellect, when invincible, which truly constitutesgenius.' And Chesterfield has also observed that 'the power of applyingan attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the suremark of a superior genius.'" (Hamilton: Lect. on Metaph., lecture xiv.)
[345] See, e.g., Ulrici: Leib u. Seele, ii, 28; Lotze: Metaphysik, § 273;Fechner, Revision d. Psychophysik, xix; G. E. Müller: Zur Theorie d.sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, $ 1; Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, i, 71.
[346] Fechner,op. cit. p. 271.
[347] Tonpsychologie, i, p. 71.
[348] Compare, on clearness as the essential fruit of attention, Lotze's Metaphysic,§ 273.
[349] Elements, part i, chap. ii.
[350] Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. ii, 226.
[351] By a negative value of the reaction-time Wundt means the case of thereactive movement occurringbefore the stimulus.
[352]Op. cit. ii, 239.
[353] The reader must not suppose this phenomenon to be of frequentoccurrence. Experienced observers, like Exner and Cattell, deny havingmet with it in their personal experience.
[354]Op. cit. pp. 241-5.
[355] It should be added that Mr. J. M. Cattell (Mind, xi, 33) found, onrepeating Wundt's experiments with a disturbing noise upon two practisedobservers, that the simple reaction-time either for light or sound washardly perceptibly increased. Making strong voluntary concentration ofattention shortened it by about 0.013 seconds on an average (p. 240).Performing mental additions whilst waiting for the stimulus lengthened itmore than anything, apparently. For other, less careful, observations,compare Obersteiner, in Brain, i, 439. Cattell's negative results show howfar some persons can abstract their attention from stimuli by which otherswould be disturbed.—A. Bartels (Versuche über die Ablenkung d. Aufmerksamkeit,Dorpat, 1889) found that a stimulus to one eye sometimesprevented, sometimes improved, the perception of a quickly ensuing veryfaint stimulus to the other.
[356] Cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. p. 794.
[357] Beiträge zur Experimentellen Psychologie, Heft i, pp. 73-106 (1889).
[358] To say the very least, he always brought his articulatory innervationclose to the discharging point. Herr M. describes a tightening of the head-musclesas characteristic of the attitude of attention to the reply.
[359] Psychophysik, Bd. ii, pp. 475-6.
[360] I must say that I am wholly unconscious of the peculiar feelings inthe scalp which Fechner goes on to describe. "The feeling of strainedattention in the different sense-organs seems to be only a muscular one producedin using these various organs by setting in motion, by a sort of reflexaction, the muscles which belong to them. One can ask, then, with whatparticular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in the effortto recall something is associated? On this question my own feeling givesme a decided answer; it comes to me distinctly, not as a sensation of tensionin the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction inthe scalp with a pressure from without inwards over the whole cranium,undoubtedly caused by a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. Thisharmonizes very well with the German popular expressionden Kopf zusammennehmen,etc., etc. In a former illness, in which I could not endurethe slightest effort of continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias onthis question, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of the occiput,assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried tothink."(Ibid. pp. 490-491.) In an early writing by Professor Mach, after speakingof the way in which by attention we decompose complex musicalsounds into their elements, this investigator continues: "It is more than afigure of speech when one says that we 'search' among the sounds. Thishearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like attentivelooking in the case of the eye. If, obeying the drift of physiology, weunderstand by attention nothing mystical, but a bodily disposition, it ismost natural to seek it in the variable tension of the muscles of the ear.Just so, what common men call attentive looking reduces itself mainly toaccommodating and setting of the optic axes.... According to this, itseems to me a very plausible view that quite generally Attention has its seatin the mechanism of the body. If nervous work is being done throughcertain channels, that by itself is a mechanical ground for other channelsbeing closed." (Wien. Sitzungsberichte, Math. Naturw., xlviii, 2, 297.1863.)
[361] Physiol. Optik, p. 741.
[362] Hermann's Handbuch, iii, i, 548.
[363] Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. 85-9 (Engl. tr., 2d ed. 50, 51;see also pp. 60-1).
[364] Physiol. Psych., ii, 209.
[365] Physiol. Optik, 741.
[366] P. 728.
[367] Popular Scientific Lectures, Eng. Trans., p. 295.
[368] Similarly in the verses which some one tried to puzzle me with theother day: "Gui n'a beau dit, qui sabot dit, nid a beau dit elle?"
[369] I cannot refrain from referring in a note to an additional set of factsinstanced by Lotze in his Medizinische Psychologie, § 431, although I amnot satisfied with the explanation, fatigue of the sense-organ, whichhegives. "In quietly lying and contemplating a wall-paper pattern, sometimesit is the ground, sometimes the design, which is clearer and consequentlycomes nearer.... Arabesques of monochromic many-convolutedlines now strike us as composed of one, now of another connected linearsystem, and all without any intention on our part. [This is beautifullyseen in Moorish patterns; but a simple diagram like Fig. 39 also shows itwell.
We see it sometimes as twolarge triangles superposed, sometimesas a hexagon with anglesspanning its sides, sometimes as sixsmall triangles stuck together attheir corners.]... Often it happensin revery that when we stareat a picture, suddenly some one ofits features will be lit up with especialclearness, although neitherits optical character nor its meaningdiscloses any motive for suchan arousal of the attention....To one in process of becomingdrowsy the surroundings alternatelyfade into darkness andabruptly brighten up. The talk ofthe bystanders seems now to comefrom indefinite distances; but at the next moment it startles us byits threatening loudness at our very ear," etc. These variations, whicheveryone will have noticed, are, it seems to me, easily explicable by thevery unstable equilibrium of our ideational centres, of which constantchange is the law. Weconceive one set of lines as object, the other asbackground, and forthwith the first set becomes the set wesee. Thereneed be nological motive for the conceptual change, the irradiations ofbrain-tracts by each other, according to accidents of nutrition, 'like sparksin burnt-up paper,' suffice. The changes during drowsiness are still moreobviously due to this cause.
[370] The Emotions and the Will, 3d ed. p. 370.
[371] Psychologie de l'Attention (1889), p. 32 ff.
[372] Philosophische Studien, iv, 413 ff.
[373] See Lange,loc. cit. p. 417, for another proof of his view, drawn fromthe phenomenon of retinal rivalry.
[374] Many of my students have at my request experimented with imaginedletters of the alphabet and syllables, and they tell me that they can seethem inwardly as total colored pictures without following their outlineswith the eye. I am myself a bad visualizer, and make movements all thewhile.—M. L. Marillier, in an article of eminent introspective power whichappeared after my text was written (Remarques sur le Mécanisme de l'Attention,in Revue Philosophique, vol. xxvii, p. 566), has contended againstRibot and others for the non-dependence of sensory upon motor images intheir relations to attention. I am glad to cite him as an ally.
[375] Drs. Ferrier (Functions of the Brain, §§ 102-3) and Obersteiner (Brain,i, 439 ff.) treat it as the essential feature. The author whose treatmentof the subject is by far the most thorough and satisfactory is Prof. G. E.Müller, whose little work Zur Théorie der sinnlichen Aufmerksamkeit,Inauguraldissertation, Leipzig, Edelmann (1874?), is for learning andacuteness a model of what a monograph should be. I should like to havequoted from it, but the Germanism of its composition makes quotation quiteimpossible. See also G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series,Prob. 2, chap. 10; G. H. Schneider: Der menschliche Wille, 294 ff., 309ff.; C. Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, i, 67-75; W. B. Carpenter: Mental Physiology,chap. 3; Cappie in 'Brain,' July 1886 (hyperæmia-theory); J. Sullyin 'Brain,' Oct. 1890.
[376] L'Enfant de trois à sept Ans, p. 108.
[377] Psychologie de l'Attention, p. 53.
[378] Repetition of this sort does not conferintelligence of what is said, it onlykeeps the mind from wandering into other channels. The intelligencesometimes comes in beats, as it were, at the end of sentences, or in themidst of words which were mere words until then. See above,p. 281.
[379] The reader will please observe that I am saying all that canpossiblybe said in favor of the effect-theory, since, inclining as I do myself to thecause-theory, I do not want to undervalue the enemy. As a matter offact, one might begin to take one's stand against the effect theory atthe outset, with the phenomenon of immediate sensorial attention. Onemight say that attention causes the movements of adjustment of the eyes,for example, and is not merely their effect. Hering writes most emphaticallyto this effect: "The movements from one point of fixation to anotherare occasioned and regulated by the changes of place of the attention.When an object, seen at first indirectly, draws our attention to itself, thecorresponding movement of the eye follows without further ado, as a consequenceof the attention's migration and of our effort to make the objectdistinct. The wandering of the attention entails that of the fixation point.Before its movement begins, its goal is already in consciousness andgrasped by the attention, and the location of this spot in the total spaceseen is what determines the direction and amount of the movement of theeye." (Hermann's Handbuch, p. 534.) I do not here insist on this, becauseit is hard to tell whether the attention or the movement comes first (Hering'sreasons, pp. 535-6, also 544-6, seem to me ambiguous), and because,even if the attention to the object does come first, it may be a mere effect ofstimulus and association. Mach's theory that thewill to look is thespace-feelingitself may be compared with Hering's in this place. See Mach'sBeiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886), pp. 55 ff.
[380] F. H. Bradley, "Is there a Special Activity of Attention?" in 'Mind,'xi, 305, and Lipps, Grundtatsachen, chaps. iv and xxx, have stated itsimilarly.
[381] More will be said of the matter when we come to the chapter on theWill.
[382] See, for a defence of the notion of inward activity, Mr. James Ward'ssearching articles in 'Mind,' xii, 45 and 564.
[383] It must be admitted that some little time will often elapse before thiseffort succeeds. As a child, I slept in a nursery with a very loud-tickingclock, and remember my astonishment more than once, on listening for itstick, to find myself unable to catch it for what seemed a long space oftime; then suddenly it would break into my consciousness with an almoststartling loudness.—M. Delbœuf somewhere narrates how, sleeping in thecountry near a mill-dam, he woke in the night and thought the water hadceased to flow, but on looking out of the open window saw it flowing in themoonlight, and then heard it too.
[384] Zur Theorie d. sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, p. 128 foll.
[385] I have begun to inquire experimentally whether any of the measurablefunctions of the workmen change after the din of machinery stops at aworkshop. So far I have found no constant results as regards either pulse,breathing, or strength of squeeze by the hand. I hope to prosecute the inquiryfarther (May, 1890).
In Chapter VIII,p. 221, the distinction was drawn betweentwo kinds of knowledge of things, bare acquaintancewith them and knowledge about them. The possibility oftwo such knowledges depends on a fundamental psychicalpeculiarity which may be entitled "the principle of constancyin the mind's meanings" and which may be thus expressed:"The same matters can be thought of in successive portions ofthe mental stream, and some of these portions can know thatthey mean the same matters which the other portions meant."One might put it otherwise by saying that "the mind canalways intend, and know when it intends, to think of the Same."
Thissense of sameness is the very keel and backbone ofour thinking. We saw inChapter X how the consciousnessof personal identity reposed on it, the present thoughtfinding in its memories a warmth and intimacy which itrecognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now feels.This sense of identity of the knowing subject is held bysome philosophers to be the only vehicle by which theworld hangs together. It seems hardly necessary to saythat a sense of identity of the known object would performexactly the same unifying function, even if the sense ofsubjective identity were lost. And without the intention tothink of the same outer things over and over again, and thesense that we were doing so, our sense of our own personalsameness would carry us but a little way towards makinga universe of our experience.
Note, however, that we are in the first instance speakingof the sense of sameness from the point of view of themind's structure alone, and not from the point of view ofthe universe. We are psychologizing, not philosophizing,[Pg 460]That is, we do not care whether there be anyreal samenessinthings or not, or whether the mind be true or false in itsassumptions of it. Our principle only lays it down thatthe mind makes continual use of thenotion of sameness,and if deprived of it, would have a different structure fromwhat it has. In a word, the principle that the mind canmean the Same is true of itsmeanings, but not necessarilyof aught besides.[386] The mind must conceive as possiblethat the Same should be before it, for our experience to bethe sort of thing it is. Without the psychological sense ofidentity, sameness might rain down upon us from the outerworld for ever and we be none the wiser. With the psychologicalsense, on the other hand, the outer world mightbe an unbroken flux, and yet we should perceive a repeatedexperience. Even now, the world may be a place in whichthe same thing never did and never will come twice. Thething we mean to point at may change from top to bottomand we be ignorant of the fact. But in our meaning itselfwe are not deceived; our intention is to think of the same.The name which I have given to the principle, in calling itthe law of constancy in our meanings, accentuates its subjectivecharacter, and justifies us in laying it down as themost important of all the features of our mental structure.
Not all psychic life need be assumed to have the senseof sameness developed in this way. In the consciousnessof worms and polyps, though the same realities may frequentlyimpress it, the feeling of sameness may seldomemerge. We, however, running back and forth, like spiderson the web they weave, feel ourselves to be working overidentical materials and thinking them in different ways.And the man who identifies the materials most is held tohave the most philosophic human mind.
The function by which we thus identify a numerically distinctand permanent subject of discourse is calledconception;and the thoughts which are its vehicles are calledconcepts.But the word 'concept' is often used as if it stood for theobject of discourse itself; and this looseness feeds suchevasiveness in discussion that I shall avoid the use of theexpression concept altogether, and speak of 'conceivingstate of mind,' or something similar, instead. The word'conception' is unambiguous. It properly denotes neitherthe mental state nor what the mental state signifies, butthe relation between the two, namely, thefunction of themental state in signifying just that particular thing. It isplain that one and the same mental state can be the vehicleof many conceptions, can mean a particular thing,and a great deal more besides. If it has such a multipleconceptual function, it may be called an act of compoundconception.
We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental,as steam-engine; fictions, as mermaid; or mereentia rationis,like difference or nonentity. But whatever we doconceive, our conception is of that and nothing else—nothingelse, that is,instead of that, though it may be of muchelsein addition to that. Each act of conception resultsfrom our attention singling out some one part of the massof matter for thought which the world presents, and holdingfast to it, without confusion.[387] Confusion occurs when[Pg 462]we do not know whether a certain object proposed to usis the same with one of our meanings or not; so that theconceptual function requires, to be complete, that thethought should not only say 'I mean this,' but also say 'Idon't mean that.'[388]
Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, andnever can become another. The mind may change itsstates, and its meanings, at different times; may drop oneconception and take up another, but the dropped conceptioncan in no intelligible sense be said tochange into itssuccessor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now seeto have been scorched black. But my conception 'white'does not change into my conception 'black.' On the contrary,it stays alongside of the objective blackness, as adifferent meaning in my mind, and by so doing lets mejudge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless itstayed, I should simply say 'blackness' and know no more.Thus, amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, theworld of conceptions, or things intended to be thoughtabout, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's Realm ofIdeas.[389]
Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some ofqualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may beconceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if onlyit be singled out and marked so as to separate it fromother things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that' will suffice.[Pg 463]To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceivedby itsdenotation, with noconnotation, or a very minimum ofconnotation, attached. The essential point is that it shouldbe re-identified by us as that which the talk is about; andno full representation of it is necessary for this, even whenit is a fully representable thing.
In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectualscale may have conception. All that is required is thatthey should recognize the same experience again. A polypwould be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hollo! thingumbobagain!' ever flitted through its mind.
Most of the objects of our thought, however, are tosome degree represented as well as merely pointed out.Either they are things and events perceived or imagined,or they are qualities apprehended in a positive way. Evenwhere we have no intuitive acquaintance with the nature ofa thing, if we know any of the relations of it at all, anythingabout it, that is enough to individualize and distinguish itfrom all the other things which we might mean. Many ofour topics of discourse are thusproblematical, or defined bytheir relations only. We think of a thingabout which certainfacts must obtain, but we do not yet know how thething will look when it is realized. Thus we conceive of aperpetual-motion machine. It is aquæsitum of a perfectlydefinite kind,—we can always tell whether the actualmachines offered us do or do not agree with what we meanby it. The natural possibility or impossibility of the thingdoes not touch the question of its conceivability in thisproblematic way. 'Round square,' 'black-white-thing,' areabsolutely definite conceptions; it is a mere accident, as faras conception goes, that they happen to stand for thingswhich nature never lets us sensibly perceive.[390]
The fact that the same real topic of discourse is at onetime conceived as a mere 'that' or 'that which, etc.,' andis at another time conceived with additional specifications,has been treated by many authors as a proof that conceptionsthemselves are fertile and self-developing. A conception,according to the Hegelizers in philosophy, 'developsits own significance,' 'makes explicit what it implicitly contained,'passes, on occasion, 'over into its opposite,' and inshort loses altogether the blankly self-identical characterwe supposed it to maintain. The figure we viewed as apolygon appears to us now as a sum of juxtaposed triangles;the number hitherto conceived as thirteen is at last noticedto be six plus seven, or prime; the man thought honest isbelieved a rogue. Such changes of our opinion are viewedby these thinkers as evolutions of our conception, fromwithin.
The facts are unquestionable; our knowledge doesgrow and change by rational and inward processes, as wellas by empirical discoveries. Where the discoveries areempirical, no one pretends that the propulsive agency, theforce that makes the knowledge develop, is mere conception.All admit it to be our continued exposure to thething, with its power to impress our senses. Thus strychnin,which tastes bitter, we find will also kill, etc. Now I saythat where the new knowledge merely comes fromthinking,the facts are essentially the same, and thatto talk of self-developmenton the part of our conceptions is a very badway of stating the case. Not new sensations, as in the empirical[Pg 465]instance, but new conceptions, are the indispensableconditions of advance.
For if the alleged cases of self-development be examinedit will be found, I believe, that the new truth affirms inevery case arelation between the original subject of conceptionand some new subject conceived later on. Thesenew subjects of conception arise in various ways. Everyone of our conceptions is of something which our attentionoriginally tore out of the continuum of felt experience, andprovisionally isolated so as to make of it an individualtopic of discourse. Every one of them has a way, if themind is left alone with it, of suggesting other parts of thecontinuum from which it was torn, for conception to workupon in a similar way. This 'suggestion' is often no morethan what we shall later know as the association of ideas.Often, however, it is a sort of invitation to the mind to play,add lines, break number-groups, etc. Whatever it is, it bringsnew conceptions into consciousness, which latter thereuponmay or may not expressly attend to the relation in whichthe new stands to the old. Thus I have a conception ofequidistant lines. Suddenly, I know not whence, therepops into my head the conception of their meeting. Suddenlyagain I think of the meeting and the equidistance bothtogether, and perceive them incompatible. "Those lineswill never meet," I say. Suddenly again the word 'parallel'pops into my head. 'They are parallels,' I continue;and so on. Original conceptions to start with; adventitiousconceptions pushed forward by multifarious psychologiccauses; comparisons and combinations of the two; resultantconceptions to end with; which latter may be of eitherrational or empirical relations.
As regards these relations, they are conceptions of thesecond degree, as one might say, and their birthplace isthe mind itself. In Chapter XXVIII I shall at considerablelength defend the mind's claim to originality and fertilityin bringing them forth. But no single one of the mind'sconceptions is fertileof itself as the opinion which I criticisepretends. When the several notes of a chord aresounded together, we get a new feeling from their combination.This feeling is due to the mind reacting upon that[Pg 466]group of sounds in that determinate way, and no one wouldthink of saying of any single note of the chord that it 'developed'of itself into the other notes or into the feeling ofharmony. So of Conceptions. No one of them developsinto any other. But if two of them are thought at once,theirrelation may come to consciousness, and form matterfor a third conception.
Take 'thirteen' for example, which is said to developinto 'prime.' What really happens is that we compare theutterly changeless conception of thirteen with various otherconceptions, those of the different multiples of two, three,four, five, and six, and ascertain that itdiffers from themall. Such difference is a freshly ascertained relation. It isonly for mere brevity's sake that we call it a property of theoriginal thirteen, the property of being prime. We shall seein the next chapter that (if we count out æsthetic and moralrelations between things) the only important relations ofwhich the mere inspection of conceptions makes us aware arerelations of comparison, that is, of difference and no-difference,between them. The judgment 6 + 7 = 13 expressesthe relation ofequality between two ideal objects, 13 on theone hand and 6 + 7 on the other, successively conceivedand compared. The judgments 6 + 7 > 12, or 6 + 7 < 14,express in like manner relations of inequality betweenideal objects. But if it be unfair to say that the conceptionof 6 + 7 generates that of 12 or of 14, surely it is as unfairto say that it generates that of 13.
The conceptions of 12, 13, and 14 are each and all generatedby individual acts of the mind, playing with its materials.When, comparing two ideal objects, we find themequal, the conception of one of them may be that of a wholeand of the other that of all its parts. This particular caseis, it seems to me, the only case which makes the notion ofone conception evolving into another sound plausible. Buteven in this case the conception, as such, of the whole doesnot evolve into the conception, as such, of the parts. Letthe conception of some object as a whole be given first.To begin with, it points to and identifies for future thoughta certainthat. The 'whole' in question might be one ofthose mechanical puzzles of which the difficulty is to unlock[Pg 467]the parts. In this case, nobody would pretend thatthe richer and more elaborate conception which we gainof the puzzle after solving it came directly out of our firstcrude conception of it, for it is notoriously the outcome ofexperimenting with our hands. It is true that, as theyboth meanthat same puzzle, our earlier thought and our laterthought have one conceptual function, are vehicles of oneconception. But in addition to being the vehicle of thisbald unchanging conception, 'that same puzzle,' the laterthought is the vehicle of all those other conceptions whichit took the manual experimentation to acquire. Now, it isjust the same where the whole is mathematical instead ofbeing mechanical. Let it be a polygonal space, which wecut into triangles, and of which we then affirm that itisthose triangles. Here the experimentation (although usuallydone by a pencil in the hands) may be done by theunaided imagination. We hold the space, first conceivedas polygonal simply, in our mind's eye until our attentionwandering to and fro within it has carved it into thetriangles. The triangles are a new conception, the result ofthis new operation. Having once conceived them, however,and compared them with the old polygon which we originallyconceived and which we have never ceased conceiving,we judge them to fit exactly into its area. The earlier andlater conceptions, we say, are of one and the same space.But this relation between triangles and polygon which themind cannot help finding if it compares them at all, is verybadly expressed by saying that the old conception has developedinto the new. New conceptions come from newsensations, new movements, new emotions, new associations,new acts of attention, and new comparisons of old conceptions,and not in other ways. Endogenous prolificationis not a mode of growth to which conceptions can layclaim.
I hope, therefore, that I shall not be accused of huddlingmysteries out of sight, when I insist that the psychologyof conception is not the place in which to treat of thoseof continuity and change. Conceptions form the one classof entities that cannot under any circumstances change.They can cease to be, altogether; or they can stay, as what[Pg 468]they severally are; but there is for them no middle way.They form an essentially discontinuous system, and translatethe process of our perceptual experience, which is naturallya flux, into a set of stagnant and petrified terms. Thevery conception of flux itself is an absolutely changelessmeaning in the mind: it signifies just that one thing, flux,immovably.—And, with this, the doctrine of the flux of theconcept may be dismissed, and need not occupy our attentionagain.[391]
We have now to pass to a less excusable mistake.There are philosophers who deny that associated thingscan be broken asunder at all, even provisionally, by theconceiving mind. The opinion known as Nominalism saysthat we really never frame any conception of the partialelements of an experience, but are compelled, whenever wethink it, to think it in its totality, just as it came.
I will be silent of mediæval Nominalism, and begin withBerkeley, who is supposed to have rediscovered the doctrine[Pg 469]for himself. His asseverations against 'abstractideas' are among the oftenest quoted passages in philosophicliterature.
"It is agreed," he says, "on all hands that the qualities or modesof things do never really exist each of them apart by itself, and separatedfrom all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together,several in the same object. But, we are told, the mind being able toconsider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other qualitieswith which it is united, does by that means frame to itself abstractideas.... After this manner, it is said, we come by the abstract ideaof man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature; wherein it istrue there is included color, because there is no man but has somecolor, but then it can be neither white, nor black, nor any particularcolor, because there is no one particular color wherein all men partake.So likewise there is included stature, but then it is neither tall staturenor low stature, nor yet middle stature, but something abstracted fromall these. And so of the rest.... Whether others have this wonderfulfaculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, Ifind indeed I have a faculty of imagining or representing to myself theideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compoundingand dividing them.... I can consider the hand, the eye,the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of thebody. But then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have someparticular shape and color. Likewise the idea of man that I frame tomyself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, ora crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by anyeffort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And itis equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinctfrom the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinearnor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract generalideas whatsoever.... And there is ground to think most men willacknowledge themselves to be in my case. The generality of menwhich are simple and illiterate never pretend to abstract notions. It issaid they are difficult, and not to be attained without pains and study.
"Now I would fain know at what time it is men are employed insurmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those necessaryhelps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, forthen it seems they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it remainstherefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely thegreat and multiplied labor of framing abstract notions will be found ahard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that acouple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rattlesand the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked togethernumberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds abstractgeneral ideas, and annexed them to every common name theymake use of?"[392]
The note, so bravely struck by Berkeley, could not,however, be well sustained in face of the fact patent toevery human being that wecan mean color without meaningany particular color, and stature without meaning anyparticular height. James Mill, to be sure, chimes in heroicallyin the chapter on Classification of his 'Analysis'; butin his son John the nominalistic voice has grown so weakthat, although 'abstract ideas' are repudiated as a matterof traditional form, the opinions uttered are really nothingbut a conceptualism ashamed to call itself by its own legitimatename.[393] Conceptualism says the mind can conceiveany quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it,in isolation from everything else in the world. This is, ofcourse, the doctrine which we have professed. John Millsays:
"The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the attributeswhich are said to compose it from all other attributes of thesame object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoinedfrom any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognizethem in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combinationwith numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object.But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomeration,we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglectof the other attributes with which we think them combined.Whilethe concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we maybe temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and mayreally, for a brief interval, have nothing-present to our mind but theattributes constituent of the concept.... General concepts, therefore,we have, properly speaking, none; we have only complex ideas of objectsin the concrete: but we are able toattend exclusively to certainparts of the concrete idea: and by thatexclusive attention we enablethose parts todetermine exclusively the course of our thoughts assubsequently called up by association; and are in a condition to carryon a train of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts only,exactlyas if we were able toconceive them separately from the rest."[394]
This is a lovely example of Mill's way of holding piouslyto his general statements, but conceding in detail all thattheir adversaries ask. If there be a better description extant,of a mind in possession of an 'abstract idea,' than is[Pg 471]contained in the words I have italicized, I am unacquaintedwith it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus breaks down.
It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which underliesthe whole discussion of the question as hitherto carriedon. That assumption is that ideas, in order to know, mustbe cast in the exact likeness of whatever things they know,and that the only things that can be known are those whichideas can resemble. The error has not been confined tonominalists.Omnis cognitio fit per assimilationem cognoscentiset cogniti has been the maxim, more or less explicitlyassumed, of writers of every school. Practically it amountsto saying that an idea mustbe a duplicate edition of whatit knows[395]—in other words, that it can only know itself—or,more shortly still, that knowledge in any strict sense of theword, as a self-transcendent function, is impossible.
Now our own blunt statements about the ultimatenessof the cognitive relation, and the difference between the'object' of the thought and its mere 'topic' or 'subject ofdiscourse' (cf.pp. 275 ff.), are all at variance with any suchtheory; and we shall find more and more occasion, as weadvance in this book, to deny its general truth. All that astate of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a reality,intend it, or be 'about' it, is to lead to a remoter stateof mind which either acts upon the reality or resembles it.The only class of thoughts which can with any show ofplausibility be said to resemble their objects are sensations.The stuff of which all our other thoughts are composed issymbolic, and a thought attests its pertinency to a topic bysimplyterminating, sooner or later, in a sensation which resemblesthe latter.
But Mill and the rest believe that a thought mustbewhat it means, and mean what itis, and that if it be a pictureof an entire individual, it cannot mean any part of himto the exclusion of the rest. I say nothing here of the preposterouslyfalse descriptive psychology involved in thestatement that the only things we can mentally picture are[Pg 472]individuals completely determinate in all regards. ChapterXVIII will have something to say on that point, and wecan ignore it here. For even if it were true that our imageswere always of concrete individuals, it would not in theleast follow that our meanings were of the same.
The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar elementof the thought. It is one of those evanescent and'transitive' facts of mind which introspection cannot turnround upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as anentomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the(somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it pertains tothe 'fringe' of the subjective state, and is a 'feeling of tendency,'whose neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot ofdawning and dying processes too faint and complex to betraced. The geometer, with his one definite figure beforehim, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countlessother figures as well, and that although hesees lines of acertain special bigness, direction, color, etc., hemeans notone of these details. When I use the wordman in two differentsentences, I may have both times exactly the samesound upon my lips and the same picture in my mentaleye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of utteringthe word and imagining the picture, know that I mean,two entirely different things. Thus when I say: "What awonderful man Jones is!" I am perfectly aware that I meanby man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. Butwhen I say: "What a wonderful thing Man is!" I amequally well aware that I mean toinclude not only Jones,but Napoleon and Smith as well. This added consciousnessis an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transformingwhat would otherwise be mere noise or vision into somethingunderstood; and determining the sequel of my thinking,the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way.We saw inChapter IX that the imageper se, the nucleus,isfunctionally the least important part of the thought.Ourdoctrine, therefore, of the 'fringe' leads to a perfectly satisfactorydecision of the nominalistic and conceptualistic controversy,so far as it touches psychology.We must decide in favor ofthe conceptualists, and affirm that the power to think things,qualities, relations, or whatever other elements there may[Pg 473]be, isolated and abstracted from the total experience inwhich they appear, is the most indisputable function of ourthought.
After abstractions, universals! The 'fringe,' whichlets us believe in the one, lets us believe in the other too.An individual conception is of something restricted, in itsapplication, to a single case. A universal or general conceptionis of an entire class, or of something belonging toan entire class, of things. The conception of an abstractquality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor particular.[396]If I abstractwhite from the rest of the wintry landscapethis morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a self-identicalquality which I may mean again; but, as I havenot yet individualized it by expressly meaning to restrict itto this particular snow, nor thought at all of the possibilityof other things to which it may be applicable, it is so farnothing but a 'that,' a 'floating adjective,' as Mr. Bradleycalls it, or a topic broken out from the rest of theworld. Properly it is, in this state, a singular—I have'singled it out;' and when, later, I universalize or individualizeits application, and my thought turns to meaneitherthis white orall possible whites, I am in reality meaningtwo new things and forming two new conceptions.[397]Such an alteration of my meaning has nothing to do withany change in the image I may have in my mental eye, butsolely with the vague consciousness that surrounds theimage, of the sphere to which it is intended to apply. Wecan give no more definite account of this vague consciousness[Pg 474]than has been given onpp. 249-266. But that is noreason for denying its presence.[398]
But the nominalists and traditional conceptualists findmatter for an inveterate quarrel in these simple facts. Fullof their notion that an idea, feeling, or state of consciousnesscan at bottom only be aware of its own quality; andagreeing, as they both do, that such an idea or state of consciousnessis a perfectly determinate, singular, and transitorything; they find it impossible to conceive how itshould become the vehicle of a knowledge of anythingpermanent or universal. "To know a universal, it mustbe universal; for like can only be known by like," etc.Unable to reconcile these incompatibles, the knower andthe known, each side immolates one of them to save theother. The nominalists 'settle the hash' of the thing knownby denying it to be ever a genuine universal; the conceptualistsdespatch the knower by denying it to be a state ofmind, in the sense of being a perishing segment of thoughts'stream, consubstantial with other facts of sensibility. Theyinvent, instead of it, as the vehicle of the knowledge ofuniversals, anactus purus intellectus, or an Ego, whose functionis treated as quasi-miraculous and nothing if not awe-inspiring,and which it is a sort of blasphemy to approachwith the intent to explain and make common, or reduce tolower terms. Invoked in the first instance as a vehicle forthe knowledge of universals, the higher principle presentlyis made the indispensable vehicle of all thinking whatever,for, it is contended, "a universal element is present inevery thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike[Pg 475]actus purus and awe-inspiring principles and despisethe reverential mood, content themselves with sayingthat we are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight ofthe face of an universal; and that what deludes us isnothing but the swarm of 'individual ideas' which mayat any time be awakened by the hearing of a name.
If we open the pages of either school, we find it impossibleto tell, in all the whirl about universal andparticular, when the author is talking about universalsin the mind, and when about objective universals, sostrangely are the two mixed together. James Ferrier,for example, is the most brilliant of anti-nominalistwriters. But who is nimble-witted enough to count, inthe following sentences from him, the number of timeshe steps from the known to the knower, and attributesto both whatever properties he finds in either one?
"To think is to pass from the singular or particular to the idea[concept] or universal.... Ideas are necessary because no thinkingcan take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as theyare completely divested of the particularity which characterizes all thephenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of this universalityis not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end may becompassed is by contrasting it with the particular. It is not difficultto understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is never morethan the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its strict particularity,it is absolutely unthinkable. In the very act of being thought,something more than it emerges, and this something more cannot beagain the particular.... Ten particularsper se cannot be thoughtof any more than one particular can be thought of;... there alwaysemerges in thought an additional something, which is the possibility ofother particulars to an indefinite extent.... The indefinite additionalsomething which they are instances of is a universal.... The ideaor universal cannot possibly be pictured in the imagination, for thiswould at once reduce it to the particular.... This inability to formany sort of picture or representation of an idea does not proceedfrom any imperfection or limitation of our faculties, but is a qualityinherent in the very nature of intelligence. A contradiction is involvedin the supposition that an idea or a universal can become theobject either of sense or of the imagination. An idea is thus diametricallyopposed to an image."[399]
The nominalists, on their side, admit aquasi-universal,something which we thinkas if it were universal, though it[Pg 476]is not; and in all that they say about this something, whichthey explain to be 'an indefinite number of particularideas,' the same vacillation between the subjective and theobjective points of view appears. The reader never cantell whether an 'idea' spoken of is supposed to be a knoweror a known. The authors themselves do not distinguish.They want to get something in the mind which shallresemblewhat is out of the mind, however vaguely, and they thinkthat when that fact is accomplished, no farther questionswill be asked. James Mill writes:[400]
"The word, man, we shall say, is first applied to an individual; itis first associated with the idea of that individual, and acquires thepower of calling up the idea of him; it is next applied to another individualand acquires the power of calling up the idea of him; so of anotherand another, till it has become associated with an indefinite number,and has acquired the power of calling up an indefinite number ofthose ideas indifferently. What happens? It does call up an indefinitenumber of the ideas of individuals as often as it occurs; and callingthem in close connection, it forms a species of complex idea of them....It is also a fact, that when an idea becomes to a certain extentcomplex, from the multiplicity of the ideas itcomprehends, it is of necessityindistinct;... and this indistinctness has, doubtless, been amain cause of the mystery which has appeared to belong to it.... Itthus appears that the wordman is not a word having a very simpleidea, as was the opinion of the realists; nor a word having no idea atall, as was that of the [earlier] nominalists; but a word calling up anindefinite number of ideas, by the irresistible laws of association, andforming them into one very complex and indistinct, but not thereforeunintelligible, idea."
Berkeley had already said:[401]
"A word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstractgeneral idea, but of many several particular ideas, any one ofwhich it indifferently suggests to the mind. An idea which, consideredin itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to representor stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort."
'Stand for,' notknow; 'becomes general,' not becomesaware of something general; 'particular ideas,' not particularthings—everywhere the same timidity about beggingthe fact of knowing, and the pitifully impotent attemptto foist it in the shape of a mode ofbeing of 'ideas.' If[Pg 477]the fact to be conceived be the indefinitely numerous actualand possible members of a class, then it is assumedthat if we can only get enough ideas to huddle together fora moment in the mind, thebeing of each several one ofthem there will be an equivalent for theknowing, ormeaning,ofone member of the class in question; and their numberwill be so large as to confuse our tally and leave itdoubtful whether all the possible members of the classhave thus been satisfactorily told off or not.
Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what itknows, nor knows what it is; nor will swarms of copies ofthe same 'idea,' recurring in stereotyped form, or 'by theirresistible laws of association formed into one idea,' everbe the same thing as a thought of 'all the possible members'of a class. We must meanthat by an altogether specialbit of consciousnessad hoc. But it is easy to translateBerkeley's, Hume's, and Mill's notion of a swarm of ideasinto cerebral terms, and so to make them stand for somethingreal; and, in this sense, I think the doctrine of theseauthors less hollow than the opposite one which makesthe vehicle of universal conceptions to be anactus purus ofthe soul. If each 'idea' stand for some special nascentnerve-process, then the aggregate of these nascent processesmight have for its conscious correlate a psychic 'fringe,'which should be just that universal meaning, or intentionthat the name or mental picture employed should mean allthe possible individuals of the class. Every peculiar complicationof brain-processes must have some peculiar correlatein the soul. To one set of processes will correspond thethought of an indefinite taking of the extent of a word likeman; to another set that of a particular taking; and to athird set that of a universal taking, of the extent of thesame word. The thought corresponding to either set ofprocesses, is always itself a unique and singular event,whose dependence on its peculiar nerve-process I of courseam far from professing to explain.[402]
Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception,whatever it be of, is one of the mind's immutable possessions,[Pg 479]the question whether a single thing, or a whole classof things, or only an unassigned quality, be meant by it, isan insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are ofsingulars, particulars, indefinites, and universals, mixedtogether in every way. A singular individual is as muchconceived when he is isolated and identified away from therest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied anduniversally applicable quality he may possess—being, forexample, when treated in the same way.[403] From everypoint of view, the overwhelming and portentous characterascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, fromPlato and Aristotle downwards, philosophers should havevied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular,and in adoration of that of the general, is hard tounderstand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge oughtto be that of the more adorable things, and that thethingsof worth are all concretes and singulars. The only valueof universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning,[Pg 480]to know new truths about individual things. The restrictionof one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing,probably requires even more complicated brain-processesthan its extension to all the instances of a kind; and themere mystery, as such, of the knowledge, is equally great,whether generals or singulars be the things known. In sum,therefore, the traditional universal-worship can only becalled a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic 'idolof the cave.'
It may seem hardly necessary to add (what followsas a matter of course frompp. 229-237, and what hasbeen implied in our assertions all along) thatnothing canbe conceived twice over without being conceived in entirelydifferent states of mind. Thus, my arm-chair is one of thethings of which I have a conception; I knew it yesterdayand recognized it when I looked at it. But if I think of itto-day as the same arm-chair which I looked at yesterday,it is obvious that the very conception of it as the same is anadditional complication to the thought, whose inward constitutionmust alter in consequence. In short, it is logicallyimpossible that the same thing should beknown as the sameby two successive copies of the same thought. As a matter offact, the thoughts by which we know that we mean the samething are apt to be very different indeed from each other.We think the thing now in one context, now in another;now in a definite image, now in a symbol. Sometimes oursense of its identity pertains to the mere fringe, sometimesit involves the nucleus, of our thought. We never canbreak the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bitsis the part that lets us know which subject is referred to;but nevertheless we alwaysdo know which of all possiblesubjects we have in mind. Introspective psychology musthere throw up the sponge; the fluctuations of subjective lifeare too exquisite to be arrested by its coarse means. Itmust confine itself to bearing witness to the fact that all sortsof different subjective states do form the vehicle by whichthe same is known; and it must contradict the oppositeview.
The ordinary Psychology of 'ideas' constantly talks as[Pg 481]if the vehicle of the same thing-known must be the same recurrentstate of mind, and as if the having over again of thesame 'idea' were not only a necessary but a sufficient conditionfor meaning the same thing twice. But this recurrenceof the same idea would utterly defeat the existence ofa repeated knowledge of anything. It would be a simple reversioninto a pre-existent state, with nothing gained in theinterval, and with complete unconsciousness of the statehaving existed before. Such is not the way in which wethink. As a rule we are fully aware that we have thoughtbefore of the thing we think of now. The continuity andpermanency of the topic is of the essence of our intellection.We recognize the old problem, and the old solutions; andwe go on to alter and improve and substitute one predicatefor another without ever letting the subject change.
This is what is meant when it is said that thinking consistsin makingjudgments. A succession of judgments mayall be about the same thing. The general practical postulatewhich encourages us to keep thinking at all is that by goingon to do so we shall judge betterof the same things than ifwe do not.[404] In the successive judgments, all sorts of newoperations are performed on the things, and all sorts ofnew results brought out, without the sense of the maintopic ever getting lost. At the outset, we merelyhave thetopic; then weoperate on it; and finally we have it againin a richer and truer way. A compound conception hasbeen substituted for the simple one, but with full consciousnessthat both are of the Same.
The distinction between having and operating is asnatural in the mental as in the material world. As ourhands may hold a bit of wood and a knife, and yet donaught with either; so our mind may simply be aware of athing's existence, and yet neither attend to it nor discriminateit, neither locate nor count nor compare nor like nordislike nor deduce it, nor recognize it articulately as havingbeen met with before. At the same time we know that,instead of staring at it in this entranced and senseless way,we may rally our activity in a moment, and locate, class,[Pg 482]compare, count, and judge it. There is nothing involved inall this which we did not postulate at the very outset of ourintrospective work: realities, namely,extra mentem, thoughts,and possible relations of cognition between the two. Theresult of the thoughts' operating on the data given tosense is to transform the order in which experiencecomesinto an entirely different order, that of theconceived world.There is no spot of light, for example, which I pick out andproceed to define as a pebble, which is not thereby tornfrom its mere time- and space-neighbors, and thought inconjunction with things physically parted from it by thewidth of nature. Compare the form in which facts appearin a text-book of physics, as logically subordinated laws,with that in which we naturally make their acquaintance.The conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try togather up the world's contents. Most facts and relationsfall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insignificantto be fixed in any conception. But whenever aphysical reality is caught and identified as the same withsomething already conceived, it remains on the sieve, andall the predicates and relations of the conception withwhich it is identified become its predicates and relationstoo; it is subjected to the sieve's network, in other words.Thus comes to pass what Mr. Hodgson calls the translationof the perceptual into the conceptual order of the world.[405]In Chapter XXII we shall see how this translationalways takes place for the sake of some subjectiveinterest,and how the conception with which we handle a bit of sensibleexperience is really nothing but a teleological instrument.This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holdingfast to meanings, has no significance apart from the factthat the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and privateends. There remains, therefore, much more to be saidabout conception, but for the present this will suffice.
[386] There are two other 'principles of identity' in philosophy. Theontological one asserts that every real thing is what it is, thata isa, andb,b. Thelogical one says that what is once true of the subject of a judgmentis always true of that subject. The ontological law is a tautologicaltruism; the logical principle is already more, for it implies subjects unalterableby time. Thepsychological law also implies facts which might notbe realized: there might be no succession of thoughts; or if there were, thelater ones might not think of the earlier; or if they did, they might notrecall the content thereof; or, recalling the content, they might not take itas 'the same' with anything else.
[387] In later chapters we shall see that determinate relations exist betweenthe various data thus fixed upon by the mind. These are calleda priorior axiomatic relations. Simple inspection of the data enables us to perceivethem; and one inspection is as effective as a million for engenderingin us the conviction that betweenthose data that relation must always hold.To change the relation we should have to make the data different. 'Theguarantee for the uniformity and adequacy' of the data can only be themind's own power to fix upon any objective content, and to mean thatcontent as often as it likes. This right of the mind to 'construct' permanentideal objects for itself out of the data of experience seems, singularlyenough, to be a stumbling-block to many. Professor Robertson in hisclear and instructive article 'Axioms' in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9thedition) suggests that it may only be wheremovements enter into the constitutionof the ideal object (as they do in geometrical figures) that we can"make the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in all circumstances."He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions ofnumber abstracted from "subjective occurrences succeeding each other intime" because these also are acts "of construction, dependent on thepower we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective consciousness.""The content of passive sensation," on the other hand, "mayindefinitely vary beyond any control of ours." What if it do vary, so longas we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from? Wecan 'make' ideal objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passiveexperience quite as perfectly as out of easily repeatable active experiences.And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we donotmake, butfind, their relations.
[388] Cf. Hodgson, Time and Space, § 46. Lotze, Logic, § 11.
[389] "For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter tastewhich at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter inthat man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall." (Locke'sEssay bk. ii, chap. xi, § 3. Read the whole section!)
[390] Black round things, square white things,per contra, Nature gives usfreely enough. But the combinations which she refuses to realize may existas distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may existin the shape of positive images, in our mind. As a matter of fact, shemayrealize a warm cold thing whenever two points of the skin, so near togetheras not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, theother with a cold, piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then oftenfelt as if in the same objective place. Under similar conditions two objects,one sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp blunt thing. Thesame space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of thecolors is made to appear as if seenthrough the other.—Whether any twoattributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the sense of appearingor not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply onde factopeculiarities of natural bodies and of our sense-organs.Logically, anyonecombination of qualities is to the full asconceivable as any other, and hasas distinct a meaning for thought. What necessitates this remark is theconfusion deliberately kept up by certain authors (e.g. Spencer, Psychology,§§ 420-7) between the inconceivable and the not-distinctly-imaginable.How do we knowwhich things we cannot imagine unless by first conceivingthem, meaningthem and not other things?
[391] Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and somereaders, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter differentlyfrom what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different editionsof the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they havetwo different conceptions of the same thing. It depends, after all, on howwe define conception. We ourselves defined it as the function by whicha state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a formeroccasion. Two states of mind will accordingly be two editions of the sameconception just so far as either does mean to think what the other thought;but no farther. If either mean to think what the other did not think, itis a different conception from the other. And if either mean to think allthat the other thought,and more, it is a different conception, so far as themore goes. In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual functions.Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of all the conceptivefunctions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other thoughtit shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just how far. "The sameA which I once meant," it says, "I shall now mean again, and mean itwith C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B, as before." In all this,therefore, there is absolutely no changing, but only uncoupling and recouplingof conceptions. Compound conceptions come, as functions ofnew states of mind. Some of these functions are the same with previousones, some not. Any changed opinion, then,partly contains new editions(absolutely identical with the old, however) of former conceptions,partlyabsolutely new conceptions. The division is a perfectly easy one to makein each particular case.
[392] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 10, 14.
[393] 'Conceptualisme honteux,' Rabier, Psychologie, 310.
[394] Exam. of Hamilton, p. 393. Cf. also Logic, bk. ii, chap. v, § 1, andbk iv, chap ii, § 1.
[395] E.g.: "The knowledge of things must mean that the mind findsitself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and themind is dissolved." (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p. 553.)
[396] The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract musteo ipsobe a universal. Even modern and independent authors like Prof. Dewey(Psychology, 207) obey the tradition: "The mind seizes upon some oneaspect,... abstracts or prescinds it. This very seizure of some oneelement generalizes the one abstracted.... Attention, in drawing itforth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness, and thus universalizesit; it is considered no longer in its particular connection with the object,but on its own account; that is, as an idea, or what it signifies to themind; and significance is always universal."
[397] C. F. Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v, chap. iii.—Whiteness isone thing,the whiteness of this sheet of paper another thing.
[398] Mr. F. H. Bradley says the conception or the 'meaning' "consistsof a part of the content, cut off, fixed by the mind, and considered apartfrom the existence of the sign. It would not be correct to add, and referredaway to another real subject; for where we think without judging,and where we deny, that description would not be applicable." Thisseems to be the same doctrine as ours; the application to one or to all subjectsof the abstract fact conceived (i.e. its individuality or its universality),constituting a new conception. I am, however, not quite sure that Mr.Bradley steadily maintains this ground. Cf. the first chapter of hisPrinciples of Logic. The doctrine I defend is stoutly upheld in Rosmini'sPhilosophical System, Introduction by Thomas Davidson, p. 43 (London,1882).
[399] Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39.
[400] Analysis, chap. viii.
[401] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12.
[402] It may add to the effect of the text to quote a passage from the essayin 'Mind,' referred to onp. 224.
"Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the universalsense of a word does correspond to a mental fact ofsome kind, butat the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all mental facts aremodifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a'feeling'?Man meant formankind is in short a different feeling fromman as a mere noise, or fromman meant forthat man, to wit, John Smithalone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, whentaken universally, the word has one of Mr. Galton's 'blended' images ofman associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that theseblended or, as Prof. Huxley calls them, 'generic' images are equivalentto concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular asa sharp thing; and the generic character of either sharp image orblurred image depends on its being feltwith its representative function.This function is the mysteriousplus, the understood meaning. But it isnothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabitinga supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized ascontinuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It isjust that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses ofother imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which wehave so abundantly set forth [inChapter IX].
"If the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing,or event; if it come fringed, it may reveal something expressly taken universallyor in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought andfeeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presenceor absence of 'fringe.' And this in turn reduces itself, with much probability,in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub-excitementsin other convolutions of the brain than those whose dischargesunderlie the more definite nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of thethought,—in this instance, the word or image it may happen to arouse.
"The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, betweencertain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others calledacts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing things,knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combinethe poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep. The contrastis really between twoaspects, in which all mental facts without exceptionmay be taken; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and theirfunctional aspect, as being cognitions. In the former aspect, the highestas well as the lowest is a feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream.This tingeing is its sensitive body, thewie ihm zu Muthe ist, the way it feelswhilst passing. In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as thehighest may grasp some bit of truth as its content, even though that truthwere as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalized and undated quality ofpain. From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts are intellections.From the subjective point of view all are feelings. Once admit that thepassing and evanescent are as real parts of the stream as the distinctand comparatively abiding; once allow that fringes and halos, inarticulateperceptions, whereof the objects are as yet unnamed, mere nascencies ofcognition, premonitions, awarenesses of direction, are thoughtssui generis,as much as articulate imaginings and propositions are; once restore, I say,thevague to its psychological rights, and the matter presents no furtherdifficulty.
"And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledgeis quite a false issue. If every feeling is at the same time a bit of knowledge,we ought no longer to talk of mental states differing by having moreor less of the cognitive quality; they only differ in knowing more or less,in having much fact or little fact for their object. The feeling of a broadscheme of relations is a feeling that knows much; the feeling of a simplequality is a feeling that knows little. But the knowing itself, whether ofmuch or of little, has the same essence, and is as good knowing in the onecase as in the other. Concept and image, thus discriminated throughtheir objects, are consubstantial in their inward nature, as modes of feeling.The one, as particular, will no longer be held to be a relatively base sort ofentity, to be taken as a matter of course, whilst the other, as universal,is celebrated as a sort of standing miracle, to be adored but not explained.Both concept and image,quâ subjective, are singular and particular. Bothare moments of the stream, which come and in an instant are no more.The word universality has no meaning as applied to their psychic body orstructure, which is always finite. It only has a meaning when applied totheir use, import, or reference to the kind of object they may reveal. Therepresentation, as such, of the universal object is as particular as that ofan object about which we know so little that the interjection 'Ha!' is allit can evoke from us in the way of speech. Both should be weighed in thesame scales, and have the same measure meted out to them whether ofworship or of contempt." (Mind, ix, pp. 18-19.)
[403] Hodgson, Time and Space, p. 404.
[404] Compare the admirable passage in Hodgson's Time and Space, p. 310.
[405] Philosophy of Reflection, i, 273-308.
It is matter of popular observation that some men havesharper senses than others, and that some have acuterminds and are able to 'split hairs' and see two shades ofmeaning where the majority see but one. Locke long agoset apart the faculty of discrimination as one in which mendiffer individually. What he wrote is good enough to quoteas an introduction to this chapter:
"Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds is that ofdiscerning and distinguishing between the several ideas it has. It isnot enough to have a confused perception of something in general: unlessthe mind had a distinct perception of different objects and theirqualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge; though thebodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now, and themind were continually employed in thinking. On this faculty of distinguishingone thing from another depends the evidence and certaintyof several even very general propositions, which have passed for innatetruths; because men, overlooking the true cause why those propositionsfind universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform impressions;whereas it in truth depends upon this clear discerning faculty of themind, whereby it perceives two ideas to be the same or different. Butof this more hereafter?
"How much the imperfection of accurately discriminating ideas onefrom another lies either in the dulness or faults of the organs of sense,or want of acuteness, exercise, or attention in the understanding, orhastiness and precipitancy natural to some tempers, I will not here examine:it suffices to take notice that this is one of the operations thatthe mind may reflect on and observe in itself. It is of that consequenceto its other knowledge, that so far as this faculty is in itselfdull, or not rightly made use of for the distinguishing one thingfrom another, so far our notions are confused, and our reason andjudgment disturbed or misled. If in having our ideas in the memoryready at hand consists quickness of parts; in this of having them unconfused,and being able nicely to distinguish one thing from anotherwhere there is but the least difference, consists in a great measure theexactness of judgment and clearness of reason which is to be observedin one man above another. And hence, perhaps, may be given some[Pg 484]reason of that common observation,—that men who have a greatdeal of wit and prompt memories have not always the clearest judgmentor deepest reason. For, wit lying most in the assemblageof ideas, and putting those together with quickness and varietywherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby tomake up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy;judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separatingcarefully one from another ideas wherein can be found the leastdifference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and byaffinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceedingquite contrary to metaphor and allusion, wherein for the most partlies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively onthe fancy, and therefore, so acceptable to all people because its beautyappears at first sight, and there is required no labor of thought to examinewhat truth or reason there is in it."[406]
But Locke's descendants have been slow to enter into thepath whose fruitfulness was thus pointed out by their master,and have so neglected the study of discrimination thatone might almost say that the classic English psychologistshave, as a school, hardly recognized it to exist. 'Association'has proved itself in their hands the one all-absorbingpower of the mind. Dr. Martineau, in his review of Bain,makes some very weighty remarks on this onesidedness ofthe Lockian school. Our mental history, says he, is, inits view,
"a perpetual formation of new compounds: and the words 'association,''cohesion,' 'fusion,' 'indissoluble connection,' all express thechange from plurality of data to some unity of result. An explanationof the process therefore requires two things: a true enumeration ofthe primary constituents, and a correct statement of their laws of combination:just as, in chemistry, we are furnished with a list of thesimple elements, and the with then principles of their synthesis. Nowthe latter of these two conditions we find satisfied by the association-psychologists:but not the former. They are not agreed upon theircatalogue of elements, or the marks by which they may know the simplefrom the compound. The psychologic unit is not fixed; that which iscalled one impression by Hartley is treated as half-a-dozen or more byMill: and the tendency of the modern teachers on this point is to recedemore and more from the better-chosen track of their master. Hartley,for example, regarded the whole present effect upon us of any singleobject—say, an orange—as a single sensation; and the whole vestigeit left behind, as a single 'idea of sensation.' His modern disciples,[Pg 485]on the other hand, consider this same effect as an aggregate from aplurality of sensations, and the ideal trace it leaves as highly compound.'The idea of an object,' instead of being an elementary starting-pointwith them, is one of the elaborate results of repetition and experience;and is continually adduced as remarkably illustrating the fusing powerof habitual association. Thus James Mill observes:
"'It is to this great law of association that we trace the formation ofour ideas of what we call external objects; that is, the ideas of a certainnumber of sensations, received together so frequently that theycoalesce as it were, and are spoken of under the idea of unity. Hence,what we call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the idea of a horse,the idea of a man. In using the names, tree, horse, man, the namesof what I call objects, I am referring, and can be referring, only to myown sensations; in fact, therefore, only naming a certain number ofsensations regarded as in a particular state of combination, that is,concomitance. Particular sensations of sight, of touch, of the muscles,are the sensations to the ideas of which, color, extension, roughness,hardness, smoothness, taste, smell, so coalescing as to appear one idea,I give the name of the idea of a tree.'[407]
"To precisely the same effect Mr. Bain remarks:
"'External objects usually affect us through a plurality of senses.The pebble on the sea-shore is pictured on the eye as form and color.We take it up in the hand and repeat the impression of form, with theadditional feeling of touch. Knock two together, and there is a characteristicsound. To preserve the impression of an object of this kind,there must be an association of all these different effects. Such association,when matured and firm, is our idea, our intellectual grasp of thepebble. Passing to the organic world, and plucking a rose, we havethe same effects of form to the eye and hand, color and touch, withnew effects of odor and taste. A certain time is requisite for the coherenceof all these qualities in one aggregate, so as to give us for allpurposes the enduring image of the rose. When fully acquired, anyone of the characteristic impressions will revive the others; the odor,the sight, the feeling of the thorny stalk—each of these by itself willhoist the entire impression into the view.'[408]
"Now, this order of derivation, making our objective knowledge beginwith plurality of impression and arrive at unity, we take to be acomplete inversion of our psychological history. Hartley, we think,was perfectly right in taking no notice of the number of inlets throughwhich an object delivers its effect upon us, and, in spite of this circumstance,treating the effect as one.... Even now, after life has readus so many analytic lessons, in proportion as we can fix the attitude ofour scene and ourselves, the sense of plurality in our impressions retreats,and we lapse into an undivided consciousness; losing, for instance,[Pg 486]the separate notice of any uniform hum in the ear, or light inthe eye, or weight of clothes on the body, though not one of them is inoperativeon the complexion of our feeling. This law, once granted,must be carried far beyond Hartley's point. Not only must each objectpresent itself to us integrally before it shells off into its qualities,but the whole scene around us must disengage for us object after objectfrom its still background by emergence and change; and even ourself-detachment from the world over against us must wait for thestart of collision between the force we issue and that which we receive.To confine ourselves to the simplest case: when a red ivory ball, seenfor the first time, has been withdrawn, it will leave a mental representationof itself, in which all that it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishablycoexist. Let a white ball succeed to it; now, and notbefore, will an attribute detach itself, and the color, by force of contrast,be shaken out into the foreground. Let the white ball be replacedby an egg: and this new difference will bring the form intonotice from its previous slumber. And thus, that which began bybeing simply an object, cut out from the surrounding scene, becomesfor us first ared object, and then ared round object; and so on. Instead,therefore, of the qualities, as separately given, subscribing togetherand adding themselves up to present us with the object as theiraggregate, the object is beforehand with them, and from its integritydelivers them out to our knowledge, one by one. In this disintegration,the primary nucleus never loses its substantive character or name;whilst the difference which it throws off appears as a mere attribute, expressedby an adjective. Hence it is that we are compelled to think ofthe object ashaving, not asbeing, its qualities; and can never heartilyadmit the belief of any loose lot of attributes really fusing themselvesinto athing. The unity of the original whole is not felt to go to piecesand be resolved into the properties which it successively gives off; itretains a residuary existence, which constitutes it asubstance, as againstthe emerging quality, which is only itsphenomenal predicate. Wereit not for this perpetual process of differentiation of self from theworld, of object from its scene, of attribute from object, no step ofAbstraction could be taken; no qualities could fall under our notice;and had we ten thousand senses, they would all converge and meet inbut one consciousness. But if this be so, it is an utter falsification ofthe order of nature to speak of sensations grouping themselves intoaggregates, and so composing for us the objects of which we think;and the whole language of the theory, in regard to the field ofsynchronous existences, is a direct inversion of the truth. Experienceproceeds and intellect is trained, not by Association, but byDissociation,not by reduction of pluralities of impression to one, but by theopening out of one into many; and a true psychological history mustexpound itself in analytic rather than synthetic terms. Precisely thoseideas—of Substance, of Mind, of Cause, of Space—which this systemtreats as infinitely complex, the last result of myriads of confluent elements,[Pg 487]are in truth the residuary simplicities of consciousness, whosestability the eddies and currents of phenomenal experience have leftundisturbed."[409]
The truth is that Experience is trained byboth associationand dissociation, and that psychology must be writboth in synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sensibletotals are, on the one hand, subdivided by discriminativeattention, and, on the other, united with other totals,—eitherthrough the agency of our own movements, carryingour senses from one part of space to another, or becausenew objects come successively and replace those by whichwe were at first impressed. The 'simple impression' ofHume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are both abstractions,never realized in experience. Experience, from the veryfirst, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuouswith the rest of the world which envelops them in spaceand time, and potentially divisible into inward elementsand parts. These objects we break asunder and reunite.We must treat them in both ways for our knowledge ofthem to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, whichway preponderates. But since the elements with whichthe traditional associationism performs its constructions—'simplesensations,' namely—are all products of discriminationcarried to a high pitch, it seems as if we ought todiscuss the subject of analytic attention and discriminationfirst.
The noticing of anypart whatever of our object is anact of discrimination. Already onp. 404 I have describedthe manner in which we often spontaneously lapse into theundiscriminating state, even with regard to objects whichwe have already learned to distinguish. Such anæstheticsas chloroform, nitrous oxide, etc., sometimes bring abouttransient lapses even more total, in which numerical discriminationespecially seems gone; for one sees light andhears sound, but whether one or many lights and soundsis quite impossible to tell. Where the parts of an objecthave already been discerned, and each made the object ofa special discriminative act, we can with difficulty feel the[Pg 488]object again in its pristine unity; and so prominent mayour consciousness of its composition be, that we may hardlybelieve that it ever could have appeared undivided. Butthis is an erroneous view, the undeniable fact being thatany number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources,falling simultaneously on a mindwhich has not yet experiencedthem separately,will fuse into a single undivided objectfor that mind. The law is that all things fuse thatcanfuse, and nothing separates except what must. What makesimpressions separate we have to study in this chapter.Although they separate easier if they come in through distinctnerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditionalground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see.The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrailsat once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion;and to the very end of life, our location of all thingsin one space is due to the fact that the original extents orbignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice atonce, coalesced together into one and the same space.There is no other reason than this why "the hand I touchand see coincides spatially with the hand I immediatelyfeel."[410]
It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim,when once a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object liebefore us, "How could we ever have been ignorant of thesethings and yet have felt the object, or drawn the conclusion,as if it were acontinuum, aplenum? There would havebeengaps—but we felt no gaps; wherefore we must have seenand heard these details, leaned upon these steps; they musthave been operative upon our minds, just as they are now, onlyunconsciously, or at leastinattentively. Our first unanalyzedsensation was really composed of these elementary sensations,our first rapid conclusion was really based on theseintermediate inferences, all the while, only we failed to notethe fact." But this is nothing but the fatal 'psychologist's fallacy'(p. 196) of treating an inferior state of mind as if itmust somehow know implicitly all that is explicitly known[Pg 489]about the same topic by superior states of mind. The thingthought of is unquestionably the same, but it is thoughttwice over in two absolutely different psychoses,—once as anunbroken unit, and again as a sum of discriminated parts. Itis not one thought in two editions, but two entirely distinctthoughts of one thing. And each thought is within itself acontinuum, aplenum, needing no contributions from the otherto fill up its gaps. As I sit here, I think objects, and Imake inferences, which the future is sure to analyze andarticulate and riddle with discriminations, showing me manythings wherever I now notice one. Nevertheless, mythought feels quite sufficient unto itself for the time being;and ranges from pole to pole, as free, and as unconsciousof having overlooked anything, as if it possessed the greatestdiscriminative enlightenment. We all cease analyzingthe world at some point, and notice no more differences.The last units with which we stop are our objective elementsof being. Those of a dog are different from those of aHumboldt; those of a practical man from those of a metaphysician.But the dog's and the practical man's thoughtsfeel continuous, though to the Humboldt or the metaphysicianthey would appear full of gaps and defects. Andtheyare continuous,as thoughts. It is onlyas mirrors ofthings that the superior minds find them full of omissions.And when the omitted things are discovered and the unnoticeddifferences laid bare, it is not that the oldthoughtssplit up, but thatnew thoughts supersede them, which makenew judgments about the same objective world.
When we discriminate an element, we may contrast itwith the case of its own absence, of its simply not beingthere, without reference to whatis there; or we may alsotake the latter into account. Let the first sort of discriminationbe calledexistential, the latterdifferential discrimination.A peculiarity of differential discriminations is thatthey result in a perception of differences which are felt asgreater or less one than the other. Entire groups of differencesmay be ranged in series: the musical scale, the colorscale, are examples. Every department of our experience[Pg 490]may have its data written down in an evenly gradated order,from a lowest to a highest member. And any one datummay be a term in several such orders. A given note mayhave a high place in the pitch-series, a low place in theloudness-series, and a medium place in the series of agreeablenesses.A given tint must, in order to be fully determined,have its place assigned in the series of qualities, inthe series of purities (freedom from white), and in the seriesof intensities or brightnesses. It may be low in one ofthese respects, but high in another. In passing from termto term in any such series we are conscious not only of eachstep of difference being equal to (or greater or less than)the last, but we are conscious of proceeding in auniformdirection, different from other possible directions. Thisconsciousness of serial increase of differences is one of thefundamental facts of our intellectual life. More,more,more, of the same kind of difference, we say, as we advancefrom term to term, and realize that the farther on we getthe larger grows the breach between the term we are atand the one from which we started. Between any twoterms of such a series the difference is greater than that betweenany intermediate terms, or than that between an intermediateterm and either of the extremes. The louder thanthe loud is louder than the less loud; the farther than thefar is farther than the less far; the earlier than the early isearlier than the late; the higher than the high is higherthan the low; the bigger than the big is bigger than thesmall; or, to put it briefly and universally,the more than themore is more than the less; such isthe great synthetic principleof mediate comparison which is involved in the possessionby the human mind of the sense of serial increase. InChapter XXVIII we shall see the altogether overwhelmingimportance of this principle in the conduct of all our higherrational operations.
Each of the differences in one of these uniform seriesfeels like a definite sensible quantity, and each term seemslike the last term with this quantity added. In many concreteobjects which differ from one another we can plainly[Pg 491]see that the difference does consist singly in the fact thatone object is the same as the otherplus something else, orthat they both have an identical part, to which each addsa distinct remainder. Thus two pictures may be struckfrom the same block, but one of them may differ in havingcolor added; or two carpets may show an identical patternwhich in each is woven in distinct hues. Similarly, twoclasses of sensation may have the same emotional tone butnegate each other in remaining respects—a dark color anda deep sound, for example; or two faces may have the sameshape of nose but everything else unlike. The similarityof the same note sounded by instruments of different timbreis explained by the coexistence of a fundamental tonecommon to both, with over-tones in one which the otherlacks. Dipping my hand into water and anon into a colderwater, I may then observe certain additional feelings, broaderand deeper irradiations of the cold, so to speak, which werenot in the earlier experience, though for aught I can tell,the feelings may be otherwise the same. 'Hefting' firstone weight, and then another, new feelings may start outin my elbow-joint, wrist, and elsewhere, and make me callthe second weight the heavier of the twain. In all thesecases each of the differing things may be represented bytwo parts, one that is common to it and the others, and anotherthat is peculiar to itself. If they form a series,A, B, C, D, etc., and the common part be calledX, whilstthe lowest difference be calledd, then the compositionof the series would be as follows:
A =X +d;
B = (X +d) +d, orX + 2d;
C =X + 3d;
D =X + 4d;
. . . . . . .
IfX itself were ultimately composed ofd's we shouldhave the entire series explained as due to the varying combinationand re-combination with itself of an unvarying element;and all the apparent differences of quality would betranslated into differences of quantity alone. This is thesort of reduction which the atomic theory in physics and[Pg 492]the mind-stuff theory in psychology regard as their ideal.So that, following the analogy of our instances, one mighteasily be tempted to generalize and to say that all differenceis but addition and subtraction, and that what we called'differential' discrimination is only 'existential' discriminationin disguise; that is to say, that whereA andB differ,we merely discern something in the one which the other iswithout.Absolute identity in things up to a certain point,then absolute non-identity, would on this theory take theplace of those ultimate qualitative unlikenesses betweenthem, in which we naturally believe; and the mental functionof discrimination, ceasing to be regarded as an ultimateone, would resolve itself into mere logical affirmation andnegation, or perception that a feature found in one thing,in another does not exist.
Theoretically, however, this theory is full of difficulty.If all the differences which we feel werein one direction,so that all objects could be arranged in one series (howeverlong), it might still work. But when we consider thenotorious fact that objects differ from each other indivergentdirections, it grows well nigh impossible to make it do so.For then, supposing that an object differed from things inone direction by the incrementd, it would have to differfrom things in another direction by a different sort of increment,call itd'; so that, after getting rid of qualitative unlikenessbetween objects, we should have it back on ourhands again between their increments. We may of coursere-apply our method, and say that the difference betweend andd' is not a qualitative unlikeness, but a fact of composition,one of them being the same as the otherplus anincrement of still higher order,δ for example, added. Butwhen we recollect that everything in the world can be comparedwith everything else, and that the number of directionsof difference is indefinitely great, then we see that thecomplication of self-compoundings of the ultimate differentialincrement by which, on this theory, all the innumerableunlikenesses of the world are explained, in order to avoidwriting any of them down as ultimate differences of kind,would beggar all conception. It is the mind-dust theory;[Pg 493]with all its difficulties in a particularly uncompromisingform; and all for the sake of the fantastic pleasure of beingable arbitrarily to say that there is between the things inthe world and between the 'ideas' in the mind nothing butabsolute sameness and absolute not-sameness of elements,the not-sameness admitting no degrees.
To me it seems much wiser to turn away from suchtranscendental extravagances of speculation, and to abideby the natural appearances. These would leave unlikenessas an indecomposable relation amongst things, and a relationmoreover of which there were all degrees. Absolutenot-sameness would be the maximal degree, absolute samenessthe minimal degree of this unlikeness, the discernmentof which would be one of our ultimate cognitive powers.[411]Certainly the natural appearances are dead against the notionthat no qualitative differences exist. With the same clearnesswith which, in certain objects, we do feel a difference tobe a mere matter ofplus andminus, in other objects we feelthat this is not the case. Contrast our feeling of the differencebetween the length of two lines with our feeling of thedifference between blue and yellow, or with that betweenright and left. Is right equal to left with something added?Is blue yellowplus something? If so,plus what?[412] Solong as we stick toverifiable psychology,we are forced toadmit that differences of simplekindform an irreducible sortof relation between some of the elements of our experience,and forced to deny that differential discrimination[Pg 494]can everywhere be reduced to the mere ascertainmentthat elements present in one fact, in another fail to exist.The perception that an element exists in one thing and doesnot exist in another and the perception of qualitative differenceare, in short, entirely disconnected mental functions.[413]
But at the same time that we insist on this, we mustalso admit that differences of quality, however abundant,are not the only distinctions with which our mind has todeal. Differences which seem of mere composition, ofnumber, ofplus andminus, also abound.[414] But it will bebest for the present to disregard all these quantitativecases and, taking the others (which, by the least favorablecalculation, will still be numerous enough), to considernextthe manner in which we come to cognize simple differencesof kind. We cannotexplain the cognition; we can only ascertainthe conditions by virtue of which it occurs.
What, then, are the conditions under which we discriminatethings differing in a simple way?
First,the things mustbedifferent, either in time, orplace, or quality. If the difference in any of these regardsis sufficiently great, then we cannot overlook it, except bynot noticing the things at all. No one can help singlingout a black stripe on a white ground, or feeling the contrastbetween a bass note and a high one sounded immediatelyafter it. Discrimination is hereinvoluntary. But wherethe objective difference is less, discrimination need not soinevitably occur, and may even require considerable effortof attention to be performed at all.
Another condition which then favors it is that the sensationsexcited bythe differing objects should not come tous simultaneously but fall in immediatesuccession upon thesame organ. It is easier to compare successive than simultaneoussounds, easier to compare two weights or two temperaturesby testing one after the other with the same hand,than by using both hands and comparing both at once.Similarly it is easier to discriminate shades of light or colorby moving the eye from one to the other, so that they successivelystimulate the same retinal tract. In testing thelocal discrimination of the skin, by applying compass-points,it is found that they are felt to touch different spotsmuch more readily when set down one after the other thanwhen both are applied at once. In the latter case theymay be two or three inches apart on the back, thighs, etc.,and still feel as if they were set down in one spot. Finally,in the case of smell and taste it is well-nigh impossible tocompare simultaneous impressions at all. The reason whysuccessive impression so much favors the result seems tobe that there is a realsensation of difference, aroused by theshock of transition from one perception to another whichis unlike the first. This sensation of difference has its ownpeculiar quality, as difference, which remains sensible, nomatter of what sort the terms may be, between which itobtains. It is, in short, one of those transitive feelings,or feelings of relation, of which I treated in a formerplace (pp. 245 ff.); and, when once aroused, its objectlingers in the memory along with the substantive termswhich precede and follow, and enables ourjudgments ofcomparison to be made. We shall soon see reason to believethat no two terms can possibly besimultaneously perceivedto differ, unless, in a preliminary operation, we have successivelyattended to each, and, in so doing, had the transitionalsensation of difference between them aroused. Afield of consciousness, however complex, is never analyzedunless some of its ingredients have changed. Wenowdiscern, 'tis true, a multitude of coexisting things aboutus at every moment: but this is because we have had along education, and each thing we now see distinct hasbeen already differentiated from its neighbors by repeated[Pg 496]appearances in successive order. To the infant, sounds,sights, touches, and pains, form probably one unanalyzedbloom of confusion.[415]
Where the difference between the successive sensationsis but slight, the transition between them must be made asimmediate as possible, and both must be comparedin memory,in order to get the best results. One cannot judgeaccurately of the difference between two similar wines,whilst the second is still in one's mouth. So of sounds,warmths, etc.—we must get the dying phases of both sensationsof the pair we are comparing. Where, however,the difference is strong, this condition is immaterial, andwe can then compare a sensation actually felt with anothercarried in memory only. The longer the interval of timebetween the sensations, the more uncertain is their discrimination.
The difference, thus immediately felt between two terms,is independent of our ability to identify either of the termsby itself. I can feel two distinct spots to be touched onmy skin, yet not know which is above and which below. Ican observe two neighboring musical tones to differ, andstill not know which of the two is the higher in pitch.Similarly I may discriminate two neighboring tints, whilstremaining uncertain which is the bluer or the yellower,orhow either differs from its mate.[416]
With such direct perceptions of difference as this, wemust not confound those entirely unlike cases in which weinfer that two things must differ because we know enoughabout each of them taken by itself to warrant our classing[Pg 497]them under distinct heads. It often happens, when theinterval is long between two experiences, that our judgmentsare guided, not so much by a positive image or copyof the earlier one, as by our recollection of certain factsabout it. Thus I know that the sunshine to-day is lessbright than on a certain day last week, because I then saidit was quite dazzling, a remark I should not now care tomake. Or I know myself to feel better now than I was lastsummer, because I can now psychologize, and then I couldnot. We are constantly busy comparing feelings withwhose quality our imagination has no sort ofacquaintanceat the time—pleasures, or pains, for example. It is notoriouslyhard to conjure up in imagination a lively image ofeither of these classes of feeling. The associationists mayprate of an idea of pleasure being a pleasant idea, of anidea of pain being a painful one, but the unsophisticatedsense of mankind is against them, agreeing with Homerthat the memory of griefs when past may be a joy, and withDante that there is no greater sorrow than, in misery, torecollect one's happier time.
Feelings remembered in this imperfect waymust becompared with present or recent feelings by the aid of whatwe know about them. We identify the remote experiencein such a case byconceiving it. The most perfect way ofconceiving it is by defining it in terms of some standardscale. If I know the thermometer to stand at zero to-dayand to have stood at 32° last Sunday, I know to-day to becolder, and I know just how much colder, than it was lastSunday. If I know that a certain note wasc, and that thisnote isd, I know that this note must be the higher of thetwo.
The inference that two things differ because their concomitants,effects, names, kinds, or—to put it generally—theirsigns, differ, is of course susceptible of unlimitedcomplication. The sciences furnish examples, in the wayin which men are led, by noticing differences in effects, toassume new hypothetical causes, differing from any knownheretofore. But no matter how many may be the steps bywhich such inferential discriminations are made,they allend in a direct intuition of difference somewhere. Thelast[Pg 498]ground for inferring that A and B differ must be that,whilst A is anm, B is ann, and thatm andn areseen todiffer. Let us then neglect the complex cases, the A's andthe B's, and go back to the study of the unanalyzable perceptionof difference between their signs, them's and then's, when these are seemingly simple terms.
I said that in their immediate succession the shock oftheir difference wasfelt. It is feltrepeatedly when we goback and forth fromm ton; and we make a point of gettingit thus repeatedly (by alternating our attention at least)whenever the shock is so slight as to be with difficulty perceived.But in addition to being felt at the brief instantof transition, the difference also feels as if incorporatedand taken up into the second term, which feels 'different-from-the-first'even while it lasts. It is obvious that the'second term' of the mind in this case is not baldn, buta very complex object; and that the sequence is not simplyfirst 'm,' then 'difference,' then 'n'; but first 'm,'then 'difference,' then 'n-different-from-m.' The severalthoughts, however, to which these three several objects arerevealed, are three ordinary 'segments' of the mental'stream.'
As our brains and minds are actually made, it is impossibleto get certainm's andn's in immediate sequence andto keep thempure. If kept pure, it would mean that theyremained uncompared. With us, inevitably, by a mechanismwhich we as yet fail to understand, the shock of differenceis felt between them, and the second object is notnpure, butn-as-different-from-m.[417] It is no more a paradoxthat under these conditions this cognition ofm andn inmutual relation should occur, than that under other conditionsthe cognition ofm's orn's simple quality shouldoccur. But as it has been treated as a paradox, and as aspiritual agent, not itself a portion of the stream, has been[Pg 499]invoked to account for it, a word of further remark seemsdesirable.
My account, it will be noted, is merely a description ofthe facts as they occur: feelings (or thoughts) each knowingsomething, but the later one knowing, if preceded bya certain earlier one, a more complicated object than itwould have known had the earlier one not been there. Ioffer noexplanation of such a sequence of cognitions. Theexplanation (I devoutly expect) will be found some day todepend on cerebral conditions. Until it is forthcoming, wecan only treat the sequence as a special case of the generallaw that every experience undergone by the brain leaves init a modification which is one factor in determining whatmanner of experiences the following ones shall be (cf.pp. 232-236). To anyone who denies the possibility of sucha law I have nothing to say, until he brings his proofs.
The sensationalists and the spiritualists meanwhile(filled both of them with their notion that the mind mustin some fashioncontain what it knows) begin by giving acrooked account of the facts. Both admit that form andn to be known in any way whatever, little rounded and finishedoff duplicates of each must be contained in the mindas separate entities. These pure ideas, so called, ofm andn respectively, succeed each other there. And since theyare distinct, say the sensationalists, they areeo ipso distinguished."To have ideas different and ideas distinguished,are synonymous expressions; different and distinguishedmeaning exactly the same thing," says James Mill.[418] "Distinguished!"say the spiritualists, "distinguishedby what,forsooth? Truly the respective ideas ofm and ofn in themind are distinct. But for that very reason neither candistinguish itself from the other, for to do that it wouldhave to be aware of the other, and thus for the time beingbecome the other, and that would be to get mixed up withthe other and to lose its own distinctness. Distinctnessof ideas and idea of distinctness, are not one thing, buttwo. This last is arelation. Only arelating principle, opposedin nature to all facts of feeling, an Ego, Soul, or[Pg 500]Subject, is competent, by being present to both of theideas alike, to hold them together and at the same time tokeep them distinct."
But if the plain facts be admitted that thepure idea of'n' isnever in the mind at all, when 'm' has once gone before;and that the feeling 'n-different-from-m' is itself anabsolutely unique pulse of thought, the bottom of thisprecious quarrel drops out and neither party is left withanything to fight about. Surely such a consummationought to be welcomed, especially when brought about, ushere, by a formulation of the facts which offers itself sonaturally and unsophistically.[419]
We may, then, conclude our examination of the mannerin which simple involuntary discrimination comes about, bysaying, 1) that its vehicle is a thought possessed of a knowledgeof both terms compared and of their difference; 2)that the necessary and sufficient condition (as the humanmind goes) for arousing this thought is that a thought orfeeling of one of the terms discriminated should, as immediatelyas possible, precede that in which the other term isknown; and 3) and that the thought which knows the secondterm will then also know the difference (or in more difficultcases will be continuously succeeded by one which doesknow the difference) and both of the terms between whichit holds.
This last thought need, however, notbe these terms withtheir difference, norcontain them. A man's thought canknow and mean all sorts of things without those things gettingbodily into it—the distant, for example, the future, andthe past.[420] The vanishing term in the case which occupiesus vanishes; but because it is the specific term it is andnothing else, it leaves a specific influence behind it when itvanishes, the effect of which is to determine the succeedingpulse of thought in a perfectly characteristic way. Whateverconsciousness comes next must know the vanishedterm and call it different from the one now there.
Here we are at the end of our tether about involuntarydiscrimination of successively felt simple things; and mustdrop the subject, hopeless of seeing any deeper into it for[Pg 502]the present, and turn to discriminations of a less simplesort.
And first, of the discrimination of simultaneously feltimpressions! Our first way of looking at a reality is oftento suppose it simple, but later we may learn to perceive itas compound. This new way of knowing the same realitymay conveniently be called by the name ofAnalysis. It ismanifestly one of the most incessantly performed of all ourmental processes, so let us examine the conditions underwhich it occurs.
I think we may safely lay down at the outset this fundamentalprinciple, thatany total impression made on themind must be unanalyzable, whose elements are never experiencedapart. The components of an absolutely changelessgroup of not-elsewhere-occurring attributes could neverbe discriminated. If all cold things were wet and all wetthings cold, if all hard things pricked our skin, and noother things did so; is it likely that we should discriminatebetween coldness and wetness, and hardness andpungency respectively? If all liquids were transparentand no non-liquid were transparent, it would be long beforewe had separate names for liquidity and transparency. Ifheat were a function of position above the earth's surface,so that the higher a thing was the hotter it became, oneword would serve for hot and high. We have, in fact, anumber of sensations whose concomitants are almost invariablythe same, and we find it, accordingly, almost impossibleto analyze them out from the totals in which theyare found. The contraction of the diaphragm and the expansionof the lungs, the shortening of certain muscles andthe rotation of certain joints, are examples. The convergingof the eyeballs and the accommodation for near objectsare, for each distance of the object (in the common useof the eyes) inseparably linked, and neither can (without asort of artificial training which shall presently be mentioned)be felt by itself. We learn that thecauses of such groupsof feelings are multiple, and therefore we frame theoriesabout the composition of the feelings themselves, by 'fusion,'[Pg 503]'integration,' 'synthesis,' or what not. But by direct introspectionno analysis of them is ever made. A conspicuouscase will come to view when we treat of the emotions.Every emotion has its 'expression,' of quick breathing,palpitating heart, flushed face, or the like. The expressiongives rise to bodily feelings; and the emotion is thus necessarilyand invariably accompanied by these bodily feelings.The consequence is that it is impossible to apprehend it asa spiritual state by itself, or to analyze it away from thelower feelings in question. It is in fact impossible to provethat it exists as a distinct psychic fact. The present writerstrongly doubts that it does so exist. But those who aremost firmly persuaded of its existence must wait, to provetheir point, until they can quote some as yet unfound pathologicalcase of an individual who shall have emotions in abody in which either complete paralysis will have preventedtheir expression, or complete anæsthesia will have madethe latter unfelt.
In general, then, if an object affects us simultaneouslyin a number of ways,abcd, we get a peculiar integral impression,which thereafter characterizes to our mind the individualityof that object, and becomes the sign of its presence;and which is only resolved intoa, b, c, d, respectively bythe aid of farther experiences. These we now may turn toconsider.
If any single quality or constituent, a, of such an object, havepreviously been known by us isolatedly, or have in any othermanner already become an object of separate acquaintanceon our part, so that we have an image of it, distinct or vague,in our mind, disconnected withbcd, then that constituent amay be analyzed out from the total impression. Analysis ofa thing means separate attention to each of its parts. InChapter XI we saw that one condition of attending to a thingwas the formation from within of a separate image of thatthing, which should, as it were, go out to meet the impressionreceived. Attention being the condition of analysis,and separate imagination being the condition of attention,it follows also that separate imagination is the condition ofanalysis.Only such elements as we are acquainted with, andcan imagine, separately, can be discriminated within a total[Pg 504]sense-impression. The image seems to welcome its ownmate from out of the compound, and to heighten the feelingthereof; whereas it dampens and opposes the feeling ofthe other constituents; and thus the compound becomesbroken for our consciousness into parts.
All the facts cited in Chapter XI, to prove that attentioninvolves inward reproduction, go to prove this point aswell. In looking for any object in a room, for a book in alibrary, for example, we detect it the more readily if, inaddition to merely knowing its name, etc., we carry in ourmind a distinct image of its appearance. The assafœtidain 'Worcestershire sauce' is not obvious to anyone whohas not tasted assafœtidaper se. In a 'cold' color anartist would never be able to analyze out the pervasivepresence ofblue, unless he had previously made acquaintancewith the color blue by itself. All the colors we actuallyexperience are mixtures. Even the purest primariesalways come to us with some white. Absolutely pure redor green or violet is never experienced, and so can neverbe discerned in the so-called primaries with which we haveto deal: the latter consequently pass for pure.—The readerwill remember how an overtone can only be attended to inthe midst of its consorts in the voice of a musical instrument,by sounding it previously alone. The imagination,being then full of it, hears the like of it in the compoundtone. Helmholtz, whose account of this observation weformerly quoted, goes on to explain the difficulty of thecase in a way which beautifully corroborates the point Inow seek to prove. He says:
"The ultimate simple elements of the sensation of tone, simple tonesthemselves, are rarely heard alone. Even those instruments by whichthey can be produced (as tuning-forks before resonance-chambers),when strongly excited, give rise to weak harmonic upper partials, partlywithin and partly without the ear.... Hence the opportunities arevery scanty for impressing on our memory an exact and sure image ofthese simple elementary tones. But if the constituents are only indefinitelyand vaguely known, the analysis of their sum into them mustbe correspondingly uncertain. If we do not know with certainty howmuch of the musical tone under consideration is to be attributed to itsprime, we cannot but be uncertain as to what belongs to the partials.Consequently we must begin by making the individual elements which[Pg 505]have to be distinguished individually audible, so as to obtain an entirelyfresh recollection of the corresponding sensation, and the wholebusiness requires undisturbed and concentrated attention. We are evenwithout the ease that can be obtained by frequent repetitions of theexperiment, such as we possess in the analysis of musical chords intotheir individual notes. In that case we hear the individual notes sufficientlyoften by themselves, whereas we rarely hear simple tones, andmay almost be said never to hear the building up of a compound fromits simple tones."[421]
Very few elements of reality are experienced by us inabsolute isolation. The most that usually happens to aconstituenta, of a compound phenomenonabcd, is thatitsstrength relatively tobcd varies from a maximum to aminimum; or that it appears linked withother qualities,in other compounds, asaefg, orahik. Either of thesevicissitudes in the mode of our experiencinga may, underfavorable circumstances, lead us to feel the difference betweenit and its concomitants, and to single it out—notabsolutely, it is true, but approximately—and so to analyzethe compound of which it is a part. The act of singlingout is then calledabstraction, and the element disengagedis anabstract.
Consider the case of fluctuations of relative strengthor intensity first. Let there be three grades of the compound,asAbcd, abcd, andabcD. In passing between thesecompounds, the mind will feel shocks of difference. Thedifferences, moreover, will serially increase, and their directionwill be felt as of a distinct sort. The increase fromabcd toAbcd is on thea side; that toabcD is on thed side.And these two differences of direction are differentlyfelt. I do not say that this discernment of thea-directionfrom thed-direction will give us an actual intuitioneither ofa or ofd in the abstract. But it leads us toconceive orpostulate each of these qualities, and to defineit as theextreme of a certain direction. 'Dry' winesand 'sweet' wines, for example, differ, and form a series.It happens that we have an experience of sweetnesspure and simple in the taste of sugar, and this we can[Pg 506]analyze out of the wine-taste. But no one knows what'dryness' tastes like, all by itself. It must, however, besomething extreme in the dry direction; and we shouldprobably not fail to recognize it as the original of our abstractconception, in case we ever did come across it. Insome such way we get to form notions of the flavor of meats,apart from their feeling to the tongue, or of that of fruitsapart from their acidity, etc., and we abstract the touch ofbodies as distinct from their temperature. We may evenapprehend the quality of a muscle's contraction as distinguishedfrom its extent, or one muscle's contraction fromanother's, as when, by practising with prismatic glasses,and varying our eyes' convergence whilst our accommodationremains the same, we learn the direction in which ourfeeling of the convergence differs from that of the accommodation.
But the fluctuation in a quality's intensity is a less efficientaid to our abstracting of it than the diversity of theother qualities in whose company it may appear.What isassociated now with one thing and now with another tends tobecome dissociated from either, and to grow into an object of abstractcontemplation by the mind. One might call this thelaw of dissociation by varying concomitants. The practicalresult of it will be to allow the mind which has thus dissociatedand abstracted a character to analyze it out of atotal, whenever it meets with it again. The law has beenfrequently recognized by psychologists, though I know ofnone who has given it the emphatic prominence in our mentalhistory which it deserves. Mr. Spencer says:
"If the property A occurs here along with the properties B, C, D,there along with C, F, H, and again with E, G, B,... it musthappen that by multiplication of experiences the impressions producedby these properties on the organism will be disconnected and renderedso far independent in the organism as the properties are in the environment,whence must eventually result a power to recognize attributes inthemselves, apart from particular bodies."[422]
And still more to the point Dr. Martineau, in the passageI have already quoted, writes:
"When a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been withdrawn,it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that[Pg 507]it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a whiteball succeed to it; now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself,and thecolor, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground.Let the white ball be replaced by an egg, and this new difference willbring theform into notice from its previous slumber, and thus thatwhich began by being simply an object cut out from the surroundingscene becomes for us first ared object, then ared round object, andso on."
Why the repetition of the character in combination withdifferent wholes will cause it thus to break up its adhesionwith any one of them, and roll out, as it were, alone uponthe table of consciousness, is a little of a mystery. Onemight suppose the nerve-processes of the various concomitantsto neutralize or inhibit each other more or less andto leave the process of the common term alone distinctlyactive. Mr. Spencer appears to think that the mere factthat the common term is repeated more often than any oneof its associates will, of itself, give it such a degree of intensitythat its abstraction must needs ensue.
This has a plausible sound, but breaks down when examinedclosely. For it is not always the often-repeatedcharacter which is first noticed when its concomitants havevaried a certain number of times; it is even more likely tobe the most novel of all the concomitants, which will arrestthe attention. If a boy has seen nothing all his life butsloops and schooners, he will probably never distinctlyhave singled out in his notion of 'sail' the character of beinghung lengthwise. When for the first time he sees asquare-rigged ship, the opportunity of extracting the lengthwisemode of hanging as a special accident, and of dissociatingit from the general notion of sail, is offered. Butthere are twenty chances to one that that will not be theform of the boy's consciousness. What henotices will bethe new and exceptional character of being hung crosswise.He will go home and speak of that, and perhaps never consciouslyformulate what the more familiar peculiarity consistsin.
This mode of abstraction is realized on a very widescale, because the elements of the world in which we findourselves appear, as a matter of fact, here, there, and everywhere,and are changing their concomitants all the while.[Pg 508]But on the other hand the abstraction is, so to speak, nevercomplete, the analysis of a compound never perfect, becauseno element is ever given to us absolutely alone, andwe can never therefore approach a compound with theimage in our mind of any one of its components in a perfectlypure form. Colors, sounds, smells, are just as much entangledwith other matter as are more formal elements ofexperience, such as extension, intensity, effort, pleasure,difference, likeness, harmony, badness, strength, and evenconsciousness itself. All are embedded in one world. Butby the fluctuations and permutations of which we havespoken, we come to form a pretty good notion of thedirectionin which each element differs from the rest, and so weframe the notion of it as aterminus, and continue to meanit as an individual thing. In the case of many elements,the simple sensibles, like heat, cold, the colors, smells, etc.,the extremes of the directions are almost touched, and inthese instances we have a comparatively exact perception ofwhat it is we mean to abstract. But even this is only anapproximation; and in literal mathematical strictnessallour abstracts must be confessed to be but imperfectly imaginablethings. At bottom the process is one ofconception,and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensiblequalities, the same as that by which we are usuallyunderstood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness,perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the directperception of a difference between compounds, and theimaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference toan ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep asone of our permanent subjects of discourse.
This is all that I can say usefully about abstraction, orabout analysis, to which it leads.
In all the cases considered hitherto I have supposedthe differences involved to be so large as to be flagrant, andthe discrimination, where successive, was treated as involuntary.But, so far from being always involuntary, discriminationsare often difficult in the extreme, and by mostmen never performed. Professor de Morgan, thinking, it[Pg 509]is true, rather of conceptual than of perceptive discrimination,wrote, wittily enough:
"The great bulk of the illogical part of the educated community—whethermajority or minority I know not; perhaps six of one and halfa dozen of the other—have not power to make a distinction, and ofcourse cannot be made to take a distinction, and of course never attemptto shake a distinction. With them all such things are evasions,subterfuges, come-offs, loop-holes, etc. They would hang a man forhorse-stealing under a statute against sheep-stealing; and would laughat you if you quibbled about the distinction between a horse and asheep."[423]
Any personal or practical interest, however, in the resultsto be obtained by distinguishing, makes one's witsamazingly sharp to detect differences. The culprit himselfis not likely to overlook the difference between a horse anda sheep. And long training and practice in distinguishinghas the same effect as personal interest. Both of theseagencies give to small amounts of objective difference thesame effectiveness upon the mind that, under other circumstances,only large ones would have. Let us seek to penetratethemodus operandi of their influence—beginning withthat of practice and habit.
That 'practice makes perfect' is notorious in the fieldof motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishmentsdepend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiard-playing,rifle-shooting, tight-rope-dancing, demand the mostdelicate appreciation of minute disparities of sensation, aswell as the power to make accurately graduated muscularresponse thereto. In the purely sensorial field we havethe well-known virtuosity displayed by the professionalbuyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One manwill distinguish by taste between the upper and the lowerhalf of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize,by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat wasgrown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, LauraBridgman, had so improved her touch as to recognize,after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once hadshaken hers; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, issaid to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort[Pg 510]the linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came fromthe wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell.
The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists haveeven recognized it as needing explanation. They haveseemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things,improve the delicacy of discernment, and have let thematter rest. At most they have said: "Attention accountsfor it; we attend more to habitual things, and what we attendto we perceive more minutely." This answer is true,but too general; it seems to me that we can be a little moreprecise.
There are at least two distinct causes which we can see atwork whenever experience improves discrimination:
First, theterms whose difference comes to be felt contractdisparate associates and these help to drag themapart.
Second, thedifference reminds us of larger differencesof the same sort, and these help us to notice it.
Let us study the first cause first, and begin by supposingtwo compounds, of ten elements apiece. Suppose no oneelement of either compound to differ from the correspondingelement of the other compound enough to be distinguishedfrom it if the two are compared alone, and let theamount of this imperceptible difference be called equal to1. The compounds will differ from each other, however,in ten different ways; and, although each difference by itselfmight pass unperceived, the total difference, equal to10, may very well be sufficient to strike the sense. In aword,increasing the number of 'points' involved in a differencemay excite our discrimination as effectually as increasing theamount of difference at any one point. Two men whose mouth,nose, eyes, cheeks, chin, and hair, all differ slightly, will beas little confounded by us, as two appearances of the sameman one with, and the other without, a false nose. Theonly contrast in the cases is that we can easily name thepoint of difference in the one, whilst in the other we cannot.
Two things, then, B and C, indistinguishable whencompared together alone, may each contract adhesionswith different associates, and the compounds thus formed[Pg 511]may, as wholes, be judged very distinct.The effect ofpractice in increasing discrimination must then, in part be dueto the reinforcing effect, upon an original slight difference betweenthe terms, of additional differences between the diverse associateswhich they severally affect. Let B and C be the terms: IfA contract adhesions with B, and C with D, AB may appearvery distinct from CD, though B and Cper se mighthave been almost identical.
To illustrate, how does one learn to distinguish claretfrom burgundy? Probably they have been drunk ondifferent occasions. When we first drank claret we heardit called by that name, we were eating such and such adinner, etc. Next time we drink it, a dim reminder of allthose things chimes through us as we get the taste of thewine. When we try burgundy our first impression is thatit is a kind of claret; but something falls short of full identification,and presently we hear it called burgundy. Duringthe next few experiences, the discrimination may stillbe uncertain—"which," we ask ourselves, "of the two winesis this present specimen?" But at last the claret-flavor recallspretty distinctly its own name, 'claret,' "that wine Idrank at So-and-so's table," etc.; and the burgundy-flavorrecalls the name burgundy and some one else's table.Andonly when this differentsettinghas come to each is our discriminationbetween the two flavors solid and stable. After awhile the tables and other parts of the setting, besides thename, grow so multifarious as not to come up distinctly intoconsciousness; butpari passu with this, the adhesion ofeach wine with its ownname becomes more and more inveterate,and at last each flavor suggests instantly and certainlyits own name and nothing else. The names differ farmore than the flavors, and help to stretch these latter fartherapart. Some such process as this must go on in all ourexperience. Beef and mutton, strawberries and raspberries,odor of rose and odor of violet, contract differentadhesions which reinforce the differences already felt inthe terms.
The reader may say that this has nothing to do withmaking us feel thedifference between the two terms. It ismerely fixing, identifying, and so to speak substantializing,[Pg 512]theterms. But what we feel as theirdifference, we shouldfeel, even though we were unable to name or otherwiseidentify the terms.
To which I reply that I believe that the difference isalways concreted and made to seemmore substantial by recognizingthe terms. I went out for instance the other dayand found that the snow just fallen had a very odd look,different from the common appearance of snow. I presentlycalled it a 'micaceous' look; and it seemed to me as if, themoment I did so, the difference grew more distinct andfixed than it was before. The other connotations of theword 'micaceous' dragged the snow farther away fromordinary snow and seemed even to aggravate the peculiarlook in question. I think some such effect as this on ourway of feeling a difference will be very generally admittedto follow from naming the terms between which it obtains;although I admit myself that it is difficult to show coercivelythat naming or otherwise identifying any given pair ofhardly distinguishable terms is essential to their being feltas different atfirst.[424]
I offer the explanation only as a partial one: it certainlyis not complete. Take the way in whichpractice refinesour local discrimination on the skin, for example. Twocompass-points touching the palm of the hand must bekept, say, half an inch asunder in order not to be mistakenfor one point. But at the end of an hour or so of practicewith them we can distinguish them as two, even when lessthan a quarter of an inch apart. If the same two regionsof the skin were constantly touched, in this experience,the explanation we have been considering would perfectlyapply. Suppose a linea b c d e f of points upon the skin.Suppose the local difference of feeling betweena andf tobe so strong as to be instantly recognized when the pointsare simultaneously touched, but suppose that betweenc andd to be at first too small for this purpose. If we began byputting the compasses ona andf and gradually contractedtheir opening, the strong doubleness recognized at firstwould still besuggested, as the compass-points approachedthe positionsc andd; for the pointe would be so nearf, andso like it, as not to be aroused withoutf also coming to mind.Similarlyd would recalle and, more remotely,f. In suchwisec—d would no longer be barec—d, but something morelikeabc—def,—palpably differing impressions. But in actualexperience the education can take place in a much lessmethodical way, and we learn at last to discriminatec anddwithout any constant adhesion being contracted between[Pg 514]one of these spots andab, and the other andef. Volkmann'sexperiments show this. He and Fechner, prompted byCzermak's observation that the skin of the blind was twiceas discriminative as that of seeing folks, sought by experimentto show the effects of practice upon themselves. Theydiscovered that even within the limits of a single sittingthe distances at which points were felt double might fallat the end to considerably less than half of their magnitudeat the beginning; and that some, though not all, of thisimproved sensibility was retained next day. But theyalso found that exercising one part of the skin in this wayimproved the discrimination not only of the correspondingpart of the opposite side of the body, but of the neighboringparts as well. Thus, at the beginning of an experimentalsitting, the compass-points had to be a Paris line asunder,in order to be distinguished by the little-finger-tip.But after exercising theother fingers, it was found that thelittle-finger-tip could discriminate points only half a lineapart.[425] The same relation existed betwixt divers points ofthe arm and hand.[426]
Here it is clear that the cause which I first suggestedfails to apply, and that we must invoke another.
What are the exact experimental phenomena? Thespots, as such, are not distinctly located, and the difference,as such, between their feelings, is not distinctly felt, untilthe interval is greater than the minimum required for themere perception of theirdoubleness. What we first feel is abluntness, then a suspicion of doubleness, which presentlybecomes a distinct doubleness, and at last two different-feelingand differently placed spots with a definite tract ofspace between them. Some of the places we try give usthis latest stage of the perception immediately; some onlygive us the earliest; and between them are intermediaryplaces. But as soon as theimage of the doubleness as it isfelt in the more discriminative places gets lodged in ourmemory, it helps us to find its like in places where otherwisewe might have missed it, much as the recent hearing of[Pg 515]an 'overtone' helps us to detect the latter in a compoundsound (supra,pp. 439-40). A dim doubleness grows clearerby being assimilated to the image of a distincter doublenessfelt a moment before. It is interpreted by means of thelatter. And so is any difference, like any other sort of impression,more easily perceived when we carry in our mindto meet it a distinct image of what sort of a thing we are tolook for, of what its nature is likely to be.[427]
These two processes, the reinforcement of the terms bydisparate associates, and the filling of the memory withpast differences, of similar direction with the present one,but of more conspicuous amount,are the only explanationsI can offer of the effects of education in this line. What isaccomplished by both processes is essentially the samething: they make small differences affect us as if they werelarge ones—that large differences should affect us as they doremains an inexplicable fact. In principle these two processesought to be sufficient to account for all possiblecases. Whether in fact they are sufficient, whether therebe no residual factor which we have failed to detect andanalyze out, I will not presume to decide.
It will be remembered that onpage 509 personal interestwas named as a sharpener of discrimination alongsideof practice. But personal interest probably acts throughattention and not in any immediate or specific way. Adistinction in which we have a practical stake is one whichwe concentrate our minds upon and which we are on thelook-out for. We draw it frequently, and we get all thebenefits of so doing, benefits which have just been explained.Where, on the other hand, a distinction has nopractical interest, where we gain nothing by analyzing afeature from out of the compound total of which it forms a[Pg 516]part, we contract a habit of leaving it unnoticed, and at lastgrow callous to its presence. Helmholtz was the first psychologistwho dwelt on these facts as emphatically as theydeserve, and I can do no better than quote his very words.
"We are accustomed," he says, "in a large number of cases wheresensations of different kinds, or in different parts of the body, existsimultaneously, to recognize that they are distinct as soon as they areperceived, and to direct our attention at will to any one of them separately.Thus at any moment we can be separately conscious of whatwe see, of what we hear, of what we feel; and distinguish what we feelin a finger or in the great toe, whether pressure, gentle touch, orwarmth. So also in the field of vision. Indeed, as I shall endeavor toshow in what follows, we readily distinguish our sensations from oneanotherwhen we have a precise knowledge that they are composite, as,for example, when we have become certain, by frequently repeated andinvariable experience, that our present sensation arises from the simultaneousaction of many independent stimuli, each of which usually excitesan equally well-known individual sensation."
This, it will be observed, is only another statement of ourlaw, that the only individual components which we canpick out of compounds are those of which we have independentknowledge in a separate form.
"This induces us to think that nothing can be easier, when a numberof different sensations are simultaneously excited, than to distinguishthem individually from each other, and that this is an innatefaculty of our minds.
"Thus we find, among other things, that it is quite a matter ofcourse to hear separately the different musical tones which come to oursenses collectively; and we expect that in every case when two of themoccur together, we shall be able to do the like.
"The matter becomes very different when we set to work to investigatethe more unusual cases of perception, and seek more completely tounderstand the conditions under which the above-mentioned distinctioncan or cannot be made, as is the case in the physiology of the senses.We then become aware thattwo different kinds or grades must be distinguishedin our becoming conscious of a sensation. The lower gradeof this consciousness is that in which the influence of the sensation inquestion makes itself felt only in the conceptions we form of externalthings and processes, and assists in determining them. This can takeplace without our needing, or indeed being able, to ascertain to whatparticular part of our sensations we owe this or that circumstance inour perceptions. In this case we will say that the impression of thesensation in question isperceived synthetically. The second highergrade is when we immediately distinguish the sensation in question as[Pg 517]an existing part of the sum of the sensations excited in us. We willsay, then, that the sensation isperceived analytically. The two casesmust be carefully distinguished from each other."[428]
By the sensation being perceived synthetically, Helmholtzmeans that it is not discriminated at all, but only feltin a mass with other simultaneous sensations. That itisfelt there he thinks is proved by the fact that ourjudgmentof the total will change if anything occurs to altertheouter cause of the sensation.[429] The following pagesfrom an earlier edition show what the concrete cases ofsynthetic perception and what those of analytic perceptionare wont to be:
"In the use of our senses, practice and experience play a much largerpart than we ordinarily suppose. Our sensations are in the first instanceimportant only in so far as they enable us to judge rightly ofthe world about us; and our practice in discriminating between themusually goes only just far enough to meet this end. We are, however,too much disposed to think that we must be immediately conscious ofevery ingredient of our sensations. This natural prejudice is due tothe fact that we are indeed conscious, immediately and without effort,of everything in our sensations which has a bearing upon those practicalpurposes, for the sake of which we wish to know the outer world.Daily and hourly, during our whole life, we keep our senses in trainingfor this end exclusively, and for its sake our experiences are accumulated.But even within the sphere of these sensations, which do correspondto outer things, training and practice make themselves felt. It iswell known how much finer and quicker the painter is in discriminatingcolors and illuminations than one whose eye is not trained in thesematters; how the musician and the musical-instrument maker perceivewith ease and certainty differences of pitch and tone which for the earof the layman do not exist; and how even in the inferior realms ofcookery and wine-judging it takes a long habit of comparing to make amaster. But more strikingly still is seen the effect of practice whenwe pass to sensations which depend only on inner conditions of ourorgans, and which, not corresponding at all to outer things or to theireffects upon us, are therefore of no value in giving us information aboutthe outer world. The physiology of the sense-organs has, in recenttimes, made us acquainted with a number of such phenomena, discoveredpartly in consequence of theoretic speculations and questionings,partly by individuals, like Goethe and Purkinje, specially endowed bynature with talent for this sort of observation. These so-called subjective[Pg 518]phenomena are extraordinarily hard to find; and when they areonce found, special aids for the attention are almost always required toobserve them. It is usually hard to notice the phenomenon again evenwhen one knows already the description of the first observer. Thereason is that we are not only unpractised in singling out these subjectivesensations, but that we are, on the contrary, most thoroughlytrained in abstracting our attention from them, because they wouldonly hinder us in observing the outer world. Only when their intensityis so strong as actually to hinder us in observing the outer worlddo we begin to notice them; or they may sometimes, in dreaming anddelirium, form the starting point of hallucinations.
"Let me give a few well-known cases, taken from physiological optics,as examples. Every eye probably containsmuscæ volitantes, so called;these are fibres, granules, etc., floating in the vitreous humor, throwingtheir shadows on the retina, and appearing in the field of vision aslittle dark moving spots. They are most easily detected by looking attentivelyat a broad, bright, blank surface like the sky. Most personswho have not had their attention expressly called to the existence ofthese figures are apt to notice them for the first time when some ailmentbefalls their eyes and attracts their attention to the subjectivestate of these organs. The usual complaint then is that themuscævolitantes came in with the malady; and this often makes the patientsvery anxious about these harmless things, and attentive to all theirpeculiarities. It is then hard work to make them believe that thesefigures have existed throughout all their previous life, and that allhealthy eyes contain them. I knew an old gentleman who once hadoccasion to cover one of his eyes which had accidentally become diseased,and who was then in no small degree shocked at finding that hisother eye was totally blind; with a sort of blindness, moreover, whichmust have lasted years, and yet he never was aware of it.
"Who, besides, would believe without performing the appropriate experiments,that when one of his eyes is closed there is a great gap, the so-called'blind spot,' not far from the middle of the field of the open eye, inwhich he sees nothing at all, but which he fills out with his imagination?Mariotte, who was led by theoretic speculations to discover thisphenomenon, awakened no small surprise when he showed it at thecourt of Charles II. of England. The experiment was at that timerepeated with many variations, and became a fashionable amusement.The gap is, in fact, so large that seven full moons alongside of eachother would not cover its diameter, and that a man's face 6 or 7 feetoff disappears within it. In our ordinary use of vision this great holein the field fails utterly to be noticed; because our eyes are constantlywandering, and the moment an object interests us we turn them fullupon it. So it follows that the object which at any actual momentexcites our attention never happens to fall upon this gap, and thus itis that we never grow conscious of the blind spot in the field. In orderto notice it, we must first purposely rivet our gaze upon one object and[Pg 519]then move about a second object in the neighborhood of the blind spot,striving meanwhile toattend to this latter without moving the directionof our gaze from the first object. This runs counter to all our habits, andis therefore a difficult thing to accomplish. With some people it is evenan impossibility. But only when it is accomplished do we see thesecond object vanish and convince ourselves of the existence of thisgap.
"Finally, let me refer to the double images of ordinary binocularvision. Whenever we look at a point with both eyes, all objects on thisside of it or beyond it appear double. It takes but a moderate effort ofobservation to ascertain this fact; and from this we may conclude thatwe have been seeing the far greater part of the external world doubleall our lives, although numbers of persons are unaware of it, and arein the highest degree astonished when it is brought to their attention.As a matter of fact, we neverhave seen in this double fashion anyparticular object upon which our attention was directed at the time;for upon such objects we always converge both eyes. In the habitualuse of our eyes, our attention is always withdrawn from such objectsas give us double images at the time; this is the reason why we soseldom learn that these images exist. In order to find them we mustset our attention a new and unusual task; we must make it explorethe lateral parts of the field of vision, not, as usual, to find what objectsare there, but to analyze our sensations. Then only do we notice thisphenomenon.[430]
"The same difficulty which is found in the observation of subjectivesensations to which no external object corresponds is found also in theanalysis of compound sensations which correspond to a single object.Of this sort are many of our sensations of sound. When the sound ofa violin, no matter how often we hear it, excites over and over againin our ear the same sum of partial tones, the result is that our feelingof this sum of tones ends by becoming for our mind a mere sign for thevoice of the violin. Another combination of partial tones becomes thesensible sign of the voice of a clarionet, etc. And the oftener any suchcombination is heard, the more accustomed we grow to perceiving it asan integral total, and the harder it becomes to analyze it by immediateobservation. I believe that this is one of the principal reasons whythe analysis of the notes of the human voice in singing is relatively so[Pg 520]difficult. Such fusions of many sensations into what, to consciousperception, seems a simple whole, abound in all our senses.
"Physiological optics affords other interesting examples. The perceptionof the bodily form of a near object comes about through thecombination of two diverse pictures which the eyes severally receivefrom it, and whose diversity is due to the different position of each eye,altering the perspective view of what is before it. Before the inventionof the stereoscope this explanation could only be assumed hypothetically;but it can now be proved at any moment by the use of the instrument.Into the stereoscope we insert two flat drawings, representing the twoperspective views of the two eyes, in such a manner that each eye seesits own view in the proper place; and we obtain, in consequence, theperception of a single extended solid, as complete and vivid as if wehad the real object before us.
"Now we can, it is true, by shutting one eye after the other and attendingto the point, recognize the difference in the pictures—at leastwhen it is not too small. But, for the stereoscopic perception of solidity,pictures suffice whose difference is so extraordinarily slight as hardlyto be recognized by the most careful comparison; and it is certain that,in our ordinary careless observing of bodily objects, we never dreamthat the perception is due to two perspective views fused into one, becauseit is an entirely different kind of perception from that of eitherflat perspective view by itself. It is certain, therefore, that two differentsensations of our two eyes fuse into a third perception entirely differentfrom either. Just as partial tones fuse into the perception of a certaininstrument's voice; and just as we learn to separate the partial tonesof a vibrating string by pinching a nodal point and letting them soundin isolation; so we learn to separate the images on the two eyes byopening and closing them alternately.
"There are other much more complex instances of the way in whichmany sensations may combine to serve as the basis of a quite simpleperception. When, for example we perceive an object in a certaindirection, we must somehow be impressed by the fact that certain ofour optic nerve-fibres, and no others, are impressed by its light. Furthermore,we must rightly judge the position of our eyes in our head,and of our head upon our body, by means of feelings in our eye-musclesand our neck-muscles respectively. If any of these processes is disturbedwe get a false perception of the object's position. The nerve-fibrescan be changed by a prism before the eye; or the eyeball's positionchanged by pressing the organ towards one side; and such experimentsshow that, for the simple seeing of the position of an object, sensationsof these two sorts must concur. But it would be quite impossible togather this directly from the sensible impression which the objectmakes. Even when we have made experiments and convinced ourselvesin every possible manner that such must be the fact, it still remainshidden from our immediate introspective observation.
"These examples" [of 'synthetic perception,' perception in which[Pg 521]each contributory sensation is feltin the whole, and is a co-determinantof what the whole shall be, but does not attract the attention to itsseparate self] "may suffice to show the vital part which the directionof attention and practice in observing play in sense-perception. Toapply this now to the ear. The ordinary task which our ear has tosolve when many sounds assail it at once is to discern the voices of theseveral sounding bodies or instruments engaged; beyond this it has noobjective interest in analyzing. We wish to know, when many men arespeaking together, what each one says, when many instruments andvoices combine, which melody is executed by each. Any deeperanalysis, such as that of each separate note into its partial tones(although it might be performed by the same means and faculty ofhearing as the first analysis) would tell us nothing new about thesources of sound actually present, but might lead us astray as to theirnumber. For this reason we confine our attention in analyzing a massof sound to the several instruments' voices, and expressly abstain, as itwere, from discriminating the elementary components of the latter. Inthis last sort of discrimination we are as unpractised as we are, on thecontrary, well trained in the former kind."[431]
After all we have said, no comment seems called forupon these interesting and important facts and reflectionsof Helmholtz.
Thetime required for discrimination has been made asubject of experimental measurement. Wundt calls itUnterscheidungszeit.His subjects (whose simple reaction-time—seep. 85 ff.—had previously been determined) were requiredto make a movement, always the same, the instantthey discernedwhich of two or more signals they received.The exact time of the signal and that of the movementwere automatically registered by a galvanic chronoscope.The particular signal to be received was unknown in advance,and the excess of time occupied by those reactionsin which its character had first to be discerned, over thesimple reaction-time, measured, according to Wundt, thetime required for the act of discrimination. It was foundlonger when four different signals were irregularly usedthan when only two were used. In the former case itaveraged, for three observers respectively (the signals beingthe sudden appearance of a black or of a white object),
0.050 sec;
0.047 sec.
0.079 sec.
In the latter case, a red and a green signal being added tothe former ones, it became, for the same observers,
0.157;
0.073;
0.132.[432]
Later, in Wundt's Laboratory, Herr Tischer made manycareful experiments after the same method, where the factsto be discriminated were the different degrees of loudnessin the sound which served as a signal. I subjoin HerrTischer's table of results, explaining that each vertical columnafter the first gives the average results obtained froma distinct individual, and that the figure in the first columnstands for the number of possible loudnesses that might beexpected in the particular series of reactions made. Thetimes are expressed in thousandths of a second.
| 2 | 6 | 8.5 | 10.75 | 10.7 | 33 | 53 |
| 3 | 10 | 14.4 | 19.9 | 22.7 | 58.5 | 57.8 |
| 4 | 16.7 | 20.8 | 29 | 29.1 | 75 | 84 |
| 5 | 25.6 | 31 | ... | 40.1 | 95.5 | 138[433] |
The interesting points here are the great individual variations,and the rapid way in which the time for discriminationincreases with the number of possible terms to discriminate.The individual variations are largely due towant of practice in the particular task set, but partly alsoto discrepancies in the psychic process. One gentlemansaid, for example, that in the experiments with threesounds, he kept the image of the middle one ready in hismind, and compared what he heard as either louder, lower,or the same. His discrimination among three possibilitiesbecame thus very similar to a discrimination between two.[434]
Mr. J. M. Cattell found he could get no results by thismethod,[435] and reverted to one used by observers previous[Pg 525]to Wundt and which Wundt had rejected. This is theeinfache Wahlmethode, as Wundt calls it. The reacterawaits the signal and reacts if it is of one sort, but omits toact if it is of another sort. The reaction thus occurs afterdiscrimination; the motor impulse cannot be sent to thehand until the subject knows what the signal is. Thenervous impulse, as Mr. Cattell says, must probably travelto the cortex and excite changes there, causing in consciousnessthe perception of the signal. These changes occupythe time of discrimination (or perception-time, as it is calledby Mr. C.) Butthen a nervous impulse must descend fromthe cortex to the lower motor centre which stands primedand ready to discharge; and this, as Mr. C. says, gives awill-time as well. The total reaction-time thus includesboth 'will-time' and 'discrimination-time.' But as thecentrifugal and centripetal processes occupying these twotimes respectively are probably about the same, and thetime used in the cortex is about equally divided betweenthe perception of the signal and the preparation of themotor discharge, if we divide it equally between perception(discrimination) and volition, the error cannot begreat.[436] We can moreover change the nature of the perceptionwithout altering the will-time, and thus investigatewith considerable thoroughness the length of the perception-time.
Guided by these principles, Prof. Cattell found the timerequired for distinguishing a white signal from no signalto be, in two observers:
0.030 sec. and 0.050 sec;
that for distinguishing one color from another was similarly:
0.100 and 0.110;
that for distinguishing a certain color from ten other colors:
0.105 and 0.117;
that for distinguishing the letter A in ordinary print fromthe letter Z:
0.142 and 0.137;
that for distinguishing a given letter from all the rest ofthe alphabet (not reacting until that letter appeared)
0.119 and 0.116;
that for distinguishing a word from any of twenty-five otherwords, from
0.118 sec. to 0.158 sec.
The difference depending on the length of the words andthe familiarity of the language to which they belonged.
Prof. Cattell calls attention to the fact that the time fordistinguishing a word is often but little more than that fordistinguishing a letter:
"We do not, therefore, distinguish separately the letters of whicha word is composed, but the word as a whole. The application of this inteaching children to read is evident."
He also finds a great difference in the time with whichvarious letters are distinguished, E being particularlybad.[437]
I have, in describing these experiments, followed the exampleof previous writers and spoken as if the process bywhich the nature of the signal determines the reaction wereidentical with the ordinary conscious process of discriminativeperception and volition. I am convinced, however,that this is not the case; and that although the results are thesame, the form of consciousness is quite different. The readerwill remember my contention (supra,p. 90 ff.) that the simplereaction-time (usually supposed to include a conscious processof perceiving) really measures nothing but a reflexact. Anyone who will perform reactions with discriminationwill easily convince himself that the process here alsois far more like a reflex, than like a deliberate, operation. Ihave made, with myself and students, a large number ofmeasurements where the signal expected was in one seriesa touchsomewhere on the skin of the back and head, andin another series a sparksomewhere in the field of view.The hand had to move as quickly as possible towards the[Pg 527]place of the touch or the spark. It did so infallibly, andsensibly instantly; whilst both place and movement seemedto beperceived only a moment later, in memory. These experimentswere undertaken for the express purpose of ascertainingwhether the movement at the sight of the spark wasdischargedimmediately by the visual perception, or whethera 'motor-idea' had to intervene between the perception ofthe spark and the reaction.[438] The first thing that was manifestto introspection was that no perception or idea ofanysort preceded the reaction. It jumped of itself, wheneverthe signal came; and perception was retrospective. Wemust suppose, then, that the state of eager expectancy of acertain definite range of possible discharges, innervates awhole set of paths in advance, so that when a particularsensation comes it is drafted into its appropriate motoroutlet too quickly for the perceptive process to be aroused.In the experiments I describe, the conditions were mostfavorable for rapidity, for the connection between thesignals and their movements might almost be called innate.It is instinctive to move the hand towards a thingseen or a skin-spot touched. But where the movement isconventionally attached to the signal, there would be morechance for delay, and the amount of practice would thendetermine the speed. This is well shown in Tischer's results,quoted onp. 524, where the most practised observer,Tischer himself, reacted in one eighth of the time neededby one of the others.[439] But what all investigators haveaimed to determine in these experiments is theminimumtime. I trust I have said enough to convince the studentthat this minimum time by no means measures what weconsciously know as discrimination. It only measuressomething which, under the experimental conditions, leads[Pg 528]to a similar result. But it is the bane of psychology tosuppose that where results are similar, processes must bethe same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometerswould, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circleis the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth,they terminate in the same two points.[440]
The perception of likeness is practically very much boundup with that of difference. That is to say, the only differenceswe noteas differences, and estimate quantitatively, andarrange along a scale, are those comparatively limited differenceswhich we find between members of a commongenus. The force of gravity and the color of this ink arethings it never occurred to me to compare until now that Iam casting about for examples of the incomparable.Similarly the elastic quality of this india-rubber band, thecomfort of last night's sleep, the good that can be done witha legacy, these are things too discrepant to have ever beencompared ere now. Their relation to each other is lessthat of difference than of mere logical negativity. To be founddifferent, things must as a rule have some commensurability,some aspect in common, which suggests the possibility oftheir being treated in the same way. This is of course nota theoretic necessity—for any distinction may be called a'difference,' if one likes—but a practical and linguistic remark.
Thesame things, then, which arouse the perception of differenceusually arouse that of resemblance also. And the analysis ofthem, so as to define wherein the difference and wherein theresemblance respectively consists, is calledcomparison. Ifwe start to deal with the things as simply the same or alike,we are liable to be surprised by the difference. If we start to[Pg 529]treat them as merely different, we are apt to discover howmuch they are alike.Difference, commonly so called, isthus between species of a genus. And the faculty by whichwe perceive the resemblance upon which the genus is based,is just as ultimate and inexplicable a mental endowment asthat by which we perceive the differences upon which thespecies depend. There is a shock of likeness when we passfrom one thing to another which in the first instance wemerely discriminate numerically, but, at the moment ofbringing our attention to bear, perceive to besimilar to thefirst; just as there is a shock of difference when we pass betweentwo dissimilars.[441] The objective extent of the likeness,just like that of the difference, determines the magnitudeof the shock. The likeness may be so evanescent, orthe basis of it so habitual and little liable to be attendedto, that it will escape observation altogether. Where, however,we find it, there we make a genus of the things compared;and their discrepancies and incommensurabilities inother respects can then figure as thedifferential of so manyspecies. As 'thinkables' or 'existents' even the smoke ofa cigarette and the worth of a dollar-bill are comparable—stillmore so as 'perishables,' or as 'enjoyables.'
Much, then, of what I have said of difference in thecourse of this chapter will apply, with a simple change oflanguage, to resemblance as well. We go through theworld, carrying on the two functions abreast, discoveringdifferences in the like, and likenesses in the different. Toabstract theground of either difference or likeness (whereit is not ultimate) demands an analysis of the given objectsinto their parts. So that all that was said of the dependenceof analysis upon a preliminary separate acquaintancewith the character to be abstracted, and upon its havingvaried concomitants, finds a place in the psychology of resemblanceas well as in that of difference.
But when all is said and done about the conditionswhich favor our perception of resemblance and our abstractionof its ground, the crude fact remains, thatsome[Pg 530]people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and far moreready to point out wherein they consist, than others are.They are the wits, the poets, the inventors, the scientificmen, the practical geniuses.A native talent for perceivinganalogies is reckoned by Prof. Bain, and by others beforeand after him, asthe leading fact in genius of every order.But as this chapter is already long, and as the question ofgenius had better wait till Chapter XXII, where its practicalconsequences can be discussed at the same time, I willsay nothing more at present either about it or about thefaculty of noting resemblances. If the reader feels thatthis faculty is having small justice done it at my hands,and that it ought to be wondered at and made much more ofthan has been done in these last few pages, he will perhapsfind some compensation when that later chapter isreached. I think I emphasize it enough when I call it oneof the ultimate foundation-pillars of the intellectual life,the others being Discrimination, Retentiveness, and Association.
Onpage 489 I spoke of differences being greater or less,and of certain groups of them being susceptible of a lineararrangement exhibiting serialincrease. A series whoseterms grow more and more different from the starting pointis one whose terms grow less and less like it. They growmore and more like it if you read them the other way.So that likeness and unlikeness to the starting point arefunctions inverse to each other, of the position of any termin such a series.
Professor Stumpf introduces the worddistance to denotethe position of a term in any such series. The lesslike is the term, the more distant it is from the startingpoint. The ideally regular series of this sort wouldbe one in which the distances—the steps of resemblanceor difference—between all pairs of adjacent terms wereequal. This would be an evenly gradated series. Andit is an interesting fact in psychology that we are able,in many departments of our sensibility, to arrange theterms without difficulty in this evenly gradated way. Differences,[Pg 531]in other words, between diverse pairs of terms,a andb, for example, on the one hand, andc andd on theother,[442] can be judged equal or diverse in amount. The distancesfrom one term to another in the series are equal.Linear magnitudes and musical notes are perhaps the impressionswhich we easiest arrange in this way. Next comeshades of light or color, which we have little difficulty inarranging by steps of difference of sensibly equal value.Messrs. Plateau and Delbœuf have found it fairly easy todetermine what shade of gray will be judged by every oneto hit the exact middle between a darker and a lightershade.[443]
How now do we so readily recognize the equality of twodifferences between different pairs of terms? or, morebriefly, how do we recognize themagnitude of a differenceat all? Prof. Stumpf discusses this question in an interestingway;[444] and comes to the conclusion that our feelingfor the size of a difference, and our perception that theterms of two diverse pairs are equally or unequally distantfrom each other, can be explained by no simpler mentalprocess, but, like the shock of difference itself, must beregarded as for the present an unanalyzable endowment[Pg 532]of the mind. This acute author rejects in particular thenotion which would make our judgment of the distancebetween two sensations depend upon ourmentally traversingthe intermediary steps. We may of course do so, andmay often find it useful to do so, as in musical intervals, orfigured lines, But we need not do so; and nothing moreis reallyrequired for a comparative judgment of the amountof a 'distance' than three or four impressions belonging toa common kind.
The vanishing of all perceptible difference between twonumerically distinct things makes themqualitatively thesame orequal. Equality, orqualitative (as distinguishedfrom numerical)identity, is thus nothing but theextremedegree of likeness.[445]
We saw above (p. 492) that some persons consider thatthe difference between two objects is constituted of twothings, viz., their absolute identity in certain respects,plustheir absolute non-identity in others. We saw that this theorywould not apply to all cases (p. 493). So here any theorywhich would base likeness on identity, and not rather identityon likeness, must fail. It is supposed perhaps, by mostpeople, that two resembling things owe their resemblanceto their absolute identity in respect of some attribute orattributes, combined with the absolute non-identity of therest of their being. This, which may be true of compoundthings, breaks down when we come to simple impressions.
"When we compare a deep, a middle, and a high note, e.g.C, f sharp,a''', we remark immediately that the first is less like the third than thesecond is. The same would be true ofc d e in the same region of thescale. Our very calling one of the notes a 'middle' note is the expressionof a judgment of this sort. But where here is the identical andwhere the non-identical part? We cannot think of the overtones; forthe first-named three notes have none in common, at least not on musicalinstruments. Moreover, we might take simple tones, and still ourjudgment would be unhesitatingly the same, provided the tones werenot chosen too close together.... Neither can it be said that theidentity consists in their all being sounds, and not a sound, a smell, anda color, respectively. For this identical attribute comes to each of themin equal measure, whereas the first, being less like the third than thesecond is, ought, on the terms of the theory we are criticising, to have[Pg 533]less of the identical quality.... It thus appears impracticable to defineall possible cases of likeness as partial identityplus partial disparity;and it is vain to seek in all cases for identical elements."[446]
And as all compound resemblances are based on simpleones like these, it follows that likenessüberhaupt must notbe conceived as a special complication of identity, butrather that identity must be conceived as a special degreeof likeness, according to the proposition expressed at theoutset of the paragraph that precedes. Likeness and differenceare ultimate relations perceived. As a matter offact, no two sensations, no two objects of all those we know,are in scientific rigor identical. We call those of themidentical whose difference is unperceived. Over and abovethis we have aconception of absolute sameness, it is true,but this, like so many of our conceptions (cf.p. 508), is anideal construction got by following a certain direction ofserial increase to its maximum supposable extreme. Itplays an important part, among other permanent meaningspossessed by us, in our ideal intellectual constructions.But it plays no part whatever in explaining psychologicallyhow we perceive likenesses between simple things.
In 1860, Professor G. T. Fechner of Leipzig, a man ofgreat learning and subtlety of mind, published two volumesentitled 'Psychophysik,' devoted to establishing and explaininga law called by him the psychophysic law, which[Pg 534]he considered to express the deepest and most elementaryrelation between the mental and the physical worlds. It isa formula for the connection between the amount of oursensations and the amount of their outward causes. Itssimplest expression is, that when we pass from one sensationto a stronger one of the same kind, the sensations increaseproportionally to the logarithms of their excitingcauses. Fechner's book was the starting point of a newdepartment of literature, which it would be perhaps impossibleto match for the qualities of thoroughness and subtlety,but of which, in the humble opinion of the presentwriter, the proper psychological outcome is justnothing.The psychophysic law controversy has prompted a goodmany series of observations on sense-discrimination, andhas made discussion of them very rigorous. It has alsocleared up our ideas about the best methods for gettingaverage results, when particular observations vary; andbeyond this it has done nothing; but as it is a chapter inthe history of our science, some account of it is here due tothe reader.
Fechner's train of thought has been popularly expoundeda great many times. As I have nothing new to add, it isbut just that I should quote an existing account. I choosethe one given by Wundt in his Vorlesungen über Menschenund Thierseele, 1863, omitting a good deal:
"How much stronger or weaker one sensation is than another, weare never able to say. Whether the sun be a hundred or a thousandtimes brighter than the moon, a cannon a hundred or a thousand timeslouder than a pistol, is beyond our power to estimate. The naturalmeasure of sensation which we possess enables us to judge of the equality,of the 'more' and of the 'less,' but not of 'how many times moreor less.' This natural measure is, therefore, as good as no measure atall, whenever it becomes a question of accurately ascertaining intensitiesin the sensational sphere. Even though it may teach us in a generalway that with the strength of the outward physical stimulus the strengthof the concomitant sensation waxes or wanes, still it leaves us withoutthe slightest knowledge of whether the sensation varies in exactly thesame proportion as the stimulus itself, or at a slower or a more rapidrate. In a word, we know by our natural sensibility nothing of thelawthat connects the sensation and its outward cause together. To findthis law we must first find an exact measure for the sensation itself;we must be able to say: A stimulus of strengthone begets a sensation[Pg 535]of strengthone; a stimulus of strengthtwo begets a sensation ofstrengthtwo, orthree, orfour, etc. But to do this we must first knowwhat a sensation two, three, or four times greater than anothersignifies....
"Space magnitudes we soon learn to determine exactly because weonly measure one space against another. The measure of mental magnitudesis far more difficult.... But the problem of measuring themagnitude ofsensations is the first step in the bold enterprise of makingmental magnitudes altogether subject to exact measurement....Were our whole knowledge limited to the fact that the sensation riseswhen the stimulus rises, and falls when the latter falls, much would notbe gained. But even immediate unaided observation teaches us certainfacts which, at least in a general way, suggest the law according towhich the sensations vary with their outward cause.
"Every one knows that in the stilly night we hear things unnoticedin the noise of day. The gentle ticking of the clock, the air circulatingthrough the chimney, the cracking of the chairs in the room, and athousand other slight noises, impress themselves upon our ear. It isequally well known that in the confused hubbub of the streets, or theclamor of a railway, we may lose not only what our neighbor says to us,but even not hear the sound of our own voice. The stars which arebrightest at night are invisible by day; and although we see the moonthen, she is far paler than at night. Everyone who has had to dealwith weights knows that if to a pound in the hand a second pound beadded, the difference is immediately felt; whilst if it be added to ahundredweight, we are not aware of the difference at all....
"The sound of the clock, the light of the stars, the pressure of thepound, these are allstimuli to our senses, and stimuli whose outwardamount remains the same. What then do these experiences teach?Evidently nothing but this, that one and the same stimulus, accordingto the circumstances under which it operates, will be felt either more orless intensely, or not felt at all. Of what sort now is the alteration inthe circumstances, upon which this alteration in the feeling may depend?On considering the matter closely we see that it is everywhere of oneand the same kind. The tick of the clock is a feeble stimulus for ourauditory nerve, which we hear plainly when it is alone, but not when itis added to the strong stimulus of the carriage-wheels and other noisesof the day. The light of the stars is a stimulus to the eye. But if thestimulation which this light exerts be added to the strong stimulus ofdaylight, we feel nothing of it, although we feel it distinctly when itunites itself with the feebler stimulation of the twilight. The pound-weightis a stimulus to our skin, which we feel when it joins itself to apreceding stimulus of equal strength, but which vanishes when it iscombined with a stimulus a thousand times greater in amount.
"We may therefore lay it down as a general rule that a stimulus,in order to be felt, may be so much the smaller if the already pre-existingstimulation of the organ is small, but must be so much the larger,[Pg 536]the greater the pre-existing stimulation is. From this in a general waywe can perceive the connection between the stimulus and the feeling itexcites. At least thus much appears, that the law of dependence isnot as simple a one as might have been expected beforehand. Thesimplest relation would obviously be that the sensation should increasein identically the same ratio as the stimulus, thus that if a stimulus ofstrengthone occasioned a sensationone, a stimulus oftwo should occasionsensationtwo, stimulusthree, sensationthree, etc. But if thissimplest of all relations prevailed, a stimulus added to a pre-existingstrong stimulus ought to provoke as great an increase of feeling as ifit were added to a pre-existing weak stimulus; the light of the starse.g., ought to make as great an addition to the daylight as it does tothe darkness of the nocturnal sky. This we know not to be the case:the stars are invisible by day, the addition they make to our sensationthen is unnoticeable, whereas the same addition to our feeling of the twilightis very considerable indeed. So it is clear that the strength of thesensations does not increase in proportion to the amount of the stimuli,but more slowly. And now comes the question, in what proportiondoes the increase of the sensation grow less as the increase of thestimulus grows greater. To answer this question, every-day experiencesdo not suffice. We need exact measurements both of the amounts ofthe various stimuli, and of the intensity of the sensations themselves.
"How to execute these measurements, however, is something whichdaily experience suggests. To measure the strength of sensations is, aswe saw, impossible; we can only measure the difference of sensations.Experience showed us what very unequal differences of sensation mightcome from equal differences of outward stimulus. But all these experiencesexpressed themselves in one kind of fact, that the same differenceof stimulus could in one case be felt, and in another case not feltat all—a pound felt if added to another pound, but not if added to ahundred-weight.... We can quickest reach a result with our observationsif we start with an arbitrary strength of stimulus, notice whatsensation it gives us, and thensee how much we can increase the stimuluswithout making the sensation seem to change. If we carry outsuch observations with stimuli of varying absolute amounts, we shall beforced to choose in an equally varying way the amounts of addition tothe stimulus which are capable of giving us a just barely perceptiblefeeling ofmore. A light, to be just perceptible in the twilight need notbe near as bright as the starlight; it must be far brighter to be just perceivedduring the day. If now we institute such observations for allpossible strengths of the various stimuli, and note for each strengththe amount of addition of the latter required to produce a barely perceptiblealteration of sensation, we shall have a series of figures inwhich is immediately expressed the law according to which the sensationalters when the stimulation is increased...."
Observations according to this method are particularly[Pg 537]easy to make in the spheres of light-, sound-, and pressure-sensation....Beginning with the latter case,
"We find a surprisingly simple result. The barely sensible additionto the original weightmust stand exactly in the same proportionto it, be thesame fraction of it, no matter what the absolute valuemay be of the weights on which the experiment is made.... As theaverage of a number of experiments, this fraction is found to be about1/3; that is, no matter what pressure there may already be made uponthe skin, an increase or a diminution of the pressure will befelt, assoon as the added or subtracted weight amounts to one third of theweight originally there."
Wundt then describes how differences may be observedin the muscular feelings, in the feelings of heat, in those oflight, and in those of sound; and he concludes his seventhlecture (from which our extracts have been made) thus:
"So we have found that all the senses whose stimuli we are enabledto measure accurately, obey a uniform law. However various may betheir several delicacies of discrimination,this holds true of all, thatthe increase of the stimulus necessary to produce an increase of the sensationbears a constant ratio to the total stimulus. The figures whichexpress this ratio in the several senses may be shown thus in tabularform:
Sensation of light, 1/100 Muscular sensation, 1/17 Feeling of pressure, 1/3 Feeling of warmth, 1/3 Feeling of sound, 1/3 "These figures are far from giving as accurate a measure as mightbe desired. But at least they are fit to convey a general notion of therelative discriminative susceptibility of the different senses.... Theimportant law which gives in so simple a form the relation of the sensationto the stimulus that calls it forth was first discovered by thephysiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber to obtain in special cases. GustavTheodor Fechner first proved it to be a law for all departments of sensation.Psychology owes to him the first comprehensive investigationof sensations from a physical point of view, the first basis of an exactTheory of Sensibility."
So much for a general account of what Fechner callsWeber's law. The 'exactness' of the theory of sensibility towhich it leads consists in the supposed fact that it givesthe means of representing sensations by numbers. Theunit of any kind of sensation will be that increment which,[Pg 538]when the stimulus is increased, we can just barely perceiveto be added. The total number of units which any givensensation contains will consist of the total number of suchincrements which may be perceived in passing from nosensation of the kind to a sensation of the present amount.We cannot get at this number directly, but we can, nowthat we know Weber's law, get at it by means of the physicalstimulus of which it is a function. For if we know howmuch of the stimulus it will take to give a barely perceptiblesensation, and then what percentage of addition tothe stimulus will constantly give a barely perceptible incrementto the sensation, it is at bottom only a question ofcompound interest to compute, out of the total amount ofstimulus which we may be employing at any moment, thenumber of such increments, or, in other words, of sensationalunits to which it may give rise. This number bearsthe same relation to the total stimulus which the timeelapsed bears to the capital plus the compound interestaccrued.
To take an example: If stimulus A just falls short ofproducing a sensation, and ifr be the percentage of itselfwhich must be added to it to get a sensation which isbarely perceptible—call this sensation 1—then we shouldhave the series of sensation-numbers corresponding totheir several stimuli as follows:
Sensation 0 = stimulus A;
Sensation 1 = stimulus A (1 + r);
Sensation 2 = stimulus A (1 + r)2;
Sensation 3 = stimulus A (1 + r)3;
.....
Sensationn = stimulus A (1 + r)n.
The sensations here form an arithmetical series, andthe stimuli a geometrical series, and the two series correspondterm for term. Now, of two series corresponding inthis way, the terms of the arithmetical one are called thelogarithms of the terms corresponding in rank to them inthe geometrical series. A conventional arithmetical seriesbeginning with zero has been formed in the ordinary logarithmictables, so that we may truly say (assuming our[Pg 539]facts to be correct so far) that thesensations vary in thesame proportion as the logarithms of their respective stimuli.And we can thereupon proceed to compute the number ofunits in any given sensation (considering the unit of sensationto be equal to the just perceptible increment abovezero, and the unit of stimulus to be equal to the incrementof stimulusr, which brings this about) by multiplying thelogarithm of the stimulus by a constant factor which mustvary with the particular kind of sensation in question. Ifwe call the stimulus R, and the constant factor C, we getthe formula
S = C log R,
which is what Fechner calls thepsychophysischer Maasformel.This, in brief, is Fechner's reasoning, as I understandit.
TheMaasformel admits of mathematical developmentin various directions, and has given rise to arduous discussionsinto which I am glad to be exempted from enteringhere, since their interest is mathematical and metaphysicaland not primarily psychological at all.[447] I must say a wordabout them metaphysically a few pages later on. Meanwhileit should be understood that no human being, in anyinvestigation into which sensations entered, has ever usedthe numbers computed in this or any other way in order totest a theory or to reach a new result. The whole notionof measuring sensations numerically, remains in short amere mathematical speculation about possibilities, whichhas never been applied to practice. Incidentally to thediscussion of it, however, a great many particular factshave been discovered about discrimination which merit aplace in this chapter.
In the first place it is found, when the difference of twosensations approaches the limit of discernibility, that atone moment we discern it and at the next we do not. Thereare accidental fluctuations in our inner sensibility whichmake it impossible to tell just what the least discernible[Pg 540]increment of the sensation is without taking the average ofa large number of appreciations. Theseaccidental errorsare as likely to increase as to diminish our sensibility,and are eliminated in such an average, for those aboveand those below the line then neutralize each other in thesum, and the normal sensibility, if there be one (that is, thesensibility due to constant causes as distinguished fromthese accidental ones), stands revealed. The best way ofgetting at the average sensibility has been very minutelyworked over. Fechner discussed three methods, as follows:
(1)The Method of just-discernible Differences. Take astandard sensationS, and add to it until you distinctly feel theadditiond; then subtract fromS +d until you distinctlyfeel the effect of the subtraction;[448] call the difference hered'. The least discernible difference sought isd +d'/2; andthe ratio of this quantity to the originalS (or rather toS +d -d') is what Fechner calls the difference-threshold.This difference-threshold should be a constant fraction (nomatter what is the size ofS)if Weber's law holds universallytrue. The difficulty in applying this method is that we areso often in doubt whether anything has been added toS ornot. Furthermore, if we simply take the smallestd aboutwhich we arenever in doubt or in error, we certainly getour least discernible difference larger than it ought theoreticallyto be.[449]
Of course thesensibility is small when the least discernibledifference is large, andvice versâ; in other words,it and the difference-threshold are inversely related to eachother.
(2)The Method of True and False Cases. A sensationwhich is barely greater than another will, on account ofaccidental errors in a long series of experiments, sometimesbe judged equal, and sometimes smaller; i.e., we shallmake a certain number of false and a certain number of[Pg 541]true judgments about the difference between the two sensationswhich we are comparing.
"But the larger this difference is, the more the number of the truejudgments will increase at the expense of the false ones; or, otherwiseexpressed, the nearer to unity will be the fraction whose denominatorrepresents the whole number of judgments, and whose numerator representsthose which are true. Ifm is a ratio of this nature, obtainedby comparison of two stimuli,A andB, we may seek another coupleof stimuli,a andb, which when compared will give the same ratio oftrue to false cases."[450]
If this were done, and the ratio ofa tob then provedto be equal to that ofA toB, that would prove that pairsof small stimuli and pairs of large stimuli may affect ourdiscriminative sensibility similarly so long as the ratio ofthe components to each other within each pair is the same.In other words, it would in so far forth prove the Weberianlaw. Fechner made use of this method to ascertain hisown power of discriminating differences of weight, recordingno less than 24,576 separate judgments, and computingas a result that his discrimination for the same relativeincrease of weight was less good in the neighborhood of500 than of 300 grams, but that after 500 grams it improvedup to 3000, which was the highest weight he experimentedwith.
(3)The Method of Average Errors consists in taking astandard stimulus and then trying to make another one ofthe same sort exactly equal to it. There will in general bean error whose amount is large when the discriminativesensibility called in play is small, andvice versâ. Thesum of the errors, no matter whether they be positive ornegative, divided by their number, gives the average error.This, when certain corrections are made, is assumed byFechner to be the 'reciprocal' of the discriminative sensibilityin question. It should bear a constant proportionto the stimulus, no matter what the absolute size of thelatter may be, if Weber's law hold true.
These methods deal with just perceptible differences.Delbœuf and Wundt have experimented with larger differences[Pg 542]by means of what Wundt calls theMéthode der mittlerenAbstufungen, and what we may call
(4)The Method of Equal-appearing Intervals. This consistsin so arranging three stimuli in a series that the intervalsbetween the first and the second shall appear equal tothat between the second and the third. At first sight thereseems to be no direct logical connection between this methodand the preceding ones. By them we compare equallyperceptibleincrements of stimulus in different regions of thelatter's scale; but by the fourth method we compare incrementswhich strike us as equallybig. But what we can butjust notice as an increment need not appear always of thesame bigness after it is noticed. On the contrary, it willappear much bigger when we are dealing with stimuli thatare already large.
(5) The method of doubling thestimulus has beenemployed by Wundt's collaborator, Merkel, who tried tomake one stimulus seem just double the other, and thenmeasured the objective relation of the two. The remarksjust made apply also to this case.
So much for the methods. The results differ in thehands of different observers. I will add a few of them,and will take first thediscriminative sensibility to light.
By the first method, Volkmann, Aubert, Masson, Helmholtz,and Kräpelin find figures varying from 1/3 or 1/4 to 1/195of the original stimulus. The smaller fractional incrementsare discriminated when the light is already fairly strong, thelarger ones when it is weak or intense. That is, the discriminativesensibility is low when weak or overstronglights are compared, and at its best with a certain mediumillumination. It is thus a function of the light's intensity;but throughout a certain range of the latter it keeps constant,andin so far forth Weber's law is verified for light.Absolute figures cannot be given, but Merkel, by method 1,found that Weber's law held good for stimuli (measured byhis arbitrary unit) between 96 and 4096, beyond which intensityno experiments were made.[451] König and Brodhun[Pg 543]have given measurements by method 1 which cover themost extensive series, and moreover apply to six differentcolors of light. These experiments (performed in Helmholtz'slaboratory, apparently,) ran from an intensity called1 to one which was 100,000 times as great. From intensity2000 to 20,000 Weber's law held good; below and abovethis range discriminative sensibility declined. The incrementdiscriminated here was the same for all colors oflight, and lay (according to the tables) between 1 and 2 percent of the stimulus.[452] Delbœuf had verified Weber's lawfor a certain range of luminous intensities by method 4;that is, he had found that the objective intensity of a lightwhich appeared midway between two others was really thegeometrical mean of the latter's intensities. But A. Lehmannand afterwards Neiglick, in Wundt's laboratory, found thateffects of contrast played so large a part in experimentsperformed in this way that Delbœuf's results could not beheld conclusive. Merkel, repeating the experiments stilllater, found that the objective intensity of the light whichwe judge to stand midway between two others neitherstands midway nor is a geometric mean. The discrepancyfrom both figures is enormous, but is least large from themidway figure or arithmetical mean of the two extreme intensities.[453]Finally, the stars have from time immemorialbeen arranged in 'magnitudes' supposed to differ by equal-seemingintervals. Lately their intensities have beengauged photometrically, and the comparison of the subjectivewith the objective series has been made. Prof. J. Jastrowis the latest worker in this field. He finds, takingPickering's Harvard photometric tables as a basis, that theratio of the average intensity of each 'magnitude' to thatbelow it decreases as we pass from lower to higher magnitudes,showing a uniform departure from Weber's law, ifthe method of equal-appearing intervals be held to haveany direct relevance to the latter.[454]
Sounds are less delicately discriminated in intensity thanlights. A certain difficulty has come from disputes as tothe measurement of the objective intensity of the stimulus.Earlier inquiries made the perceptible increase of the stimulusto be about 1/3 of the latter. Merkel's latest results ofthe method of just perceptible differences make it about3/10 for that part of the scale of intensities during whichWeber's law holds good, which is from 20 to 5000 of M.'sarbitrary unit.[455] Below this the fractional increment mustbe larger. Above it no measurements were made.
Forpressure and muscular sense we have rather divergentresults. Weber found by the method of just-perceptibledifferences that persons could distinguish an increase ofweight of 1/40 when the two weights were successively liftedby the same hand. It took a much larger fraction to bediscerned when the weights were laid on a hand whichrested on the table. He seems to have verified his resultsfor only two pairs of differing weights,[456] and on this foundedhis 'law.' Experiments in Hering's laboratory on lifting11 weights, running from 250 to 2750 grams showed thatthe least perceptible increment varied from 1/21 for 250 gramsto 1/114 for 2500. For 2750 it rose to 1/98 again. Merkel'srecent and very careful experiments, in which the fingerpressed down the beam of a balance counterweightedby from 25 to 8020 grams, showed that between 200 and2000 grams a constant fractional increase of about 1/13 wasfelt when there was no movement of the finger, and of about1/19 when there was movement. Above and below theselimits the discriminative power grew less. It was greaterwhen the pressure was upon one square millimeter of surfacethan when it was upon seven.[457]
Warmth and taste have been made the subject of similarinvestigations with the result of verifying something likeWeber's law. The determination of the unit of stimulusis, however, so hard here that I will give no figures.The results may be found in Wundt's Physiologische Psychologie,3d Ed. i, 370-2.
The discrimination of lengths by the eye has been foundalso to obey to a certain extent Weber's law. The figureswill all be found in G. E. Müller,op. cit. part ii, chap. x,to which the reader is referred. Professor Jastrow haspublished some experiments, made by what may be calleda modification of the method of equal-appearing differences,on our estimation of the length of sticks, by which itwould seem that the estimated intervals and the real onesare directly and not logarithmically proportionate to eachother. This resembles Merkel's results by that methodfor weights, lights, and sounds, and differs from Jastrow'sown finding about star-magnitudes.[458]
If we look back over these facts as a whole, we see thatit is not any fixed amount added to an impression thatmakes us notice an increase in the latter, but that theamount depends on how large the impression already is.The amount is expressible as a certain fraction of the entireimpression to which it is added; and it is found that thefraction is a well-nigh constant figure throughout an entireregion of the scale of intensities of the impression in question.Above and below this region the fraction increases invalue. This isWeber's law, which in so far forth expressesan empirical generalization of practical importance, withoutinvolving any theory whatever or seeking any absolutemeasure of the sensations themselves. It is in the
that Fechner's originality exclusively consists, in his assumptions,namely, 1) that the just-perceptible incrementis thesensation-unit, and is in all parts of the scale the same(mathematically expressed, Δs= const.); 2) that all oursensations consist of sums of these units; and finally, 3) thatthe reason why it takes a constant fractional increase of thestimulus to awaken this unit lies in an ultimate law of theconnection of mind with matter, whereby the quantities ofour feelings are related logarithmically to the quantitiesof their objects. Fechner seems to find something inscrutablysublime in the existence of an ultimate 'psychophysic'law of this form.
These assumptions are all peculiarly fragile. To beginwith, themental fact which in the experiments correspondsto the increase of the stimulus is not anenlarged sensation,but ajudgment that the sensation is enlarged. What Fechnercalls the 'sensation' is what appears to the mind astheobjective phenomenon of light, warmth, weight, sound,impressed part of body, etc. Fechner tacitly if not openlyassumes that such ajudgment of increase consists in thesimple fact that anincreased number of sensation-unitsare present to the mind; and that the judgment is thusitself a quantitatively bigger mental thing when it judgeslarge differences, or differences between large terms, thanwhen it judges small ones. But these ideas are reallyabsurd. The hardest sort of judgment, the judgmentwhich strains the attention most (ifthat be any criterionof the judgment's 'size'), is that about thesmallest thingsand differences. But really it has no meaning to talkabout one judgment being bigger than another. Andeven if we leave out judgments and talk of sensationsonly, we have already found ourselves (inChapter VI)quite unable to read any clear meaning into the notion thatthey are masses of units combined. To introspection, ourfeeling of pink is surely not a portion of our feeling ofscarlet; nor does the light of an electric arc seem to containthat of a tallow-candle in itself. Compoundthingscontain parts; and one such thing may have twice or threetimes as many parts as another. But when we take a simplesensible quality like light or sound, and say that thereis now twice or thrice as much of it present as there wasa moment ago, although we seem to mean the same thingas if we were talking of compound objects, we really meansomething different. We mean that if we were to arrangethe various possible degrees of the quality in a scale ofserial increase, thedistance, interval, ordifference betweenthe stronger and the weaker specimen before us wouldseem about as great as that between the weaker one andthe beginning of the scale.It is theserelations,thesedistances,which we are measuring and not the composition of thequalities themselves, as Fechner thinks. Whilst if we turnto objects whichare divisible, surely a big object may beknown in a little thought. Introspection shows moreover[Pg 547]that in most sensations a newkind of feeling invariably accompaniesour judgment of an increased impression; andthis is a fact which Fechner's formula disregards.[459]
But apart from thesea priori difficulties, and even supposingthat sensations did consist of added units, Fechner'sassumption that allequally perceptible additions areequallygreat additions is entirely arbitrary. Why might not asmall addition to a small sensation be asperceptible as alarge addition to a large one? In this case Weber's lawwould apply not to the additions themselves, but only totheir perceptibility. Ournoticing of a difference of units intwo sensations would depend on the latter being in a fixedratio. But thedifference itself would depend directly onthat between their respective stimuli. So many units addedto the stimulus, so many added to the sensation, and ifthe stimulus grew in a certain ratio, in exactly the sameratio would the sensation also grow, though itsperceptibilitygrew according to the logarithmic law.[460]
IfA stand for the smallest difference whichwe perceive,then we should have, instead of the formula Δs = const.,which is Fechner's, the formula Δs/s = const., a formulawhich interprets all thefacts of Weber's law, in an entirelydifferent theoretic way from that adopted by Fechner.[461]
The entire superstructure which Fechner rears upon the[Pg 548]facts is thus not only seen to be arbitrary and subjective,but in the highest degree improbable as well. The departuresfrom Weber's law in regions where it does not obtain,he explains by the compounding with it of other unknownlaws which mask its effects. As ifany law could not befound inany set of phenomena, provided one have the wit toinvent enough other coexisting laws to overlap and neutralizeit! The whole outcome of the discussion, so far asFechner's theories are concerned, is indeednil. Weber'slaw alone remains true, as an empirical generalization of fairextent: What we add to a large stimulus we notice lessthan what we add to a small one, unless it happenrelativelyto the stimulus to be as great.
One can express this state of things otherwise by sayingthat the whole of the stimulus does not seem to be effectivein giving us the perception of 'more,' and the simplest interpretationof such a state of things would bephysical.The loss of effect would take place in the nervous system.If our feelings resulted from a condition of the nerve-moleculeswhich it grew ever more difficult for the stimulusto increase, our feelings would naturally grow at a slowerrate than the stimulus itself. An ever larger part of thelatter's work would go to overcoming the resistances, andan ever smaller part to the realization of the feeling-bringingstate. Weber's law would thus be a sort oflaw offriction in the neural machine.[462] Just how these innerresistances and frictions are to be conceived is a speculativequestion. Delbœuf has formulated them as fatigue;Bernstein and Ward, as irradiations. The latest,and probably the most 'real,' hypothesis is that of Ebbinghaus,who supposes that the intensity of sensation dependson thenumber of neural molecules which are disintegratedin the unit of time. There are only a certain number atany time which arecapable of disintegrating; and whilstmost of these are in an average condition of instability,[Pg 549]some are almost stable and some already near to decomposition.The smallest stimuli affect these latter moleculesonly; and as they are but few, the sensational effect fromadding a given quantity of stimulusat first is relativelysmall. Medium stimuli affect the majority of the molecules,but affect fewer and fewer in proportion as they havealready diminished their number. The latest additions tothe stimuli find all the medium molecules already disintegrated,and only affect the small relatively indecomposableremainder, thus giving rise to increments of feeling whichare correspondingly small. (Pflüger's Archiv, 45, 113.)
It is surely in some such way as this that Weber's lawis to be interpreted, if it ever is. The FechnerianMaasformeland the conception of it as an ultimate 'psychophysiclaw' will remain an 'idol of the den,' if ever there was one.Fechner himself indeed was a GermanGelehrter of the idealtype, at once simple and shrewd, a mystic and an experimentalist,homely and daring, and as loyal to facts as to histheories. But it would be terrible if even such a dear oldman as this could saddle our Science forever with hispatient whimsies, and, in a world so full of more nutritiousobjects of attention, compel all future students to ploughthrough the difficulties, not only of his own works, but ofthe still drier ones written in his refutation. Those whodesire this dreadful literature can find it; it has a 'disciplinaryvalue;' but I will not even enumerate it in a foot-note.The only amusing part of it is that Fechner's criticsshould always feel bound, after smiting his theories hipand thigh and leaving not a stick of them standing, towind up by saying that nevertheless to him belongs theimperishable glory, of first formulating them and therebyturning psychology into anexact science,
"'And everybody praised the duke
Who this great fight did win.'
'But what good came of it at last?'
Quoth little Peterkin.
'Why, that I cannot tell,' said he,
'But 'twas a famous victory!'"
[406] Human Understanding, ii, xi, 1, 2.
[407] Analysis, vol. i, p. 71.
[408] The Senses and the Intellect, page 411.
[409] Essays Philosophical and Theological: First Series, pp. 268-273.
[410] Montgomery in 'Mind,' x, 527. Cf. also Lipps: Grundtatsachen desSeelenlebens, p. 579 ff.; and see below, Chapter XIX.
[411] Stumpf (Tonpsychologie, i, 116 ff.) tries to prove that the theory thatall differences are differences of composition leads necessarily to an infiniteregression when we try to determine the unit. It seems to me that in hisparticular reasoning he forgets the ultimate units of the mind-stufftheory. I cannot find the completed infinite to be one of the obstacles tobelief in this theory, although I fully accept Stumpf's general reasoning,and am only too happy to find myself on the same side with such an exceptionallyclear thinker. The strictures by Wahle in the Vierteljsch. f.wiss. Phil. seem to me to have no force, since the writer does not discriminatebetween resemblance of things obviously compound and that ofthings sensibly simple.
[412] Thebelief that the causes of effects felt by us to differ qualitatively arefacts which differ only in quantity (e.g. that blue is caused by so manyether-waves, and yellow by a smaller number) must not be confoundedwith the feeling that the effects differ quantitatively themselves.
[413] Herr G. H. Schneider, in his youthful pamphlet (Die Unterscheidung,1877) has tried to show that there are no positively existent elements ofsensibility, no substantive qualities between which differences obtain, butthat the terms we call such, the sensations, are but sums of differences,loci or starting points whence many directions of difference proceed.'Unterschiedsempfindungs-Complexe' are what he calls them. This absurdcarrying out of that 'principle of relativity' which we shall have to mentionin Chapter XVII may serve as a counterpoise to the mind-stufftheory, which says that there are nothing but substantive sensations, anddenies the existence of relations of difference between them at all.
[414] Cf. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, i, 121, and James Ward, Mind, i, 464.
[415] The ordinary treatment of this is to call it the result of thefusion ofa lot of sensations, in themselves separate. This is pure mythology, as thesequel will abundantly show.
[416] "We often begin to be dimly aware of a difference in a sensation orgroup of sensations, before we can assign any definite character to thatwhich differs. Thus we detect a strange or foreign ingredient or flavor ina familiar dish, or of tone in a familiar tune, and yet are wholly unable fora while to say what the intruder is like. Hence perhaps discriminationmay be regarded as the earliest and most primordial mode of intellectualactivity." (Sully: Outlines of Psychology, p. 142.Cf. also G. H.Schneider: Die Unterscheidung, pp. 9-10.)
[417] In cases where the difference is slight, we may need, as previouslyremarked, to get the dying phase ofn as well as ofm beforen-different-from-mis distinctly felt. In that case the inevitably successive feelings(as far as we can sever what is so continuous) would be four,m, difference,n, n-different-from-m. This slight additional complication alters not a whitthe essential features of the case.
[418] Analysis. J. S. Mill's ed., ii, 17. Cf. also pp. 12, 14.
[419] There is only one obstacle, and that is our inveterate tendency to believethat where two things or qualities are compared, itmust be thatexact duplicates of both have got into the mind and have matched themselvesagainst each other there. To which the first reply is the empiricalone of "Look into the mind and see." When I recognize a weight whichI now lift asinferior to the one I just lifted; when, with my tooth nowaching, I perceive the pain to beless intense than it was a minute ago; thetwo things in the mind which are compared would, by the authors I criticise,be admitted to be an actual sensation and an image in the memory.An image in the memory, by general consent of these same authors, is admittedto be a weaker thing than a sensation. Nevertheless it is in theseinstances judged stronger; that is, an object supposed to be known only inso far forth as this image represents it, is judged stronger. Ought not thisto shake one's belief in the notion of separate representative 'ideas' weighingthemselves, or being weighed by the Ego, against each other in themind? And let it not be said that what makes us judge the felt pain to beweaker than the imagined one of a moment since is our recollection ofthedownward nature of the shock of difference which we felt as we passed tothe present moment from the one before it. That shock does undoubtedlyhave a different character according as it comes between terms of whichthe second diminishes or increases; and it may be admitted that in casesWhere the past term is doubtfully remembered, the memory of the shockasplus orminus, might sometimes enable us to establish a relation whichotherwise we should not perceive. But one could hardly expect the memoryof this shock to overpower our actual comparison of terms, both ofwhich arepresent (as are the image and the sensation in the case supposed),and make us judge the weaker one to be the stronger.—And hereuponcomes the second reply: Suppose the mind does compare two realities bycomparing two ideas of its own which represent them—what is gained?The same mystery is still there. The ideas must still beknown; and, asthe attention in comparing oscillates from one to the other, past must beknown with present just as before. If you must end by simply sayingthat your 'Ego,' whilstbeing neither the idea ofm nor the idea ofn, yetknows and compares both, why not allow your pulse of thought, whichisneither the thingm nor the thingn, to know and compare both directly?'Tis but a question of how toname the facts least artificially. The egoistexplains them, by naming them as an Ego 'combining' or 'synthetizing'two ideas, no more than we do by naming them a pulse of thought knowingtwo facts.
[420] I fear that few will be converted by my words, so obstinately dothinkers of all schools refuse to admit the unmediated function ofknowinga thing, and so incorrigibly do they substitutebeing the thing for it. E.g., inthe latest utterance of the spiritualistic philosophy (Bowne's Introduction toPsychological Theory, 1887, published only three days before this writing)one of the first sentences which catch my eye is this: "What remembers?The spiritualist says, the soul remembers; it abides across the years andthe flow of the body, andgathering up its past, carries it with it" (p. 28).Why, for heaven's sake, O Bowne, cannot you say 'knows it'? If there isanything our soul doesnot do to its past, it is to carry it with it.
[421] Sensations of Tone, 2d English Ed., p. 65.
[422] Psychology, i, 345.
[423] A Budget of Paradoxes, p. 380.
[424] The explanation I offer presupposes that a difference too faint to haveany direct effect in the way of making the mind notice itper se will neverthelessbe strong enough to keep its 'terms' from calling up identicalassociates. It seems probable from many observations that this is the case.All the facts of 'unconscious' inference are proofs of it. We say apainting 'looks' like the work of a certain artist, though we cannot namethe characteristic differentiæ. We see by a man's face that he is sincere,though we can give no definite reason for our faith. The facts of sense-perceptionquoted from Helmholtz a few pages below will be additionalexamples. Here is another good one, though it will perhaps be easierunderstood after reading the chapter on Space-perception than now.Take two stereoscopic slides and represent on each half-slide a pair ofspots,a andb, but make their distances such that thea's are equidistanton both slides, whilst theb's are nearer together on slide 1 than on slide 2.Make moreover the distanceab = ab''' and the distanceab' = ab''. Thenlook successively at the two slides stereoscopically, so that thea's in bothare directly fixated (that is fall on the two foveæ, or centres of distinctestvision). Thea's will then appear single, and so probably will theb's.But the now single-seemingb on slide 1 will look nearer, whilst that onslide 2 will look farther than thea. But, if the diagrams are rightly drawn,b andb''' must affect 'identical' spots, spots equally far to the right ofthe fovea,b in the left eye andb''' in the right eye. The same is trueofb' andb''. Identical spots are spots whose sensations cannot possibly bediscriminated as such. Since in these two observations, however, theygive rise to such opposite perceptions of distance, and prompt such oppositetendencies to movement (since in slide 1 weconverge in looking froma tob, whilst in slide 2 wediverge), it follows that two processes whichoccasion feelings quite indistinguishable to direct consciousness may neverthelessbe each allied with disparate associates both of a sensorial and of amotor kind. Cf. Donders, Archiv f. Ophthalmologie, Bd. 13 (1867). Thebasis of his essay is that we cannotfeel on which eye any particular elementof a compound picture falls, but its effects on our total perceptiondiffer in the two eyes.
[425] A. W. Volkmann: Ueber den Einfluss der Uebung, etc., Leipzig Berichte,Math.-phys. Classe. x, 1858, p. 67.
[426]Ibid. Tabelle 1, p. 43.
[427] Professor Lipps accounts for the tactile discrimination of the blindin a way which (divested of its 'mythological' assumptions) seems to meessentially to agree with this. Stronger ideas are supposed to raise weakerones over the threshold of consciousness by fusing with them, the tendencyto fuse being proportional to the similarity of the ideasCf. Grundtatsachen,etc., pp. 232-3; also pp. 118, 492, 526-7.
[428] Sensations of Tone, 2d. English Edition, p. 62.
[429] Compare as to this, however, what I said above, Chapter V,pp.172-176.
[430] When a person squints, double images are formed in the centre of thefield. As a matter of fact, most squinters are found blind of one eye, oralmost so; and it has long been supposed amongst ophthalmologists thatthe blindness is a secondary affection superinduced by the voluntary suppressionof one of the sets of double images, in other words by the positiveand persistent refusal to use one of the eyes. This explanation of theblindness has, however, been called in question of late years. See, for abrief account of the matter, O. F. Wadsworth in Boston Med. and Surg.Journ., cxvi, 49 (Jan. 20, '87), and the replies by Derby and others a littlelater.—W. J.
[431] Tonempfindungen, Dritte Auflage, pp. 102-107.—The reader whohas assimilated the contents of ourChapter V, above, will doubtlesshave remarked that the illustrious physiologist has fallen, in these paragraphs,into that sort of interpretation of the facts which we theretried to prove erroneous. Helmholtz, however, is no more careless thanmost psychologists in confounding together the object perceived, theorganic conditions of the perception, and the sensations whichwouldbe excited by the several parts of the object, or by the several organicconditions,provided they came into action separately or were separatelyattended to, and in assuming that what is true of any one of these sorts offact must be true of the other sorts also. If each organic condition or partof the object is there, its sensation, he thinks, must be there also, only ina 'synthetic'—which is indistinguishable from what the authors whom weformerly reviewed called an 'unconscious'—state. I will not repeat argumentssufficiently detailed in the earlier chapter (see especiallypp. 170-176),but simply say that what he calls the 'fusion of manysensations into one'is really the production of one sensation by the co-operation of manyorganicconditions; and that what perception fails to discriminate (when it is'synthetic') is notsensations already existent but not singled out, but newobjectivefacts, judged truer than the facts already synthetically perceived—twoviews of the solid body, many harmonic tones, instead of one view andone tone, states of the eyeball-muscles thitherto unknown, and the like.These new facts, when first discovered, are known in states of consciousnessnever till that moment exactly realized before, states of consciousnesswhich at the same time judge them to be determinations of the samematter of fact which was previously realized. All that Helmholtz says ofthe conditions which hinder and further analysis applies just as naturallyto the analysis, through the advent ofnew feelings, ofobjects into their elements,as to the analysis of aggregate feelings into elementary feelings supposedto have been hidden in them all the while.
The reader can himself apply this criticism to the following passages fromLotze and Stumpf respectively, which I quote because they are the ablestexpressions of the view opposed to my own. Both authors, it seems to me,commit the psychologist's fallacy, and allow their later knowledge of thethings felt to be foisted into their account of the primitive way of feelingthem.
Lotze says: "It is indubitable that the simultaneous assault of avariety of different stimuli on different senses, or even on the same sense,puts us into a state of confused general feeling in which we are certainlynot conscious of clearly distinguishing the different impressions. Still itdoes not follow that in such a case we have a positive perception of anactual unity of the contents of our ideas, arising from their mixture; ourstate of mind seems rather to consist in (1) the consciousness of our inabilityto separate what really has remained diverse, and (2) in the generalfeeling of the disturbance produced in the economy of our body by thesimultaneous assault of the stimuli.... Not that the sensations melt intoone another, but simply that the act of distinguishing them is absent; andthis again certainly not so far that the fact of the difference remainsentirely unperceived, but only so far as to prevent us from determining theamount of the difference, and from apprehending other relations betweenthe different impressions. Anyone who is annoyed at one and the sametime by glowing heat, dazzling light, deafening noise, and an offensivesmell, will certainly not fuse these disparate sensations into a single onewith a single content which could be sensuously perceived; they remainfor him in separation, and he merely finds it impossible to be conscious ofone of them apart from the others. But, further, he will have a feeling ofdiscomfort—what I mentioned above as thesecond constituent of his wholestate. For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite contentof sensation is also a definite degree of disturbance, and thereforemakes a call upon the forces of the nerves; and the sum of these littlechanges, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as thecontents of consciousness they give rise to, produce the general feelingwhich, added to the inability to distinguish, deludes us into the belief inan actual absence of diversity in our sensations. It is only in some suchway as this, again, that I can imagine that state which is sometimes describedas the beginning of our whole education, a state which in itself issupposed to be simple, and to be afterwards divided into different sensationsby an activity of separation. No activity of separation in the worldcould establish differences where no real diversity existed; for it wouldhave nothing to guide it to the places where it was to establish them, or toindicate the width it was to give them." (Metaphysic, § 260, English translation.)
Stumpf writes as follows: "Of coexistent sensations there are alwaysa large number undiscriminated in consciousness, or (if one preferto call what is undiscriminated unconscious) in the soul. They are, however,not fused into a simple quality. When, on entering a room, wereceive sensations of odor and warmth together, without expressly attendingto either, the two qualities of sensation are not, as it were, an entirelynew simple quality, which first at the moment in which attention analyticallysteps inchanges into smell and warmth.... In such cases we findourselves in presence of an indefinable, unnamable total of feeling. Andwhen, after successfully analyzing this total, we call it back to memory, asit was in its unanalyzed state, and compare it with the elements we havefound, the latter (as it seems to me) may be recognized as real parts containedin the former, and the former seen to be their sum. So, for example,when we clearly perceive that the content of our sensation of oil of peppermintis partly a sensation of taste and partly one of temperature." (Tonpsychologie,i, 107.)
I should prefer to say that we perceive that objective fact, known to usas the peppermint taste, to contain those other objective facts known asaromatic or sapid quality, and coldness, respectively. No ground to supposethat the vehicle of this last very complex perception has any identitywith the earlier psychosis—least of all is contained in it.
[432] Physiol. Psych., ii, 248.
[433] Wundt's Philos. Studien, i, 527.
[434]Ibid. p. 530.
[435] Mind, xi, 377 ff. He says: "I apparently either distinguished theimpression and made the motion simultaneously, or if I tried to avoid thisby waiting until I had formed a distinct impression before I began tomake the motion, I added to the simple reaction, not only a perception,but a volition."—Which remark may well confirm our doubts as to thestrictpsychologic worth of any of these measurements.
[436] Mind, xi, 379.
[437] For other determinations of discrimination-time by this method cf.v. Kries and Auerbach, Archiv f. Physiologie, Bd. i, p. 297 ff. (these authorsget much smaller figures); Friedrich, Psychologische Studien, i, 39.Chapter ix of Buccola's book, Le Legge del tempo, etc., gives a full accountof the subject.
[438] If so, the reactions upon the spark would have to be slower thanthose upon the touch. The investigation was abandoned because it wasfound impossible to narrow down the difference between the conditions ofthe sight-series and those of the touch-series, to nothing more than thepossible presence in the latter of the intervening motor-idea. Other disparitiescould not be excluded.
[439] Tischer gives figures from quite unpractised individuals, which I havenot quoted. The discrimination-time of one of them is 22 times longer thanTischer's own! (Psychol. Studien, i, 527.)
[440] Compare Lipps's excellent passage to the same critical effect in hisGrundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, pp. 390-393.—I leave my text just as itwas written before the publication of Lange's and Münsterberg's resultscited onpp. 92 and432. Their 'shortened' or 'muscular' times, gotwhen the expectant attention was addressed to the possible reactions ratherthan to the stimulus, constitute the minimal reaction-time of which I speak,and all that I say in the text falls beautifully into line with their results.
[441] Cf. Sully: Mind, x, 494-5; Bradley:ibid. xi, 83; Bosanquet:ibid. xi,405.
[442] The judgment becomes easier if the two couples of terms have onemember in common, ifa—b andb—c, for example, are compared. This, asStumpf says (Tonpsychologie, i, 131), is probably because the introductionof the fourth term brings involuntary cross-comparisons with it,a andbwithd, b withc, etc., which confuses us by withdrawing our attentionfrom the relations we ought alone to be estimating.
[443] J. Delbœuf: Éléments de Psychophysique (Paris, 1883), p. 64. Plateauin Stumpf, Tonpsych., i, 125. I have noticed a curious enlargementof certain 'distances' of difference under the influence of chloroform.The jingling of the bells on the horses of a horse-car passing the door, forexample, and the rumbling of the vehicle itself, which to our ordinaryhearing merge together very readily into aquasi-continuous body ofsound, have seemed so far apart as to require a sort of mental facing inopposite directions to get from one to the other, as if they belonged in differentworlds. I am inclined to suspect, from certain data, that the ultimatephilosophy of difference and likeness will have to be built uponexperiences of intoxication, especially by nitrous oxide gas, which lets usinto intuitions the subtlety whereof is denied to the waking state. Cf. B.P. Blood: The Anæsthetic Revelation, and the Gist of Philosophy (Amsterdam,N. Y., 1874). Cf. also Mind, vii, 200.
[444]Op. cit. p. 126 ff.
[445] Stumpf, pp. 111-121.
[446] Stumpf, pp. 116-7. I have omitted, so as not to make my text too intricate,an extremely acute and conclusive paragraph, which I reproduce here:"We may generalize: Wherever a number of sensible impressions areapprehendedas a series, there in the last instance must perceptions of simplelikeness be found.Proof: Assume that all the terms of a series, e.g.the qualities of tone,c d e f g, have something in common,—no matter whatit is, call itX; then I say that the differing parts of each of these termsmust not only be differently constituted in each, but mustthemselves forma series, whose existence is the ground for our apprehending the originalterms in serial form. We thus get instead of the original seriesa b c d e f... the equivalent seriesXα, Xβ, Xγ,... etc. What is gained? Thequestion immediately arises: How isα β γ known as a series? Accordingto the theory, these elements must themselves be made up of a part commonto all, and of parts differing in each, which latter parts form a new series,and so onad infinitum, which is absurd."
[447] The most important ameliorations of Fechner's formula are Delbœuf'sin his Recherches sur la Mesure des Sensations (1873), p. 35, and Elsas's inhis pamphlet Über die Psychophysik (1886) p. 16.
[448] Reversing the order is for the sake of letting the opposite accidentalerrors due to 'contrast' neutralize each other.
[449] Theoretically it would seem that it ought to be equal to the sum ofall the additions which we judge to be increases divided by the total numberof judgments made.
[450] J. Delbœuf, Éléments de Psychophysique (1883), p. 9.
[451] Philos. Studien, iv, 588.
[452] Berlin Acad. Sitzungsberichte, 1888, p. 917. Other observers (Dobrowolsky,Lamausky) found great differences in different colors.
[453] See Merkel's tables,loc. cit. p. 568.
[454] American Journal of Psychology, i, 125. The rate of decrease issmall but steady, and I cannot well understand what Professor J. means bysaying that his figures verify Weber's law.
[455] Philosophische Studien, v, 514-5.
[456] Cf. G. E. Müller: Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik, §§ 68-70.
[457] Philosophische Studien, v, 287 ff.
[458] American J. of Psychology, iii, 44-7.
[459] Cf. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, pp. 397-9. "One sensation cannot be amultiple of another. If it could, we ought to be able to subtract the onefrom the other, and to feel the remainder by itself. Every sensation presentsitself as an indivisible unit." Professor von Kries, in the Viertejahrschriftfür wiss. Philosophie, vi, 257 ff., shows very clearly the absurdityof supposing that our stronger sensations contain our weaker onesas parts. They differ as qualitative units. Compare also J. Tannery inDelbœuf's Éléments de Psychophysique (1883), p. 134 ff.; J. Ward in Mind,i, 464: Lotze, Metaphysik, § 258.
[460] F Brentano, Psychologie, i, 9, 88 ff.—Merkel thinks that his resultswith the method of equal-appearing intervals show that we compare considerableintervals with each other by a different law from that by whichwe notice barely perceptible intervals. The stimuli form an arithmeticalseries (a pretty wild one according to his figures) in the former case, ageometrical one in the latter—at least so I understand this valiant experimenterbut somewhat obscure if acute writer.
[461] This is the formula which Merkel thinks he has verified (if I understandhim aright) by his experiments by method 4.
[462] Elsas: Ueber die Psychophysik (1856), p. 41. When the pans ofa balance are already loaded, but in equilibrium, it takes a proportionallylarger weight added to one of them to incline the beam.
After discrimination, association! Already in the lastchapter I have had to invoke, in order to explain the improvementof certain discriminations by practice, the 'association'of the objects to be distinguished, with other morewidely differing ones. It is obvious that the advance of ourknowledgemust consist of both operations; for objects atfirst appearing as wholes are analyzed into parts, andobjects appearing separately are brought together and appearas new compound wholes to the mind. Analysis andsynthesis are thus the incessantly alternating mentalactivities, a stroke of the one preparing the way for a strokeof the other, much as, in walking, a man's two legs arealternately brought into use, both being indispensable forany orderly advance.
The manner in which trains of imagery and considerationfollow each other through our thinking, the restless flightof one idea before the next, the transitions our minds makebetween things wide as the poles asunder, transitions whichat first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which,when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediating linksof perfect naturalness and propriety—all this magical, imponderablestreaming has from time immemorial excitedthe admiration of all whose attention happened to be caughtby its omnipresent mystery. And it has furthermorechallenged the race of philosophers to banish somethingof the mystery by formulating the process in simplerterms. The problem which the philosophers have setthemselves is that of ascertainingprinciples of connectionbetween the thoughts which thus appear to sprout one out[Pg 551]of the other, whereby their peculiar succession or coexistencemay be explained.
But immediately an ambiguity arises: which sort ofconnection is meant? connectionthought-of, or connectionbetween thoughts? These are two entirely different things,and only in the case of one of them is there any hope offinding 'principles.' The jungle of connectionsthought ofcan never be formulated simply. Every conceivable connectionmay be thought of—of coexistence, succession, resemblance,contrast, contradiction, cause and effect, meansand end, genus and species, part and whole, substanceand property, early and late, large and small, landlordand tenant, master and servant,—Heaven knows what, forthe list is literally inexhaustible. The only simplificationwhich could possibly be aimed at would be the reductionof the relations to a smaller number of types, like thosewhich such authors as Kant and Renouvier call the 'categories'of the understanding.[464] According as we followedone category or another we should sweep, with our thought,through the world in this way or in that. And all the categorieswould be logical, would be relations of reason. Theywould fuse the items into a continuum. Werethis the sortof connection sought between one moment of our thinkingand another, our chapter might end here. For the onlysummary description of these infinite possibilities of transition,is that they are allacts of reason, and that the mindproceeds from one object to another by some rational pathof connection. The trueness of this formula is only equalledby its sterility, for psychological purposes. Practically itamounts to simply referring the inquirer to the relationsbetween facts or things, and to telling him that his thinkingfollows them.
But as a matter of fact, his thinking only sometimesfollows them, and these so-called 'transitions of reason'are far from being all alike reasonable. If pure thoughtruns all our trains, why should she run some so fast andsome so slow, some through dull flats and some through[Pg 552]gorgeous scenery, some to mountain-heights and jewelledmines, others through dismal swamps and darkness?—andrun some off the track altogether, and into the wildernessof lunacy? Why do we spend years straining after acertain scientific or practical problem, but all in vain—thoughtrefusing to evoke the solution we desire? Andwhy, some day, walking in the street with our attentionmiles away from that quest, does the answer saunter intoour minds as carelessly as if it had never been called for—suggested,possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of thelady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can discover?If reason can give us relief then, why did she notdo so earlier?
The truth must be admitted that thought works underconditions imposedab extra. The great law of habit itself—thattwenty experiences make us recall a thing betterthan one, that long indulgence in error makes right thinkingalmost impossible—seems to have no essential foundationin reason. The business of thought is with truth—thenumber of experiences ought to have nothing to do withher hold of it; and she ought by right to be able to hug itall the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. Thecontrary arrangements seem quite fantastic and arbitrary,but nevertheless are part of the very bone and marrow ofour minds. Reason is only one out of a thousand possibilitiesin the thinking of each of us. Who can count allthe silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterlyirrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Whocan swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs constitutea less bulky part of his mental furniture than hisclarified opinions? It is true that a presiding arbiterseems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the bettersuggestions into permanence, while it ends by dropping outand leaving unrecorded the confusion. But this is all thedifference. Themode of genesis of the worthy andthe worthless seems the same. The laws of our actualthinking, of thecogitatum, must account alike for the badand the good materials on which the arbiter has to decide,for wisdom and for folly. The laws of the arbiter, of thecogitandum, of what weought to think, are to the former as the[Pg 553]laws of ethics are to those of history. Who but an Hegelianhistorian ever pretended that reason in action wasper se asufficient explanation of the political changes in Europe?
There are, then, mechanical conditions on which thoughtdepends, and which, to say the least,determine the order inwhich is presented the content or material for her comparisons,selections, and decisions. It is a suggestive fact thatLocke, and many more recent Continental psychologists,have found themselves obliged to invoke a mechanicalprocess to account for theaberrations of thought, the obstructivepreprocessions, the frustrations of reason. Thisthey found in the law of habit, or what we now call Associationby Contiguity. But it never occurred to thesewriters that a process which could go the length of actuallyproducing some ideas and sequences in the mind mightsafely be trusted to produce others too; and that thosehabitual associations which further thought may also comefrom the same mechanical source as those which hinder it.Hartley accordingly suggested habit as a sufficient explanationof all connections of our thoughts, and in so doingplanted himself squarely upon the properly psychologicalaspect of the problem of connection, and sought to treatboth rational and irrational connections from a singlepoint of view. The problem which he essayed, howeverlamely, to answer, was that of the connection between ourpsychic states considered purely as such, regardless of theobjective connections of which they might take cognizance.How does a man come, after thinking of A, to think ofB the next moment? or how does he come to think Aand B always together? These were the phenomena whichHartley undertook to explain by cerebral physiology. Ibelieve that he was, in many essential respects, on theright track, and I propose simply to revise his conclusionsby the aid of distinctions which he did not make.
But the whole historic doctrine of psychological associationis tainted with one huge error—that of the constructionof our thoughts out of the confounding of themselvestogether of immutable and incessantly recurring 'simpleideas.' It is the cohesion of these which the 'principles of[Pg 554]association' are considered to account for. InChapters VIandIX we saw abundant reasons for treating the doctrineof simple ideas or psychic atoms as mythological; and, inall that follows, our problem will be to keep whatever truthsthe associationist doctrine has caught sight of withoutweighing it down with the untenable incumbrance that theassociation is between 'ideas.'
Association, so far as the word stands for aneffect, isbetweenthings thought of—it isthings,not ideas, which areassociated in the mind. We ought to talk of the associationofobjects, not of the association ofideas. And so far asassociation stands for acause, it is betweenprocesses in thebrain—it is these which, by being associated in certainways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.Let us proceed towards our final generalizations by surveyingfirst a few familiar facts.
The laws of motor habit in the lower centres of the nervoussystem are disputed by no one. A series of movementsrepeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselveswith peculiar ease in that order for ever afterward. Numberone awakens number two, and that awakens numberthree, and so on, till the last is produced. A habit of thiskind once become inveterate may go on automatically. Andso it is with the objects with which our thinking is concerned.With some persons each note of a melody, heardbut once, will accurately revive in its proper sequence.Small boys at school learn the inflections of many a Greeknoun, adjective, or verb, from the reiterated recitationsof the upper classes falling on their ear as they sit at theirdesks. All this happens with no voluntary effort on theirpart and with no thought of the spelling of the words. Thedoggerel rhymes which children use in their games, such asthe formula
"Ana mana mona mike
Barcelona bona strike,"
used for 'counting out,' form another familiar example ofthings heard in sequence cohering in the same order in thememory.
In touch we have a smaller number of instances, thoughprobably every one who bathes himself in a certain fixedmanner is familiar with the fact that each part of his bodyover which the water is squeezed from the sponge awakensa premonitory tingling consciousness in that portion of skinwhich is habitually the next to be deluged. Tastes andsmells form no very habitual series in our experience. Buteven if they did, it is doubtful whether habit would fix theorder of their reproduction quite so well as it does that ofother sensations. In vision, however, we have a sense inwhich the order of reproduced things is very nearly asmuch influenced by habit as is the order of rememberedsounds. Rooms, landscapes, buildings, pictures, or personswith whose look we are very familiar, surge up before themind's eye with all the details of their appearance complete,so soon as we think of any one of their component parts.Some persons, in reciting printed matter by heart, willseem to see each successive word, before they utter it, appearin its order on an imaginary page. A certain chess-player,one of those heroes who train themselves to playseveral games at once blindfold, is reported to say that inbed at night after a match the games are played all overagain before his mental eye, each board being pictured aspassing in turn through each of its successive stages. Inthis case, of course, the intense previous voluntary strainof the power of visual representation is what facilitated thefixed order of revival.
Association occurs as amply between impressions ofdifferent senses as between homogeneous sensations. Seenthings and heard things cohere with each other, and withodors and tastes, in representation, in the same order inwhich they cohered as impressions of the outer world.Feelings of contact reproduce similarly the sights, sounds,and tastes with which experience has associated them. Infact, the 'objects' of our perception, as trees, men, houses,microscopes, of which the real world seems composed, arenothing but clusters of qualities which through simultaneousstimulation have so coalesced that the moment oneis excited actually it serves as a sign or cue for the idea ofthe others to arise. Let a person enter his room in the[Pg 556]dark and grope among the objects there. The touch of thematches will instantaneously recall their appearance. Ifhis hand comes in contact with an orange on the table, thegolden yellow of the fruit, its savor and perfume will forthwithshoot through his mind. In passing the hand overthe sideboard or in jogging the coal-scuttle with the foot,the large glossy dark shape of the one and the irregularblackness of the other awaken like a flash and constitutewhat we call the recognition of the objects. The voice ofthe violin faintly echoes through the mind as the hand islaid upon it in the dark, and the feeling of the garments ordraperies which may hang about the room is notunderstoodtill the look correlative to the feeling has in each case beenresuscitated. Smells notoriously have the power of recallingthe other experiences in whose company they were wontto be felt, perhaps long years ago; and the voluminousemotional character assumed by the images which suddenlypour into the mind at such a time forms one of thestaple topics of popular psychologic wonder—
"Lost and gone and lost and gone!
A breath, a whisper—some divine farewell—
Desolate sweetness—far and far away."
We cannot hear the din of a railroad tram or the yellof its whistle, without thinking of its long, jointed appearanceand its headlong speed, nor catch a familiar voice ina crowd without recalling, with the name of the speaker,also his face. But the most notorious and important caseof the mental combination of auditory with optical impressionsoriginally experienced together is furnished by language.The child is offered a new and delicious fruit andis at the same time told that it is called a 'fig.' Or lookingout of the window he exclaims, "What a funny horse!" andis told that it is a 'piebald' horse. When learning his letters,the sound of each is repeated to him whilst its shapeis before his eye. Thenceforward, long as he may live, hewill never see a fig, a piebald horse, or a letter of the alphabetwithout the name which he first heard in conjunctionwith each clinging to it in his mind; and inversely he will[Pg 557]never hear the name without the faint arousal of the imageof the object.[465]
Reading exemplifies this kind of cohesion even morebeautifully. It is an uninterrupted and protracted recallof sounds by sights which have always been coupled withthem in the past. I find that I can name six hundred lettersin two minutes on a printed page. Five distinct actsof association between sight and sound (not to speak of allthe other processes concerned) must then have occurred ineach second in my mind. In reading entire words the speedis much more rapid. Valentin relates in his Physiologythat the reading of a single page of the proof, containing2629 letters, took him 1 minute and 32 seconds. In thisexperiment each letter wasunderstood in 1/28 of a second,but owing to the integration of letters into entire words,forming each a single aggregate impression directly associatedwith a single acoustic image, we need not suppose asmany as 28 separate associations in a sound. The figures,however, suffice to show with what extreme rapidity anactual sensation recalls its customary associates. Both infact seem to our ordinary attention to come into the mindat once.
The time-measuring psychologists of recent days havetried their hand at this problem by more elaborate methods.Galton, using a very simple apparatus, found that the sightof an unforeseen word would awaken an associated 'idea'in about 5/6 of a second.[466] Wundt next made determinations[Pg 558]in which the 'cue' was given by single-syllabled wordscalled out by an assistant. The person experimented onhad to press a key as soon as the sound of the word awakenedan associated idea. Both word and reaction werechronographically registered, and the total time-intervalbetween the two amounted, in four observers, to 1.009,0.896, 1.037, and 1.154 seconds respectively. From this thesimple physiological reaction-time and the time of merelyidentifying the word's sound (the 'apperception-time,' asWundt calls it) must be subtracted, to get the exact timerequired for the associated idea to arise. These times wereseparately determined and subtracted. The difference,called by Wundt theassociation-time, amounted, in the samefour persons, to 706, 723, 752, and 874 thousandths of asecond respectively.[467] The length of the last figure is dueto the fact that the person reacting (President G. S. Hall)was an American, whose associations with German wordswould naturally be slower than those of natives. The shortestassociation-time noted was when the word 'Sturm' suggestedto Prof. Wundt the word 'Wind' in 0.341 second.[468]—Finally,Mr. Cattell made some interesting observationsupon the association-time between the look of letters andtheir names. "I pasted letters," he says, "on a revolvingdrum, and determined at what rate they could be readaloud as they passed by a slit in a screen." He found itto vary according as one, or more than one letter, was visibleat a time through the slit, and gives half a second asabout the time which it takes to see and name a singleletter seen alone.
"When two or more letters are always in view, not only do the processesof seeing and naming overlap, but while the subject is seeing oneletter he begins to see the ones next following, and so can read themmore quickly. Of the nine persons experimented on, four could readthe letters faster when five were in view at once, but were not helpedby a sixth letter; three were not helped by a fifth, and two not by afourth letter. This shows that while one idea is in the centre, two,[Pg 559]three, or four additional ideas may be in the background of consciousness.The second letter in view shortens the time about 1/40, the third1/60, the fourth 1/100, the fifth 1/200 sec.
"I find it takes about twice as long to read (aloud, as fast as possible)words which have no connection as words which make sentencesand letters which have no connection as letters which make words.When the words make sentences and the letters words, not only do theprocesses of seeing and naming overlap, but by one mental effort thesubject can recognize a whole group of words or letters, and by onewill-act choose the motions to be made in naming, so that the rateat which the words and letters are read is really only limited by themaximum rapidity at which the speech-organs can be moved. As theresult of a large number of experiments, the writer found that he hadread words not making sentences at the rate of 1/4 sec, words makingsentences (a passage from Swift) at the rate of 1/8 sec., per word....The rate at which a person reads a foreign language is proportional tohis familiarity with the language. For example, when reading as fastas possible the writer's rate was, English 138, French 167, German 250,Italian 327, Latin 434, and Greek 484; the figures giving the thousandthsof a second taken to read each word. Experiments made onothers strikingly confirm these results. The subject does not knowthat he is reading the foreign language more slowly than his own; thisexplains why foreigners seem to talk so fast. This simple method ofdetermining a person's familiarity with a language might be used inschool examinations.
"The time required to see and name colors and pictures of objectswas determined in the same way. The time was found to be about thesame (over 1/2 sec.) for colors as for pictures, and about twice as long asfor words and letters. Other experiments I have made show that wecan recognize a single color or picture in a slightly shorter time than aword or letter, but take longer to name it. This is because, in the caseof words and letters, the association between the idea and name hastaken place so often that the process has become automatic, whereas inthe case of colors and pictures we must by a voluntary effort choosethe name."[469]
In later experiments Mr. Cattell studied the time forvarious associations to be performed, the termini (i.e., cueand answer) being words. A word in one language was tocall up its equivalent in another, the name of an author thetongue in which he wrote, that of a city the country inwhich it lay, that of a writer one of his works, etc. Themean variation from the average is very great in all theseexperiments; and the interesting feature which they show[Pg 560]is the existence of certain constant differences between associationsof different sorts. Thus:
Fromcountry tocity, Mr. C.'s time was 0.340 sec.
Fromseason tomonth, Mr. C.'s time was 0.399
Fromlanguage toauthor, Mr. C.'s time was 0.523
Fromauthor towork, Mr. C.'s time was 0.596
The average time of two observers, experimenting oneight different types of association, was 0.420 and 0.436sec. respectively.[470] The very wide range of variation isundoubtedly a consequence of the fact that the words used[Pg 561]as cues, and the different types of association studied, differmuch in their degree of familiarity.
"For example, B is a teacher of mathematics; C has busied himselfmore with literature. C knows quite as well as B that 7 + 5 = 12,yet he needs 1/10 a second longer to call it to mind; B knows quite aswell as C that Dante was a poet, but needs 1/20 of a second longer tothink of it. Such experiments lay bare the mental life in a way thatis startling and not always gratifying."[471]
Time-determinations apart, the facts we have run overcan all be summed up in the simple statement thatobjectsonce experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination,so that when any one of them is thought of, the othersare likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence orcoexistence as before. This statement we may name the lawofmental association by contiguity.[472]
I preserve this name in order to depart as little as possiblefrom tradition, although Mr. Ward's designation ofthe process as that of association bycontinuity[473] or Wundt'sas that ofexternal association (to distinguish it from theinternal association which we shall presently learn to knowunder the name of association by similarity)[474] are perhapsbetter terms. Whatever we name the law, since it expressesmerely a phenomenon of mentalhabit, the mostnatural way of accounting for it is to conceive it as a result[Pg 562]of the laws of habit in the nervous system; in other words,it is to ascribe it to a physiological cause. If it be trulya law of those nerve-centres which co-ordinate sensoryand motor processes together that paths once used forcoupling any pair of them are thereby made more permeable,there appears no reason why the same law should nothold good of ideational centres and their coupling-paths aswell.[475] Parts of these centres which have once been inaction together will thus grow so linked that excitement atone point will irradiate through the system. The chancesof complete irradiation will be strong in proportion as theprevious excitements have been frequent, and as thepresent points excited afresh are numerous. If all pointswere originally excited together, the irradiation may besensibly simultaneous throughout the system, when anysingle point or group of points is touched off. But wherethe original impressions were successive—the conjugation of[Pg 563]a Greek verb, for example—awakening nerve-tracts in adefinite order, they will now, when one of them awakens,discharge into each other in that definite order and in noother way.
The reader will recollect all that has been said of increasedtension in nerve-tracts and of the summation ofstimuli (p. 82 ff.). We must therefore suppose that in theseideational tracts as well as elsewhere, activity may beawakened, in any particular locality, by the summationtherein of a number of tensions, each incapable alone ofprovoking an actual discharge. Suppose for example thelocality M to be in functional continuity with four otherlocalities, K, L, N, and O. Suppose moreover that onfour previous occasions it has been separately combinedwith each of these localities in a common activity. M maythen be indirectly awakened by any cause which tends toawaken either K, L, N, or O. But if the cause whichawakens K, for instance, be so slight as only to increaseits tension without arousing it to full discharge, K willonly succeed in slightly increasing the tension of M. Butif at the same time the tensions of L, N, and O are similarlyincreased, the combined effects of all four upon M maybe so great as to awaken an actual discharge in this latterlocality. In like manner if the paths between M andthe four other localities have been so slightly excavated byprevious experience as to require a very intense excitementin either of the localities before M can be awakened, a lessstrong excitement than this in any one will fail to reachM. But if all four at once are mildly excited, their compoundeffect on M may be adequate to its full arousal.
The psychological law of association of objects thought ofthrough their previous contiguity in thought or experiencewould thus be an effect, within the mind, of the physical factthat nerve-currents propagate themselves easiest through thosetracts of conduction which have been already most in use. Descartesand Locke hit upon this explanation, which modernscience has not yet succeeded in improving.
"Custom," says Locke, "settles habits of thinking in the understanding,as well as of determining in the will, and of motions in thebody; all which seem to be buttrains of motion in the animal spirits[Pg 564][by this Locke meant identically what we understand byneural processes]which, once set agoing, continue in the same steps they havebeen used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth path,and the motion in it becomes easy and, as it were, natural."[476]
Hartley was more thorough in his grasp of the principle.The sensorial nerve-currents, produced when objectsare fully present, were for him 'vibrations,' and those whichproduce ideas of objects in their absence were 'miniaturevibrations.' And he sums up the cause of mental associationin a single formula by saying:
"Any vibrations, A, B, C, etc., by being associated together a sufficientNumber of Times, get such a Power overa, b, c, etc., the correspondingMiniature Vibrations, that any of the Vibrations A, whenimpressed alone, shall be able to exciteb, c, etc., the Miniatures of therest."[477]
It is evident that if there be any law of neural habitsimilar to this, the contiguities, coexistences, and successions,met with in outer experience, must inevitably becopied more or less perfectly in our thought. If A B C D Ebe a sequence of outer impressions (they may be events[Pg 565]or they may be successively experienced properties of anobject) which once gave rise to the successive 'ideas'a b c d e,then no sooner will A impress us again and awaken thea, thanb c d e will arise as ideas even before B C D Ehave come in as impressions. In other words, the order ofimpressions will the next time beanticipated; and the mentalorder will so far forth copy the order of the outerworld. Any object when met again will make us expect itsformer concomitants, through the overflowing of its brain-tractinto the paths which lead to theirs. And all thesesuggestions will be effects of a material law.
Where the associations are, as here, of successively appearingthings, the distinction I made at the outset of thechapter, between a connectionthought of and a connectionofthoughts, is unimportant. For the connection thought of isconcomitance or succession; and the connection betweenthe thoughts is just the same. The 'objects' and the'ideas' fit into parallel schemes, and may be described inidentical language, as contiguous things tending to bethought again together, or contiguous ideas tending to recurtogether.
Now were these cases fair samples of all association, thedistinction I drew might well be termed aSpitzfindigkeit orpiece of pedantic hair-splitting, and be dropped. But as amatter of fact we cannot treat the subject so simply. Thesame outer object may suggesteither of many realities formerlyassociated with it—for in the vicissitudes of our outerexperience we are constantly liable to meet the same thingin the midst of differing companions—and a philosophy ofassociation that should merely say that it will suggest oneof these, or even of that one of them which it has oftenestaccompanied, would go but a very short way into therationaleof the subject. This, however, is about as far asmost associationists have gone with their 'principle of contiguity.'Granted an object, A, they never tell us beforehandwhich of its associates itwill suggest; their wisdom islimited to showing, after ithas suggested a second object,that that object was once an associate. They have had tosupplement their principle of Contiguity by other principles,[Pg 566]such as those of Similarity and Contrast, before theycould begin to do justice to the richness of the facts.
I shall try to show, in the pages which immediatelyfollow, that there is no otherelementary causal law of associationthan the law of neural habit. All thematerials ofour thought are due to the way in which one elementaryprocess of the cerebral hemispheres tends to excite whateverother elementary process it may have excited at someformer time. The number of elementary processes atwork, however, and the nature of those which at any timeare fully effective in rousing the others, determine thecharacter of the total brain-action, and, as a consequenceof this, they determine the object thought of at the time.According as this resultant object is one thing or another,we call it a product of association by contiguity or of associationby similarity, or contrast, or whatever other sortswe may have recognized as ultimate. Its production, however,is, in each one of these cases, to be explained by amerely quantitative variation in the elementary brain-processesmomentarily at work under the law of habit, so thatpsychic contiguity, similarity, etc., are derivatives of a singleprofounder kind of fact.
My thesis, stated thus briefly, will soon become moreclear; and at the same time certain disturbing factors,which co-operate with the law of neural habit, will come toview.
Let us then assume as thebasis of all our subsequentreasoning this law:When two elementary brain-processeshave been active together or in immediate succession, one ofthem, on reoccurring, tends to propagate its excitement into theother.
But, as a matter of fact, every elementary process hasfound itself at different times excited in conjunction withmany other processes, and this by unavoidable outwardcauses. Which of these others it shall awaken now becomesa problem. Shallb orc be aroused next by thepresenta? We must make a further postulate, based, however,on the fact oftension in nerve-tissue, and on the fact[Pg 567]of summation of excitements, each incomplete or latent initself, into an open resultant.[478] The processb, rather thanc, will awake, if in addition to the vibrating tracta someother tractd is in a state of sub-excitement, and formerlywas excited withb alone and not witha. In short, we maysay:
The amount of activity at any given point in the brain-cortexis the sum of the tendencies of all other points to dischargeinto it, such tendencies being proportionate (1)to the number oftimes the excitement of each other point may have accompaniedthat of the point in question; (2)to the intensity of such excitements;and (3)to the absence of any rival point functionallydisconnected with the first point, into which the discharges mightbe diverted.
Expressing the fundamental law in this most complicatedway leads to the greatest ultimate simplification.Let us, for the present, only treat of spontaneous trains ofthought and ideation, such as occur in revery or musing.The case of voluntary thinking toward a certain end shallcome up later.
Take, to fix our ideas, the two verses from 'LocksleyHall':
"I, the heir of allthe ages in the foremost files of time,"
and—
"For I doubt not throughthe ages one increasing purpose runs."
Why is it that when we recite from memory one of theselines, and get as far asthe ages, that portion of theotherline which follows, and, so to speak, sprouts out ofthe ages,does not also sprout out of our memory, and confuse thesense of our words? Simply because the word that followsthe ages has its brain-process awakened not simply bythe brain-process ofthe ages alone, but by itplus the brain-processesof all the words precedingthe ages. The wordages at its moment of strongest activity would,per se, indifferentlydischarge into either 'in' or 'one.' So wouldthe previous words (whose tension is momentarily muchless strong than that ofages) each of them indifferently discharge[Pg 568]into either of a large number of other words withwhich they have been at different times combined. Butwhen the processes of 'I, the heir of all the ages,' simultaneouslyvibrate in the brain, the last one of them in amaximal, the others in a fading phase of excitement; thenthe strongest line of discharge will be that which theyallalike tend to take. 'In' and not 'one' or any other wordwill be the next to awaken, for its brain-process has previouslyvibrated in unison not only with that ofages, but withthat of all those other words whose activity is dying away.It is a good case of the effectiveness over thought of whatwe called onp. 258 a 'fringe.'
But if some one of these preceding words—'heir,' forexample—had an intensely strong association with somebrain-tracts entirely disjoined in experience from the poemof 'Locksley Hall'—if the reciter, for instance, were tremulouslyawaiting the opening of a will which might makehim a millionaire—it is probable that the path of dischargethrough the words of the poem would be suddenly interruptedat the word 'heir.' Hisemotional interest in thatword would be such that itsown special associations wouldprevail over the combined ones of the other words. Hewould, as we say, be abruptly reminded of his personalsituation, and the poem would lapse altogether from histhoughts.
The writer of these pages has every year to learn thenames of a large number of students who sit in alphabeticalorder in a lecture-room. He finally learns to call themby name, as they sit in their accustomed places. On meetingone in the street, however, early in the year, the facehardly ever recalls the name, but it may recall the place ofits owner in the lecture-room, his neighbors' faces, and consequentlyhis general alphabetical position; and then,usually as the common associate of all these combineddata, the student's name surges up in his mind.
A father wishes to show to some guests the progress ofhis rather dull child in Kindergarten instruction. Holdingthe knife upright on the table, he says, "What do you callthat, my boy?" "I calls it aknife, I does," is the sturdy reply,from which the child cannot be induced to swerve by[Pg 569]any alteration in the form of question, until the fatherrecollecting that in the Kindergarten a pencil was used, andnot a knife, draws a long one from his pocket, holds it inthe same way, and then gets the wished-for answer, "I callsitvertical." All the concomitants of the Kindergarten experiencehad to recombine their effect before the word'vertical' could be reawakened.
Professor Bain, in his chapters on 'Compound Association,'has treated in a minute and exhaustive way of thistype of mental sequence, and what he has done so wellneed not be here repeated.[479]
The ideal working of the law of compound association,were it unmodified by any extraneous influence, would besuch as to keep the mind in a perpetual treadmill of concretereminiscences from which no detail could be omitted.Suppose, for example, we begin by thinking of a certaindinner-party. The only thing which all the components ofthe dinner-party could combine to recall would be the firstconcrete occurrence which ensued upon it. All the detailsof this occurrence could in turn only combine to awaken thenext following occurrence, and so on. Ifa, b, c, d, e, for instance,be the elementary nerve-tracts excited by the lastact of the dinner-party, call this act A, andl, m, n, o, p, bethose of walking home through the frosty night, which wemay call B, then the thought of A must awaken that of B,becausea, b, c, d, e, will each and all discharge intolthrough the paths by which their original discharge tookplace. Similarly they will discharge intom, n, o, andp;and these latter tracts will also each reinforce the other'saction because, in the experience B, they have alreadyvibrated in unison. The lines in Fig. 40 symbolizethe summation of discharges into each of the componentsof B, and the consequent strength of the combination ofinfluences by which B in its totality is awakened.
Hamilton first used the word 'redintegration' to designateall association. Such processes as we have just described[Pg 570]might in an emphatic sense be termed redintegrations,for they would necessarily lead, if unobstructed, tothe reinstatement in thought of theentire content of largetrains of past experience. From this complete redintegrationthere could be no escape save through the irruption ofsome new and strong present impression of the senses, orthrough the excessive tendency of some one of the elementarybrain-tracts to discharge independently into an aberrantquarter of the brain. Such was the tendency of theword 'heir' in the verse from 'Locksley Hall,' which wasour first example. How such tendencies are constitutedwe shall have soon to inquire with some care. Unless theyare present, the panorama of the past, once opened, mustunroll itself with fatal literality to the end, unless someoutward sound, sight, or touch divert the current of thought.
Let us call this processimpartial redintegration. Whetherit ever occurs in an absolutely complete form is doubtful.We all immediately recognize, however, that in some mindsthere is a much greater tendency than in others for theflow of thought to take this form. Those insufferably garrulousold women, those dry and fanciless beings who spareyou no detail, however petty, of the facts they are recounting,and upon the thread of whose narrative all the irrelevantitems cluster as pertinaciously as the essential ones,[Pg 571]the slaves of literal fact, the stumblers over the smallestabrupt step in thought, are figures known to all of us.Comic literature has made her profit out of them. Juliet'snurse is a classical example. George Eliot's village charactersand some of Dickens's minor personages supplyexcellent instances.
Perhaps as successful a rendering as any of this mentaltype is the character of Miss Bates in Miss Austen's 'Emma.'Hear how she redintegrates:
"'But where couldyou hear it?' cried Miss Bates. 'Where could youpossibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? For it is not five minutes since I receivedMrs. Cole's note—no, it cannot be more than five—or at least ten—forI had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out—I wasonly gone down to speak to Patty again about the pork—Jane wasstanding in the passage—were not you, Jane?—for my mother was soafraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said I wouldgo down and see, and Jane said: "Shall I go down instead? for I thinkyou have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen." "Oh,my dear," said I—well, and just then came the note. A Miss Hawkins—that'sall I know—a Miss Hawkins, of Bath. But, Mr. Knightley,how could you possibly have heard it? for the very moment Mr. Coletold Mrs. Cole of it, she sat down and wrote to me. A Miss Hawkins—'"
But in every one of us there are moments when thiscomplete reproduction of all the items of a past experienceoccurs. What are those moments? They are moments ofemotional recall of the past as something which once was,but is gone for ever—moments, the interest of which consistsin the feeling that our self was once other than it nowis. When this is the case, any detail, however minute,which will make the past picture more complete, will alsohave its effect in swelling that total contrast betweennowandthen which forms the central interest of our contemplation.
This case helps us to understand why it is that theordinary spontaneous flow of our ideas does not follow thelaw of impartial redintegration.In no revival of a past experienceare all the items of our thought equally operative indetermining what the next thought shall be. Always some ingredientis prepotent over the rest. Its special suggestions or[Pg 572]associations in this case will often be different from thosewhich it has in common with the whole group of items;and its tendency to awaken these outlying associates willdeflect the path of our revery. Just as in the originalsensible experience our attention focalized itself upon afew of the impressions of the scene before us, so here inthe reproduction of those impressions an equal partialityis shown, and some items are emphasized above the rest.What these items shall be is, in most cases of spontaneousrevery, hard to determine beforehand. In subjective termswe say thatthe prepotent items are those which appeal mostto ourinterest.
Expressed in brain-terms, the law of interest will be:some one brain-process is always prepotent above its concomitantsin arousing action elsewhere.
"Two processes," says Mr. Hodgson,[480] "are constantly going on inredintegration. The one a process of corrosion, melting, decay; theother a process of renewing, arising, becoming.... No object of representationremains long before consciousness in the same state, butfades, decays, and becomes indistinct. Those parts of the object, however,which possess an interest resist this tendency to gradual decay ofthe whole object.... This inequality in the object—some parts, the uninteresting,submitting to decay; others, the interesting parts, resistingit—when it has continued for a certain time, ends in becoming a newobject."
Only where the interest is diffused equally over all theparts (as in the emotional memory just referred to, where,as allpast, they all interest us alike) is this law departedfrom. It will be least obeyed by those minds which havethe smallest variety and intensity of interests—those who,by the general flatness and poverty of their æsthetic nature,are kept for ever rotating among the literal sequences oftheir local and personal history.
Most of us, however, are better organized than this, and[Pg 573]our musings pursue an erratic course, swerving continuallyinto some new direction traced by the shifting playof interest as it ever falls on some partial item in eachcomplex representation that is evoked. Thus it so oftencomes about that we find ourselves thinking at two nearlyadjacent moments of things separated by the whole diameterof space and time. Not till we carefully recall eachstep of our cogitation do we see how naturally we came byHodgson's law to pass from one to the other. Thus, forinstance, after looking at my clock just now (1879), I foundmyself thinking of a recent resolution in the Senate aboutour legal-tender notes. The clock called up the image ofthe man who had repaired its gong. He suggested thejeweller's shop where I had last seen him; that shop, someshirt-studs which I had bought there; they, the value ofgold and its recent decline; the latter, the equal value ofgreenbacks, and this, naturally, the question of how longthey were to last, and of the Bayard proposition. Each ofthese images offered various points of interest. Thosewhich formed the turning-points of my thought are easilyassigned. The gong was momentarily the most interestingpart of the clock, because, from having begun with a beautifultone, it had become discordant and aroused disappointment.But for this the clock might have suggestedthe friend who gave it to me, or any one of a thousand circumstancesconnected with clocks. The jeweller's shopsuggested the studs, because they alone of all its contentswere tinged with the egoistic interest of possession. Thisinterest in the studs, their value, made me single out thematerial as its chief source, etc., to the end. Every readerwho will arrest himself at any moment and say, "Howcame I to be thinking of just this?" will be sure to trace atrain of representations linked together by lines of contiguityand points of interest inextricably combined. Thisis the ordinary process of the association of ideas as itspontaneously goes on in average minds.We may call itordinary,ormixed, association.
Another example of it is given by Hobbes in a passagewhich has been quoted so often as to be classical:
"In a discourse of our present civil war, what could seem more impertinentthan to ask (as one did) what was the value of a Romanpenny? Yet the coherence to me was manifest enough. For thethought of the war introduced the thought of the delivering up theKing to his enemies; the thought of that brought in the thought of thedelivering up of Christ; and that again the thought of the thirtypence, which was the price of that treason: and thence easily followedthat malicious question; and all this in a moment of time; for thoughtis quick."[481]
Can we determine, now, when a certain portion of thegoing thought has, by dint of its interest, become so prepotentas to make its own exclusive associates the dominantfeatures of the coming thought—can we, I say, determinewhich of its own associates shall be evoked? For they aremany. As Hodgson says:
"The interesting parts of the decaying object are free to combineagain with any objects or parts of objects with which at any time theyhave been combined before. All the former combinations of theseparts may come back into consciousness; one must; but which will?"
Mr. Hodgson replies:
"There can be but one answer: that which has been mosthabituallycombined with them before. This new object begins at once to formitself in consciousness, and to group its parts round the part still remainingfrom the former object; part after part comes out and arrangesitself in its old position; but scarcely has the process begun, when theoriginal law of interest begins to operate on this new formation, seizeson the interesting parts and impresses them on the attention to the exclusionof the rest, and the whole process is repeated again with endlessvariety. I venture to propose this as a complete and true accountof the whole process of redintegration."
In restricting the discharge from the interesting iteminto that channel which is simply mosthabitual in the senseof most frequent, Hodgson's account is assuredly imperfect.An image by no means always revives its most frequentassociate, although frequency is certainly one of the mostpotent determinants of revival. If I abruptly utter thewordswallow, the reader, if by habit an ornithologist, willthink of a bird; if a physiologist or a medical specialist inthroat diseases, he will think of deglutition. If I saydate,[Pg 575]he will, if a fruit-merchant or an Arabian traveller, think ofthe produce of the palm; if an habitual student of history,figures witha.d. orb.c. before them will rise in his mind.If I saybed, bath, morning, his own daily toilet will be invinciblysuggested by the combined names of three of itshabitual associates. But frequent lines of transition areoften set at naught. The sight of C. Goring's 'System derkritischen Philosophie' has most frequently awakened inme thoughts of the opinions therein propounded. Theidea of suicide has never been connected with the volumes.But a moment since, as my eye fell upon them, suicide wasthe thought that flashed into my mind. Why? Becausebut yesterday I received a letter from Leipzig informing methat this philosopher's recent death by drowning was anact of self-destruction. Thoughts tend, then, to awakentheir most recent as well as their most habitual associates.This is a matter of notorious experience, too notorious, infact, to need illustration. If we have seen our friend thismorning, the mention of his name now recalls the circumstancesof that interview, rather than any more remotedetails concerning him. If Shakespeare's plays are mentioned,and we were last night reading 'Richard II.,' vestigesof that play rather than of 'Hamlet' or 'Othello'float through our mind. Excitement of peculiar tracts, orpeculiar modes of general excitement in the brain, leave asort of tenderness or exalted sensibility behind them whichtakes days to die away. As long as it lasts, those tracts orthose modes are liable to have their activities awakened bycauses which at other times might leave them in repose.Hence,recency in experience is a prime factor in determiningrevival in thought.[482]
Vividness in an original experience may also have thesame effect as habit or recency in bringing about likelihoodof revival. If we have once witnessed an execution, anysubsequent conversation or reading about capital punishmentwill almost certainly suggest images of that particular[Pg 576]scene. Thus it is that events lived through only once, andin youth, may come in after-years, by reason of their excitingquality or emotional intensity, to serve as types orinstances used by our mind to illustrate any and everyoccurring topic whose interest is most remotely pertinentto theirs. If a man in his boyhood once talked with Napoleon,any mention of great men or historical events, battlesor thrones, or the whirligig of fortune, or islands in theocean, will be apt to draw to his lips the incidents of thatone memorable interview. If the wordtooth now suddenlyappears on the page before the reader's eye, there are fiftychances out of a hundred that, if he gives it time to awakenany image, it will be an image of some operation of dentistryin which he has been the sufferer. Daily he hastouched his teeth and masticated with them; this verymorning he brushed them, chewed his breakfast and pickedthem; but the rarer and remoter associations arise morepromptly because they were so much more intense.[483]
A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction iscongruity in emotional tone between the reproduced idea andour mood. The same objects do not recall the same associateswhen we are cheerful as when we are melancholy.Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our utter inabilityto keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressedin spirits. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty,and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs.And those of sanguine temperament, when theirspirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanenceto evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instantthe train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine,and images of spring and hope. The records of Arctic orAfrican travel perused in one mood awaken no thoughtsbut those of horror at the malignity of Nature; read atanother time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections onthe indomitable power and pluck of man. Few novels sooverflow with joyous animal spirits as 'The Three Guardsmen'of Dumas. Yet it may awaken in the mind of a[Pg 577]reader depressed with sea-sickness (as the writer can personallytestify) a most dismal and woeful consciousness ofthe cruelty and carnage of which heroes like Athos, Porthos,and Aramis make themselves guilty.
Habit, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity are, then,all reasons why one representation rather than anothershould be awakened by the interesting portion of a departingthought. We may say with truth thatin the majorityof cases the coming representation will have been eitherhabitual, recent, or vivid, and will be congruous. If allthese qualities unite in any one absent associate, we maypredict almost infallibly that that associate of the goingthought will form an important ingredient in the comingthought. In spite of the fact, however, that the successionof representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeterminismand limited to a few classes whose characteristicquality is fixed by the nature of our past experience, itmust still be confessed that an immense number of termsin the linked chain of our representations fall outside of allassignable rule. To take the instance of the clock givenonpage 586. Why did the jeweller's shop suggest the shirt-studsrather than a chain which I had bought there morerecently, which had cost more, and whose sentimental associationswere much more interesting? Both chain andstuds had excited brain-tracts simultaneously with the shop.The only reason why the nerve-stream from the shop-tractswitched off into the stud-tract rather than into the chain-tractmust be that the stud-tract happened at that moment tolie more open, either because of some accidental alteration inits nutrition or because the incipient sub-conscious tensionsof the brain as a whole had so distributed their equilibrium,that it was more unstable here than in the chain-tract.Any reader's introspection will easily furnish similar instances.It thus remains true that to a certain extent, evenin those forms of ordinary mixed association which lienearest to impartial redintegration,which associate of theinteresting item shall emerge must be called largely a matterof accident—accident, that is, for our intelligence. Nodoubt it is determined by cerebral causes, but they are toosubtile and shifting for our analysis.
In partial or mixed association we have all along supposedthe interesting portion of the disappearing thoughtto be of considerable extent, and to be sufficiently complexto constitute by itself a concrete object. Sir WilliamHamilton relates, for instance, that after thinking ofBen Lomond he found himself thinking of the Prussiansystem of education, and discovered that the links of associationwere a German gentleman whom he had met on BenLomond, Germany, etc. The interesting part of BenLomond, as he had experienced it, the part operative indetermining the train of his ideas was the complex imageof a particular man. But now let us suppose that thatselective agency of interested attention, which may thusconvert impartial redintegration into partial association—letus suppose that it refines itself still further and accentuatesa portion of the passing thought, so small as to beno longer the image of a concrete thing, but only of anabstract quality or property. Let us moreover supposethat the part thus accentuated persists in consciousness (or,in cerebral terms, has its brain-process continue) after theother portions of the thought have faded.This small survivingportion will then surround itself with its own associatesafter the fashion we have already seen, and the relationbetween the new thought's object and the object of thefaded thought will be arelation of similarity. The pair ofthoughts will form an instance of what is called 'Associationby Similarity.'[484]
The similars which are here associated, or of which thefirst is followed by the second in the mind, are seen to becompounds. Experience proves that this is always the[Pg 579]case.There is no tendency on the part ofsimple'ideas,' attributes,or qualities to remind us of their like. The thought ofone shade of blue does not remind us of that of anothershade of blue, etc., unless indeed we have in mind somegeneral purpose like naming the tint, when we shouldnaturally think of other blues of the scale, through 'mixedassociation' of purpose, names, and tints, together. Butthere is no elementary tendency of pure qualities to awakentheir similars in the mind.
We saw in the chapter on Discrimination that two compoundthings are similar when some one quality or groupof qualities is shared alike by both, although as regardstheir other qualities they may have nothing in common.The moon is similar to a gas-jet, it is also similar to a foot-ball;but a gas-jet and a foot-ball are not similar to eachother. When we affirm the similarity of two compoundthings, we should always sayin what respect it obtains.Moon and gas-jet are similar in respect of luminosity,and nothing else; moon and foot-ball in respect of rotundity,and nothing else. Foot-ball and gas-jet arein no respect similar—that is, they possess no commonpoint, no identical attribute. Similarity, in compounds, ispartial identity. When thesame attribute appears in twophenomena, though it be their only common property, thetwo phenomena are similar in so far forth. To return nowto our associated representations. If the thought of themoon is succeeded by the thought of a foot-ball, and thatby the thought of one of Mr. X's railroads, it is becausethe attribute rotundity in the moon broke away from all therest and surrounded itself with an entirely new set of companions—elasticity,leathery integument, swift mobility inobedience to human caprice, etc.; and because the last-namedattribute in the foot-ball in turn broke away from itscompanions, and, itself persisting, surrounded itself withsuch new attributes as make up the notions of a 'railroadking,' of a rising and falling stock-market, and the like.
The gradual passage from impartial redintegration tosimilar association through what we have called ordinarymixed association may be symbolized by diagrams. Fig.41 is impartial redintegration, Fig. 42 is mixed, and Fig. 43[Pg 580]similar association. A in each is the passing, B the comingthought. In 'impartial,' all parts of A are equally operativein calling up B. In 'mixed,' most parts of A are inert.The part M alone breaks out and awakens B. In 'similar,'the focalized part M is much smaller than in the previouscase, and after awakening its new set of associates, insteadof fading out itself, it continues persistently active alongwith them, forming an identical part in the two ideas, andmaking these,pro tanto, resemble each other.
Why a single portion of the passing thought shouldbreak out from its concert with the rest and act, as we say,on its own hook, why the other parts should become inert,are mysteries which we can ascertain but not explain. Possiblya minuter insight into the laws of neural action will[Pg 581]some day clear the matter up; possibly neural laws willnot suffice, and we shall need to invoke a dynamic reactionof the form of consciousness upon its content. But intothis we cannot enter now.
To sum up, then, we see thatthe difference between thethree kinds of association reduces itself to a simple difference inthe amount of that portion of the nerve-tract supporting thegoing thought which is operative in calling up the thought whichcomes. But themodus operandi of this active part is thesame, be it large or be it small. The items constitutingthe coming object waken in every instance because theirnerve-tracts once were excited continuously with those ofthe going object or its operative part. This ultimate physiologicallaw of habit among the neural elements is whatrunsthe train. The direction of its course and the form of itstransitions, whether redintegrative, associative, or similar,are due to unknown regulative or determinative conditionswhich accomplish their effect by opening this switch andclosing that, setting the engine sometimes at half-speed,and coupling or uncoupling cars.
This last figure of speech, into which I have glided unwittingly,affords itself an excellent instance of associationby similarity. I was thinking of the deflections of thecourse of ideas. Now, from Hobbes's time downward,English writers have been fond of speaking of thetrain ofour representations. This word happened to stand out inthe midst of my complex thought with peculiarly sharpaccentuation, and to surround itself with numerous detailsof railroad imagery. Only such details became clear, however,as had their nerve-tracts besieged by a double set ofinfluences—those fromtrain on the one hand, and those fromthemovement of thought on the other. It may possibly bethat the prepotency of the suggestions of the wordtrain atthis moment were due to the recent excitation of the railroadbrain-tract by the instance chosen a few pages back ofii railroad king playing foot-ball with the stock-market.
It is apparent from such an example how inextricablycomplex are all the contributory factors whose resultant isthe line of our reverie. It would be folly in most cases to[Pg 582]attempt to trace them out. From an instance like the above,where the pivot of the Similar Association was formed bya definite concrete word,train, to those where it is so subtileas utterly to elude our analysis, the passage is unbroken.We can form a series of examples. When Mr. Bagehot saysthat the mind of the savage, so far from being in a state ofnature, istattooed all over with monstrous superstitions,the case is very like the one we have just been considering.When Sir James Stephen compares our belief in the uniformityof nature, the congruity of the future with the past,to a man rowing one way and looking another, and steeringhis boat by keeping her stern in a line with an object behindhim, the operative link becomes harder to dissect out. Itis subtler still in Dr. Holmes's phrase, that stories in passingfrom mouth to mouth make a great deal of lee-way inproportion to their headway; or in Mr. Lowell's descriptionof German sentences, that they have a way of yawingand going stern-foremost and not minding the helm for severalminutes after it has been put down. And finally, it isa real puzzle when the color pale-blue is said to have feminineand blood-red masculine affinities. And if I hear afriend describe a certain family as havingblotting-papervoices, the image, though immediately felt to be apposite,baffles the utmost powers of analysis. The higherpoets all use abrupt epithets, which are alike intimate andremote, and, as Emerson says, sweetly torment us with invitationsto their inaccessible homes.
In these latter instances we must suppose that there isan identical portion in the similar objects, and that its brain-tractis energetically operative, without, however, being sufficientlyisolable in its activity as to stand outper se, and formthe condition of a distinctly discriminated 'abstract idea.'We cannot even by careful search see the bridge over whichwe passed from the heart of one representation to that ofthe next. In some brains, however, this mode of transitionis extremely common. It would be one of the most importantof physiological discoveries could we assign the mechanicalor chemical difference which makes the thoughtsof one brain cling close to impartial redintegration, whilethose of another shoot about in all the lawless revelry of[Pg 583]similarity. Why, in these latter brains, action should tendto focalize itself in small spots, while in the others it fillspatiently its broad bed, it seems impossible to guess.Whatever the difference may be, it is what separates theman of genius from the prosaic creature of habit and routinethinking. In Chapter XXII we shall need to recuragain to this point.
Hitherto we have assumed the process of suggestion ofone object by another to be spontaneous. The train ofimagery wanders at its own sweet will, now trudging in sobergrooves of habit, now with a hop, skip, and jump dartingacross the whole field of time and space. This is revery,or musing; but great segments of the flux of our ideasconsist of something very different from this. They areguided by a distinct purpose or conscious interest. Asthe Germans say, wenachdenken, or think towards a certainend. It is now necessary to examine what modification ismade in the trains of our imagery by the having of an endin view. The course of our ideas is then calledvoluntary.
Physiologically considered, we must suppose that apurpose means the persistent activity of certain ratherdefinite brain-processes throughout the whole course ofthought. Our most usual cogitations are not pure reveries,absolute driftings, but revolve about some central interestor topic to which most of the images are relevant, and towardswhich we return promptly after occasional digressions.This interest is subserved by the persistently activebrain-tracts we have supposed. In the mixed associationswhich we have hitherto studied, the parts of each objectwhich form the pivots on which our thoughts successivelyturn have their interest largely determined by their connectionwith somegeneral interest which for the time hasseized upon the mind. If we call Z the brain-tract of generalinterest, then, if the objectabc turns up, andb hasmore associations with Z than have eithera orc, b will becomethe object's interesting, pivotal portion, and will call upits own associates exclusively. For the energy ofb's brain-tractwill be augmented by Z's activity,—an activity which,[Pg 584]from lack of previous connection between Z anda orc,does not influencea orc. If, for instance, I think of Pariswhilst I amhungry, I shall not improbably find that itsrestaurants have become the pivot of my thought, etc., etc.
But in the theoretic as well as in the practical life thereare interests of a more acute sort, taking the form of definiteimages of some achievement, be it action or acquisition,which we desire to effect. The train of ideas arising underthe influence of such an interest constitutes usually thethought of themeans by which the end shall be attained.If the end by its simple presence does not instantaneouslysuggest the means, the search for the latter becomes an intellectualproblem. The solution of problems is the mostcharacteristic and peculiar sort of voluntary thinking.Where the end thought of is some outward deed or gain,the solution is largely composed of the actual motor processes,walking, speaking, writing, etc., which lead up to it.Where the end is in the first instance only ideal, as in layingout a place of operations, the steps are purely imaginary.In both of these cases the discovery of the meansmay form a new sort of end, of an entirely peculiar nature,an end, namely, which we intensely desire before we haveattained it, but of the nature of which, even whilst moststrongly craving it, we have no distinct imagination whatever.Such an end is a problem.
The same state of things occurs whenever we seek torecall something forgotten, or to state the reason for ajudgment which we have made intuitively. The desirestrains and presses in a direction which it feels to be rightbut towards a point which it is unable to see. In short,theabsence of an item is a determinant of our representationsquite as positive as its presence can ever be. Thegap becomes no mere void, but what is called anachingvoid. If we try to explain in terms of brain-action how athought which only potentially exists can yet be effective,we seem driven to believe that the brain-tract thereof mustactually be excited, but only in a minimal and sub-consciousway. Try, for instance, to symbolize what goes onin a man who is racking his brains to remember a thoughtwhich occurred to him last week. The associates of the[Pg 585]thought are there, many of them at least, but they refuseto awaken the thought itself. We cannot suppose that theydo not irradiateat all into its brain-tract, because his mindquivers on the very edge of its recovery. Its actual rhythmsounds in his ears; the words seem on the imminent pointof following, but fail. What it is that blocks the dischargeand keeps the brain-excitement here from passing beyondthe nascent into the vivid state cannot be guessed. But wesee in the philosophy of desire and pleasure, that such nascentexcitements, spontaneously tending to a crescendo,but inhibited or checked by other causes, may becomepotent mental stimuli and determinants of desire. Allquestioning, wonder, emotion of curiosity, must be referredto cerebral causes of some such form as this. The greatdifference between the effort to recall things forgotten andthe search after the means to a given end, is that the latterhave not, whilst the former have, already formed a part ofour experience. If we first studythe mode of recalling athing forgotten, we can take up with better understandingthe voluntary quest of the unknown.
The forgotten thing is felt by us as a gap in the midst ofcertain other things. If it is a thought, we possess a dimidea of where we were and what we were about when it occurredto us. We recollect the general subject to which itrelates. But all these details refuse to shoot together intoa solid whole, for the lack of the vivid traits of this missingthought, the relation whereof to each detail forms now themain interest of the latter. We keep running over the detailsin our mind, dissatisfied, craving something more.From each detail there radiate lines of association formingso many tentative guesses. Many of these are immediatelyseen to be irrelevant, are therefore void of interest, andlapse immediately from consciousness. Others are associatedwith the other details present, and with the missingthought as well. Whenthese surge up, we have a peculiarfeeling that we are 'warm,' as the children say when theyplay hide and seek; and such associates as these we clutchat and keep before the attention. Thus we recollect successivelythat when we had the thought in question wewere at the dinner-table; then that our friend J. D. was[Pg 586]there; then that the subject talked about was so and so;finally, that the thought cameà propos of a certain anecdote,and then that it had something to do with a French quotation.Now all these added associationsarise independentlyof the will, by the spontaneous process we know so well.Allthat the will does is to emphasize and linger over those whichseem pertinent, and ignore the rest. Through this hovering ofthe attention in the neighborhood of the desired object, theaccumulation of associates becomes so great that the combinedtensions of their neural processes break through thebar, and the nervous wave pours into the tract which hasso long been awaiting its advent. And as the expectant,sub-conscious itching there, bursts into the fulness of vividfeeling, the mind finds an inexpressible relief.
The whole process can be rudely symbolized in a diagram.Call the forgotten thing Z, the first facts with whichwe felt it was related,a, b, andc, and the details finallyoperative in calling it up,l, m, andn. Each circle willthen stand for the brain-process underlying the thought ofthe object denoted by the letter contained within it. Theactivity in Z will at first be a mere tension; but as the activitiesina, b, andc little by little irradiate intol, m, andn,and asall these processes are somehow connected with Z,their combined irradiations upon Z, represented by the centripetalarrows, succeed in helping the tension there toovercome the resistance, and in rousing Z also to full activity.
The tension present from the first in Z, even though itkeep below the threshold of discharge, is probably to somedegree co-operative witha, b, c in determining thatl, m, nshall awake. Without Z's tension there might be a sloweraccumulation of objects connected with it. But, as aforesaid,the objects come before us through the brain's own laws,and the Ego of the thinker can only remain on hand, as itwere, to recognize their relative values and brood oversome of them, whilst others are let drop. As when we havelost a material object we cannot recover it by a direct effort,but only through moving about such neighborhoodswherein it is likely to lie, and trusting that it will thenstrike our eye; so here, by not letting our attention leavethe neighborhood of what we seek, we trust that it will endby speaking to us of its own accord.[485]
Turn now to the case of finding the unknown means toa distinctly conceived end. The end here stands in theplace ofa, b, c, in the diagram. It is the starting-point ofthe irradiations of suggestion; and here, as in that case,what the voluntary attention does is only to dismiss someof the suggestions as irrelevant, and hold fast to otherswhich are felt to be more pertinent—let these be symbolizedbyl, m, n. These latter at last accumulate sufficiently todischarge all together into Z, the excitement of which processis, in the mental sphere, equivalent to the solution ofour problem. The only difference between this case andthe last, is that in this one there need be no original sub-excitementin Z, co-operating from the very first. When[Pg 588]we seek a forgotten name, we must suppose the name'scentre to be in a state of active tension from the very outset,because of that peculiar feeling ofrecognition which weget at the moment of recall. The plenitude of the thoughtseems here but a maximum degree of something which ourmind divined in advance. It instantaneously fills a socketcompletely moulded to its shape; and it seems most naturalto ascribe the identity of quality in our feeling of the gapingsocket and our feeling of what comes to fill it, to thesameness of a nerve-tract excited in different degrees. Inthe solving of a problem, on the contrary, the recognitionthat we have found the means is much less immediate.Here, what we are aware of in advance seems to be itsrelations with the items we already know. It must bear acausal relation, or it must be an effect, or it must containan attribute common to two items, or it must be a uniformconcomitant, or what not. We know, in short, a lotaboutit, whilst as yet we have no knowledge ofacquaintance withit (seep. 221), or in Mr. Hodgson's language, "we knowwhat we want to find beforehand, in a certain sense, in itssecond intention, and do not know it, in another sense, inits first intention."[486] Our intuition that one of the ideaswhich turn up is, at last, ourquæsitum, is due to our recognitionthat its relations are identical with those we hadin mind, and this may be a rather slow act of judgment.In fact, every one knows that an object may be for sometime present to his mind before its relations to other mattersare perceived. To quote Hodgson again:
"The mode of operation is common to voluntary memory andreason.... But reasoning adds to memory the function of comparingor judging the images which arise.... Memory aims at filling the gapwith an image which has at some particular time filled it before, reasoningwith one which bears certain time-and space-relations to theimages before and after"—
or, to use perhaps clearer language, one which stands indeterminate logical relations to those data round about thegap which filled our mind at the start. This feeling of theblank form of relationship before we get the material quality[Pg 589]of the thing related will surprise no one who has readChapter IX.
From the guessing of newspaper enigmas to the plottingof the policy of an empire there is no other processthan this. We trust to the laws of cerebral nature to presentus spontaneously with the appropriate idea:
"Our only command over it is by the effort we make to keep thepainful unfilled gap in consciousness.[487]... Two circumstances areimportant to notice: the first is, that volition has no power of callingup images, but only of rejecting and selecting from those offered byspontaneous redintegration.[488] But the rapidity with which this selectionis made, owing to the familiarity of the ways in which spontaneousredintegration runs, gives the process of reasoning the appearance ofevoking images that are foreseen to be conformable to the purpose.There is no seeing them before they are offered; there is no summoningthem before they are seen. The other circumstance is, that every kindof reasoning is nothing, in its simplest form, but attention."[489]
It is foreign to our purpose here to enter into anydetailed analysis of the different classes of mental pursuit.In a scientific research we get perhaps as rich an exampleas can be found. The inquirer starts with a fact of whichhe seeks the reason, or with an hypothesis of which heseeks the proof. In either case he keeps turning thematter incessantly in his mind until, by the arousal of associateupon associate, some habitual, some similar, one ariseswhich he recognizes to suit his need. This, however, maytake years. No rules can be given by which the investigatormay proceed straight to his result; but both hereand in the case of reminiscence the accumulation of helpsin the way of associations may advance more rapidly bythe use of certain routine methods. In striving to recall athought, for example, we may of set purpose run throughthe successive classes of circumstance with which it may[Pg 590]possibly have been connected, trusting that when the rightmember of the class has turned up it will help the thought'srevival. Thus we may run through all theplaces in whichwe may have had it. We may run through thepersonswhom we remember to have conversed with, or we may callup successively all thebooks we have lately been reading.If we are trying to remember a person we may run througha list of streets or of professions. Some item out of thelists thus methodically gone over will very likely be associatedwith the fact we are in need of, and may suggest itor help to do so. And yet the item might never have arisenwithout such systematic procedure. In scientific researchthis accumulation of associates has been methodized byMill under the title of 'The Four Methods of ExperimentalInquiry.' By the 'method of agreement,' by thatof 'difference,' by those of 'residues' and 'concomitantvariations'(which cannot here be more nearly defined), wemake certain lists of cases; and by ruminating these listsin our minds the cause we seek will be more likely toemerge. But the final stroke of discovery is only prepared,not effected, by them. The brain-tracts must, of their ownaccord, shoot the right way at last, or we shall still gropein darkness. That in some brains the tractsdo shoot theright way much oftener than in others, and that we cannottell why,—these are ultimate facts to which we must neverclose our eyes. Even in forming our lists of instancesaccording to Mill's methods, we are at the mercy of thespontaneous workings of Similarity in our brain. Howare a number of facts, resembling the one whose cause weseek, to be brought together in a list unless the one willrapidly suggest the other through association by similarity?
Such is the analysis I propose, first of the three maintypes of spontaneous association, and then of voluntaryassociation. It will be observed that theobject called upmay bear any logical relation whatever to the one which suggestedit. The law requires only that one condition shouldbe fulfilled. The fading object must be due to a brain-processsome of whose elements awaken through habit[Pg 591]some of the elements of the brain-process of the objectwhich comes to view. This awakening is the operativemachinery, the causal agency, throughout, quite asmuch so in the kind of association I have called by thename of Similarity, as in any other sort. The similaritybetween the objects, or between the thoughts (if similaritythere be between these latter), has no causal agency incarrying us from one to the other. It is but a result—theeffect of the usual causal agent when this happens to workin a certain particular and assignable way. But ordinarywriters talk as if the similarity of the objects were itself anagent, co-ordinate with habit, and independent of it, andlike it able to push objects before the mind. This is quiteunintelligible. The similarity of two things does not existtill both things are there—it is meaningless to talk of it asanagent of production of anything, whether in the physicalor the psychical realms.[490] It is a relation which the mindperceives after the fact, just as it may perceive the relationsof superiority, of distance, of causality, of container andcontent, of substance and accident, or of contrast, betweenan object and some second object which the associativemachinery calls up.[491]
There are, nevertheless, able writers who not only insiston preserving association by similarity as a distinct elementarylaw, but who make it the most elementary law,and seek to derive contiguous association from it. Theirreasoning is as follows: When the present impression A[Pg 592]awakens the ideab of its past contiguous associate B, howcan this occur except through first reviving an imagea ofits own past occurrence.This is the term directly connectedwithb; so that the process instead of being simplyA—b is A—a—b. Now A anda are similars; therefore noassociation by contiguity can occur except through a previousassociation by similarity. The most important suppositionhere made is that every impression on entering themind must needs awaken an image of its past self, in thelight of which it is 'apperceived' or understood, and throughthe intermediation of which it enters into relation with themind's other objects. This assumption is almost universallymade; and yet it is hard to find any good reason for it.It first came before us when we were reviewing the facts ofaphasia and mental blindness (seep. 50 ff.). But we thensaw no need of optical and auditory images to interpret opticaland auditory sensations by. On the contrary, we agreedthat auditory sensations were understood by us only so faras they awakenednon-auditory images, and optical sensationsonly so far as they awakenednon-optical images. Inthe chapters on Memory, on Reasoning, and on Perceptionthe same assumption will meet us again, and againwill have to be rejected as groundless. The sensationalprocess A and the ideational processa probably occupyessentially the same tracts. When the outer stimuluscomes and those tracts vibrate with the sensation A, theydischarge as directly into the paths which lead to B aswhen there is no outer stimulus and they only vibrate withthe ideaa. To say that the process A can only reach thesepaths by the help of the weaker processa is like sayingthat we need a candle to see the sun by. A replacesa,does all thata does and more; and there is no intelligiblemeaning, to my mind, in saying that the weaker processcoexists with the stronger. I therefore consider that thesewriters are altogether wrong. The only plausible proofthey give of the coexistence ofa with A is when A gives usasense of familiarity but fails to awaken any distinctthought of past contiguous associates. In a later chapterI shall consider this case. Here I content myself with sayingthat it does not seem conclusive as to the point at issue;[Pg 593]and that I still believe association of coexistent or sequentimpressions to be the oneelementary law.
Contrasthas also been held to be an independent agent inassociation. But the reproduction of an object contrastingwith one already in the mind is easily explained on ourprinciples. Recent writers, in fact, all reduce it eitherto similarity or contiguity. Contrast always presupposesgeneric similarity; it is only theextremes of a class whichare contrasted, black and white, not black and sour, orwhite and prickly. A machinery which reproduces a similarat all, may reproduce theopposite similar, as well asany intermediate term. Moreover, the greater number ofcontrasts are habitually coupled in speech, young and old,life and death, rich and poor, etc., and are, as Dr. Bainsays, in everybody's memory.[492]
I trust that the student will now feel that the way to adeeper understanding of the order of our ideas lies in thedirection of cerebral physiology. Theelementary processof revival can be nothing but the law of habit. Truly theday is distant when physiologists shall actually trace fromcell-group to cell-group the irradiations which we have hypotheticallyinvoked. Probably it will never arrive. Theschematism we have used is, moreover, taken immediatelyfrom the analysis of objects into their elementary parts,and only extended by analogy to the brain. And yet it isonly as incorporated in the brain that such a schematismcan represent anythingcausal. This is, to my mind, the conclusivereason for saying that the order ofpresentation ofthe mind's materials is due to cerebral physiology alone.
The law of accidental prepotency of certain processesover others falls also within the sphere of cerebral probabilities.Granting such instability as the brain-tissue requires,certain points must always discharge more quicklyand strongly than others; and this prepotency would shiftits place from moment to moment by accidental causes,[Pg 594]giving us a perfect mechanical diagram of the capriciousplay of similar association in the most gifted mind. Thestudy of dreams confirms this view. The usual abundanceof paths of irradiation seems, in the dormant brain, reduced.A few only are pervious, and the most fantastic sequencesoccur because the currents run—'like sparks in burnt-uppaper'—wherever the nutrition of the moment creates anopening, but nowhere else.
Theeffects of interested attention and volition remain.These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements, andby emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make theirassociates the only ones which are evoked.This is thepoint at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if anywhere,make it stand in dealing with association. Everythingelse is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. Myown opinion on the question of active attention and spiritualspontaneity is expressed elsewhere. But even thoughthere be a mental spontaneity, it can certainly not createideas or summon themex abrupto. Its power is limited toselecting amongst those which the associative machineryhas already introduced or tends to introduce. If it canemphasize, reinforce, or protract for a second either one ofthese, it can do all that the most eager advocate of free willneed demand; for it then decides the direction of the nextassociations by making them hinge upon the emphasizedterm; and determining in this wise the course of the man'sthinking, it also determines his acts.
may be briefly glanced at ere we end the chapter.[493] Aristotleseems to have caught both the facts and the principleof explanation; but he did not expand his views, and it wasnot till the time of Hobbes that the matter was again touchedon in a definite way. Hobbes first formulated the problemof the succession of our thoughts. He writes in Leviathan,chapter iii, as follows:
"By consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that successionof one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discoursein words,mental discourse. When a man thinketh on anythingwhatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as itseems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerlyhad sense, in whole or in parts; so we have no transition from oneimagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in oursenses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us,relics of those made in the sense: and those motions that immediatelysucceeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense:insomuch as the former coming again to take place, and be predominant,the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in suchmanner, as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one partof it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the samething perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another succeedeth, itcomes to pass in time that, in the imagining of anything, there is nocertainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall besomething that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.This train of thoughts, or mental discourse, is of two sorts. The first isunguided, without design, and inconstant; wherein there is no passionatethought, to govern and direct those that follow, to itself, asthe end and scope of some desire, or other passion.... The secondis more constant; as beingregulated by some desire and design. Forthe impression made by such things as we desire, or fear, is strong andpermanent, or, if it cease for a time, of quick return: so strong is it,sometimes, as to hinder and break our sleep. From desire ariseth thethought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which weaim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to thatmean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within ourown power. And because the end, by the greatness of the impression,comes often to mind, in case our thoughts begin to wander, they arequickly again reduced into the way: which observed by one of theseven wise men, made him give men this precept, which is now wornout,Respite finem; that is to say, in all your actions, look often uponwhat you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in theway to attain it.
"The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds; one, when ofan effect imagined we seek the causes, or means that produce it: andthis is common to man and beast. The other is, when imagining anythingwhatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can by it be produced;that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when wehave it. Of which I have not at any time seen any sign, but in manonly; for this is a curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any livingcreature that has no other passion but sensual, such as are hunger,thirst, lust, and anger. In sum, the discourse of the mind, when it isgoverned by design, is nothing butseeking or the faculty of invention,[Pg 596]which the Latins calledsagacitas, andsollertia; a hunting out of thecauses, of some effect, present or past; or of the effects, of some presentor past cause."
The most important passage after this of Hobbes isHume's:
"As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, andmay be united again in what form it pleases, nothing would be moreunaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guidedby some universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniformwith itself in all times and places. Were ideas entirely loose and unconnected,chance alone would join them; and 'tis impossible the samesimple ideas should fall regularly into complex ones (as they commonlydo) without some bond of union among them, some associating quality,by which one idea naturally introduces another. This uniting principleamong ideas is not to be considered as an inseparable connection;for that has been already excluded from the imagination. Nor yet arewe to conclude that without it the mind cannot join two ideas; fornothing is more free than that faculty: but we are only to regard it asa gentle force, which commonly prevails, and is the cause why, amongother things, languages so nearly correspond to each other; nature ina manner pointing to every one those simple ideas which are mostproper to be united in a complex one. The qualities from which thisassociation arises, and by which the mind is after this manner conveyedfrom one idea to another, are three, viz.,Resemblance, Contiguityin time or place, andCause andEffect.
"I believe it will not be very necessary to prove that these qualitiesproduce an association among ideas, and upon the appearance of oneidea naturally introduce another. 'Tis plain that in the course of ourthinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imaginationruns easily from one idea to any other thatresembles it, and that thisquality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association. 'Tislikewise evident, that as the senses, in changing their objects, arenecessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they liecontiguousto each other, the imagination must by long custom acquirethe same method of thinking, and run along the parts of space andtime in conceiving its objects. As to the connection that is made bythe relation ofcause and effect, we shall have occasion afterwards toexamine it to the bottom, and therefore shall not at present insist uponit. 'Tis sufficient to observe that there is no relation which producesa stronger connection in the fancy, and makes one idea more readilyrecall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their objects....These are therefore the principles of union or cohesionamong our simple ideas, and in the imagination supply the place ofthat inseparable connection by which they are united in our memory.Here is a kind ofAttraction, which in the mental world will be found[Pg 597]to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself inas many and as various forms. Its effects are everywhere conspicuous;but as to its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolvedintooriginal qualities of human nature, which I pretend not toexplain."[494]
Hume did not, however, any more than Hobbes, followout the effects of which he speaks, and the task of popularizingthe notion of association and making an effective schoolbased on association of ideas alone was reserved for Hartley[495]and James Mill.[496] These authors traced minutely thepresence of association in all the cardinal notions and operationsof the mind. The several 'faculties' of the Mindwere dispossessed; the one principle of association betweenideas did all their work. As Priestley says:
"Nothing is requisite to make any man whatever he is, but asentient principle with this single law.... Not only all our intellectualpleasures and pains but all the phenomena of memory, imagination,volition, reasoning and every other mental affection and operation,are but different modes or cases of the association of ideas."[497]
An eminent French psychologist, M. Ribot, repeatsHume's comparison of the law of association with that ofgravitation, and goes on to say:
"It is remarkable that this discovery was made so late. Nothing issimpler, apparently, than to notice that this law of association is thetruly fundamental, irreducible phenomenon of our mental life; that itis at the bottom of all our acts; that it permits of no exception; thatneither dream, revery, mystic ecstasy, nor the most abstract reasoningcan exist without it; that its suppression would be equivalent to that ofthought itself. Nevertheless no ancient author understood it, for onecannot seriously maintain that a few scattered lines in Aristotle andthe Stoics constitute a theory and clear view of the subject. It is toHobbes, Hume, and Hartley that we must attribute the origin of thesestudies on the connection of our ideas. The discovery of the ultimatelaw of our psychologic acts has this, then, in common with many otherdiscoveries: it came late and seems so simple that it may justly astonishus.
"Perhaps it is not superfluous to ask in what this manner of explanationis superior to the current theory of Faculties.[498] The most[Pg 598]extended usage consists, as we know, in dividing intellectual phenomenainto classes, in separating those which differ, in grouping togetherthose of the same nature and in giving to these a common name and inattributing them to the same cause; it is thus that we have come to distinguishthose diverse aspects of intelligence which are called judgment,reasoning, abstraction, perception, etc. This method is precisely theone followed in Physics, where the words caloric, electricity, gravity,designate the unknown causes of certain groups of phenomena. If onethus never forgets that the diverse faculties are only the unknowncauses of known phenomena, that they are simply a convenient meansof classifying the facts and speaking of them, if one does not fall intothe common fault of making out of them substantial entities, creationswhich now agree, now disagree, so forming in the intelligence a littlerepublic; then, we can see nothing reprehensible in this distributioninto faculties, conformable as it is to the rules of a sound method andof a good natural classification. In what then is Mr. Bain's proceduresuperior to the method of the faculties? It is that the latter is simplyaclassification while his is anexplanation. Between the psychologywhich traces intellectual facts back to certain faculties, and that whichreduces them to the single law of association, there is, according to ourway of thinking, the same difference that we find in Physics betweenthose who attribute its phenomena to five or six causes, and those whoderive gravity caloric, light, etc., from motion. The system of thefaculties explains nothing because each one of them is only aflatus vociswhich is of value merely through the phenomena which it contains, andsignifies nothing more than these phenomena. The new theory, on thecontrary, shows that the different processes of intelligence are onlydiverse cases of a single law; that imagination, deduction, induction,perception, etc., are but so many determinate ways in which ideas maycombine with each other; and that the differences of faculties are onlydifferences of association. Itexplains all intellectual facts, certainlynot after the manner of Metaphysics which demands the ultimate andabsolute reason of things; but after the manner of Physics which seeksonly their secondary and immediate cause."[499]
The inexperienced reader may be glad of a brief indicationof the manner in which all the different mental operationsmay be conceived to consist of images of sensationassociated together.
Memory is the association of a present image with othersknown to belong to the past.Expectation the same, withfuture substituted for past.Fancy, the association ofimages without temporal order.
Belief in anythingnot present to sense is the very lively,[Pg 599]strong, and steadfast association of the image of that thingwith some present sensation, so that as long as the sensationpersists the image cannot be excluded from the mind.
Judgment is 'transferring the idea oftruth by associationfrom one proposition to another that resembles it.'[500]
Reasoning is the perception that "whatever has any markhas that which it is a mark of"; in the concrete case themark or middle term being alwaysassociated with each ofthe other terms and so serving as a link by which they arethemselves indirectly associated together. This same kindof transfer of a sensible experience associated with anotherto a third also associated with that other, serves to explainemotional facts. When we are pleased or hurt we expressit, and the expression associates itself with the feeling.Hearing the same expression from another revives the associatedfeeling, and wesympathize, i.e. grieve or are gladwith him.
The other social affections,Benevolence, Conscientiousness,Ambition, etc., arise in like manner by the transfer of thebodily pleasure experienced as a reward for social service,and hence associated with it, to the act of service itself, thelink of reward being dropped out. Just soAvarice whenthe miser transfers the bodily pleasures associated withthe spending of money to the money itself, dropping thelink of spending.
Fear is a transfer of the bodily hurt associated by experiencewith the thing feared, to the thought of the thing,with the precise features of the hurt left out. Thus we feara dog without distinctly imagining his bite.
Love is the association of the agreeableness of certainsensible experiences with the idea of the object capable ofaffording them. The experiences themselves may cease tobe distinctly imagined after the notion of their pleasure hasbeen transferred to the object, constituting our love therefor.
Volition is the association of ideas of muscular motionwith the ideas of those pleasures which the motion produces.The motion at first occurs automatically and results[Pg 600]in a pleasure unforeseen. The latter becomes so associatedwith the motion that whenever we think of it the idea of themotion arises; and the idea of the motion when vivid causesthe motion to occur. This is an act of will.
Nothing is easier than for a philosopher of this schoolto explain from experience such a notion as that of infinitude.
"He sees in it an ordinary manifestation of one of the laws of theassociation of ideas,—the law that the idea of a thing irresistibly suggeststhe idea of any other thing which has been often experienced inclose conjunction with it, and not otherwise. As we have never hadexperience of any point of space without other points beyond it, nor ofany point of time without others following it, the law of indissolubleassociation makes it impossible for us to think of any point of space ortime, however distant, without having the idea irresistibly realized, inimagination, of other points still more remote. And thus the supposedoriginal and inherent property of these two ideas is completely explainedand accounted for by the law of association; and we are enabled to seethat if Space or Time were really susceptible of termination, we shouldbe just as unable as we now are to conceive the idea."[501]
These examples of the Associationist Psychology are withthe exception of the last, very crudely expressed, but theysuffice for our temporary need. Hartley and James Mill[502]improved upon Hume so far as to employ but a single principleof association, that of contiguity or habit. Hartleyignores resemblance, James Mill expressly repudiates it ina passage which is assuredly one of the curiosities of literature:
"I believe it will be found that we are accustomed to see like thingstogether. When we see a tree, we generally see more trees than one;a sheep, more sheep than one; a man, more men than one. From thisobservation, I think, we may refer resemblance to the law of frequency[i.e., contiguity], of which it seems to form only a particular case."
Mr. Herbert Spencer has still more recently tried to constructa Psychology which ignores Association by Similarity,[503]and in a chapter, which also is a curiosity, he tries[Pg 601]to explain the association of two ideas by a conscious referenceof the first to the point of time when its sensation wasexperienced, which point of time is no sooner thought ofthan its content, namely, the second idea, arises. Messrs.Bain and Mill, however, and the immense majority of contemporarypsychologists retain both Resemblance and Contiguityas irreducible principles of Association.
Professor Bain's exposition of association is by commonconsent looked upon as the best expression of the Englishschool. Perception of agreement and difference, retentiveness, andthe two sorts of association, contiguity and similarity,are by him regarded as constituting all that is meant byintellect proper. His pages are painstaking and instructivefrom a descriptive point of view; though, after my own attemptto deal with the subject causally, I can hardlyaward to them any profoundexplanatory value. Associationby Similarity, too much neglected by the British schoolbefore Bain, receives from him the most generous exemplification.As an instructive passage, the following, out ofmany equally good, may be chosen to quote:
"We may have similarity in form with diversity of use, and similarityof use with diversity of form. A rope suggests other ropes andcords, if we look to the appearance; but looking to theuse, it may suggestan iron cable, a wooden prop, an iron girding, a leather band, orbevelled gear. In spite of diversity of appearance, the suggestion turnson what answers a common end. If we are very much attracted bysensible appearances, there will be the more difficulty in recallingthings that agree only in the use; if, on the other hand, we are profoundlysensitive to the one point of practical efficiency as a tool, thepeculiarities not essential to this will be little noticed, and we shall beever ready to revive past objects corresponding in use to some one present,although diverse in all other circumstances. We become obliviousto the difference between a horse, a steam-engine, and a waterfall,when our minds are engrossed with the one circumstance of movingpower. The diversity in these had no doubt for a long time the effectof keeping back their first identification; and to obtuse intellects, thisidentification might have been for ever impossible. A strong concentrationof mind upon the single peculiarity of mechanical force, and adegree of indifference to the general aspect of the things themselves,[Pg 602]must conspire with the intellectual energy of resuscitation by similars,in order to summon together in the view three structures so different.We can see, by an instance like this, how new adaptations of existingmachinery might arise in the mind of a mechanical inventor. When itfirst occurred to a reflecting mind that moving water had a propertyidentical with human or brute force, namely, the property of settingother masses in motion, overcoming inertia and resistance,—when thesight of the stream suggested through this point of likeness the powerof the animal,—a new addition was made to the class of prime movers,and when circumstances permitted, this power could become a substitutefor the others. It may seem to the modern understanding, familiarwith water-wheels and drifting rafts, that the similarity here was anextremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back into an earlystate of mind, when running water affected the mind by its brilliancy,its roar, and irregular devastation, we may easily suppose that to identifythis with animal muscular energy was by no means an obviouseffect. Doubtless when a mind arose, insensible by natural constitutionto the superficial aspects of things, and having withal a great stretch ofidentifying intellect, such a comparison would then be possible. Wemay pursue the same example one stage further, and come to the discoveryof steam power, or the identification of expanding vapor withthe previously known sources of mechanical force. To the common eye,for ages, vapor presented itself as clouds in the sky; or as a hissingnoise at the spout of a kettle, with the formation of a foggy curlingcloud at a few inches' distance. The forcing up of the lid of a kettlemay also have been occasionally observed. But how long was it ereany one was struck with the parallelism of this appearance with a blastof wind, a rush of water, or an exertion of animal muscle? The discordancewas too great to be broken through by such a faint and limitedamount of likeness. In one mind, however, the identification did takeplace, and was followed out into its consequences. The likeness hadoccurred to other minds previously, but not with the same results.Such minds must have been in some way or other distinguished abovethe millions of mankind; and we are now endeavoring to give the explanationof their superiority. The intellectual character of Watt containedall the elements preparatory to a great stroke of similarity insuch a case;—a high susceptibility, both by nature and by education,to the mechanical properties of bodies; ample previous knowledge orfamiliarity; and indifference to the superficial and sensational effectsof things. It is not only possible, however, but exceedingly probable,that many men possessed all these accomplishments; they are of a kindnot transcending common abilities. They would in some degree attachto a mechanical education almost as a matter of course. That the discoverywas not sooner made supposes that something farther, and notof common occurrence, was necessary; and this additional endowmentappears to be the identifying power of Similarity in general; the tendencyto detect likeness in the midst of disparity and disguise. This[Pg 603]supposition accounts for the fact, and is consistent with the known intellectualcharacter of the inventor of the steam-engine."[504]
Dr. Hodgson's account of association is by all odds thebest yet propounded in English.[505] All these writers holdmore or less explicitly to the notion of atomistic 'ideas'which recur. In Germany, the same mythological suppositionhas been more radically grasped, and carried out toa still more logical, if more repulsive, extreme, by Herbart[506]and his followers, who until recently may be said tohave reigned almost supreme in their native country.[507]For Herbart each idea is a permanently existing entity, theentrance whereof into consciousness is but an accidentaldetermination of its being. So far as it succeeds in occupyingthe theatre of consciousness, it crowds out anotheridea previously there. This act of inhibition gives it, however,a sort of hold on the other representation which onall later occasions facilitates its following the other into themind. The ingenuity with which most special cases of associationare formulated in this mechanical language ofstruggle and inhibition, is great, and surpasses in analyticthoroughness anything that has been done by the Britishschool. This, however, is a doubtful merit, in a case wherethe elements dealt with are artificial; and I must confessthat to my mind there is something almost hideous in theglib Herbartian jargon aboutVorstellungsmassen and theirHemmungen andHemmungssummen, andsinken anderhebenandschweben, andVerschmelzungen andComplexionen. HerrLipps, the most recent systematic German Psychologist,has, I regret to say, carried out the theory of ideas in away which the great originality, learning, and acuteness he[Pg 604]shows make only the more regrettable.[508] Such elaboratelyartificial constructions are, it seems to me, only a burdenand a hindrance, not a help, to our science.[509]
In French, M. Rabier in his chapter on Association,[510]handles the subject more vigorously and acutely than anyone. His treatment of it, though short, seems to me forgeneral soundness to rank second only to Hodgson's.
In the last chapter we already invoked association toaccount for the effects of use in improving discrimination.In later chapters we shall see abundant proof of the immensepart which it plays in other processes, and shallthen readily admit that few principles of analysis, in anyscience, have proved more fertile than this one, howevervaguely formulated it often may have been. Our own attemptto formulate it more definitely, and to escape the usual confusionbetween causal agencies and relations merely known,must not blind us to the immense services of those bywhom the confusion was unfelt. From this practical pointof view it would be a trueignoratio elenchi to flatter one'sself that one has dealt a heavy blow at the psychology ofassociation, when one has exploded the theory of atomisticideas, or shown that contiguity and similarity betweenideas can only be there after association is done.[511] Thewhole body of the associationist psychology remains standingafter you have translated 'ideas' into 'objects,' on theone hand, and 'brain-processes' on the other; and theanalysis of faculties and operations is as conclusive in theseterms as in those traditionally used.
[463] The theory propounded in this chapter, and a good many pages ofthe text, were originally published in the Popular Science Monthly forMarch, 1880.
[464] Compare Renouvier's criticism of associationism in his Essais deCritique générale, Logique, ii, p. 493 foll.
[465] Unless the name belong to a rapidly uttered sentence, when no substantiveimage may have time to arise.
[466] In his observations he says that time was lost in mentally taking inthe word which was the cue, "owing to the quiet unobtrusive way inwhich I found it necessary to bring it into view, so as not to distract thethoughts. Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is usually the equivalentof too abstract an idea for us to conceive properly without delay.Thus it is very difficult to get a quick conception of the word 'carriage,'because there are so many different kinds—two-wheeled, four-wheeled,open and closed, and in so many different possible positions, that the mindpossibly hesitates amidst an obscure sense of many alternations that cannotblend together. But limit the idea to say a landau, and the mental associationdeclares itself more quickly." (Inquiries, etc., p. 190.)
[467] Physiol. Psych., ii, 280 fol.
[468] For interesting remarks on the sorts of things associated, in these experiments,with the prompting word, see Galton,op. cit. pp. 185-203, andTrautscholdt in Wundt's Psychologische Studien, i, 213.
[469] Mind, xi, 64-5.
[470] This value is much smaller than that got by Wundt as above. Noreason for the difference is suggested by Mr. Cattell. Wundt calls attentionto the fact that the figures found by him give an average, 0.720'', exactlyequal to thetime interval which in his experiments (vide infra, chapteron Time) was reproduced without error either way, and to that required,according to the Webers, for the legs to swing in rapid locomotion. "It isnot improbable," he adds, "that this psychic constant, of the mean association-timeand of the most correct appreciation of a time-interval, mayhave been developed under the influence of the most usual bodily movements,which also have determined the manner in which we tend to subdividerhythmically longer periods of time." (Physiol. Psych., ii, 286).Therapprochement is of that tentative sort which it is no harm for psychologiststo make, provided they recollect how very fictitious and incomparablemutually all these averages derived from different observers, workingunder different conditions, are. Mr. Cattell's figure throws Wundt'singenious parallel entirely out of line.—The only measurements of association-timewhich so far seem likely to have much theoretic importanceare a few made on insane patients by Von Tschisch (Mendel's NeurologischesCentralblatt, 15 Mai, 1885, 3 Jhrg., p. 217). The simple reactiontime was found about normal in three patients, one with progressiveparalysis, one with inveterate mania of persecution, one recovering fromordinary mania. In the convalescent maniac and the paralytic, however,the association-time was hardly half as much as Wundt's normal figure(0.28'' and 0.23'' instead of 0.7'—smaller also than Cattell's), whilst in thesufferer from delusions of persecution and hallucinations it was twice asgreat as normal (1.39'' instead of 0.7''). This latter patient's time was sixfoldthat of the paralytic. Herr von Tschisch remarks on the connectionof the short times with diminished power for clear and consistent processesof thought, and on that of the long times with the persistent fixation of theattention upon monotonous objects (delusions). Miss Marie Walitzky(Revue Philosophique, xxviii, 583) has carried Von Tschisch's observationsstill farther, making 18,000 measurements in all. She found association-timeincreased in paralytic dementia and diminished inmania. Choicetime, on the contrary, is increased in mania.
[471] Mind, xii, 67-74.
[472] Compare Bain's law of Association by Contiguity: "Actions, Sensations,and States of Feeling, occurring together or in close succession,tend to grow together, or cohere, in such a way that, when any one ofthem is afterwards presented to the mind, the others are apt to be broughtup in idea" (Senses and Intellect, p. 327). Compare also Hartley's formulation:"Any sensations A, B, C, etc., by being associated with one anothera sufficient Number of Times, get such a power over the correspondingIdeasa, b, c, etc., that anyone of the sensations A, when impressed alone,shall be able to excite in the Mindb, c, etc., the ideas of the rest." (Observationson Man, part i, chap. i, § 2, Prop. x.) The statement in thetext differs from these in holding fast to the objective point of view. It isthings, and objectiveproperties in things, which are associated in ourthought.
[473] Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th Ed., article Psychology, p. 60. col. 2.
[474] Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. ii, 300.
[475] The difficulty here as with habitüberhaupt is in seeing how newpaths comefirst to be formed (cf. above,p. 109). Experience shows that anew pathis formed between centres for sensible impressions wheneverthese vibrate together or in rapid succession. A child sees a certain bottleand hears it called 'milk,' and thenceforward thinks the name when he againsees the bottle. But why the successive or simultaneous excitement of twocentres independently stimulated from without, one by sight and theother by hearing,should result in a path between them, one does not immediatelysee. We can only make hypotheses. Any hypothesis of thespecific mode of their formation which tallies well with the observed factsof association will be in so far forth credible, in spite of possible obscurity.Herr Münsterberg thinks (Beiträge zur exp. Psychologie, Heft i, p. 132)that between centres excited successively from without no path ought tobe formed, and that consequently all contiguous association is betweensimultaneous experiences. Mr. Ward (loc. cit.) thinks, on the contrary, thatit can only be betweensuccessive experiences: "The association of objectssimultaneously presented can be resolved into an association of objectssuccessively attended to.... It seems hardly possible to mention a casein which attention to the associated objects could not have been successive.In fact, an aggregate of objects on which attention could be focussed atonce would be already associated." Between these extreme possibilities,I have refrained from deciding in the text, and have described contiguousassociation as holding between both successively and coexistently presentedobjects. The physiological question as to how we may conceivethe paths to originate had better be postponed till it comes to us again inthe chapter on the Will, where we can treat it in a broader way. It isenough here to have called attention to it as a serious problem.
[476] Essay, bk. ii, chap. xxxiii, § 6. Compare Hume, who, like Locke,only uses the principle to account for unreasonable and obstructive mentalassociations:
"'Twould have been easy to have made an imaginary dissection of thebrain, and have shown why, upon our conception of any idea, the animalspirits run into all the contiguous traces, and rouse up the other ideas thatare related to it. But though I have neglected any advantage which Imight have drawn from this topic in explaining the relations of ideas, I amafraid I must here have recourse to it, in order to account for the mistakesthat arise from these relations. I shall therefore observe, that as the mindis endowed with a power of exciting any idea it pleases; whenever it dispatchesthe spirits into that region of the brain in which the idea is placed,these spirits always excite the idea, when they run precisely into the propertraces, and rummage that cell which belongs to the idea. But as their motionis seldom direct, and naturally turns a little to the one side or the other:for this reason the animal spirits, falling into the contiguous traces, presentother related ideas in lieu of that which the mind desired at first tosurvey. This change we are not always sensible of; but continuing stillthe same train of thought, make use of the related idea which is presentedto us, and employ it in our reasoning, as if it were the same with what wedemanded. This is the cause of many mistakes and sophisms in philosophy;as will naturally be imagined, and as it would be easy to show, if therewas occasion."
[477]Op. cit. prop. xi.
[479] I strongly advise the student to read his Senses and Intellect, pp. 544-556.
[480] Time and Space, p. 266. Compare Coleridge: "The true practicalgeneral law of association is this: that whatever makes certain parts of atotal impression more vivid or distinct than the rest will determine the mindto recall these, in preference to others equally linked together by the commoncondition of contemporaeity or ofcontiguity. But the will itself, byconfining and intensifying the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness ordistinctness to any object whatsoever." (Biographia Litteraria, Chap. v.)
[481] Leviathan, pt. i, chap. iii,init.
[482] I refer to a recency of a few hours. Mr. Galton found that experiencesfrom boyhood and youth were more likely to be suggested by wordsseen at random than experiences of later years. See his highly interestingaccount of experiments in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 191-203.
[483] For other instances see Wahle, in Vierteljsch. f. Wiss. Phil., ix, 144-417(1885).
[484] I retain the title of association by similarity in order not to departfrom common usage. The reader will observe, however, that my nomenclatureis not based on the same principle throughout. Impartial redintegrationconnotes neural processes; similarity is an objective relation perceivedby the mind; ordinary or mixed association is a merely denotativeword.Total recall, partial recall, andfocalized recall, of associates, would bebetter terms. But as thedenotation of the latter word is almost identicalwith that of association by similarity, I think it better to sacrifice proprietyto popularity, and to keep the latter well-worn phrase.
[485] No one has described this process better than Hobbes: "Sometimesa man seeks what he hath lost; and from that place and time whereinhe misses it, his mind runs back from place to place and time to time toand where and when he had it; that is to say, to find some certain andlimited time and place, in which to begin a method of seeking. Again,from thence his thoughts run over the same places and times to find whataction or other occasion might make him lose it. This we callRemembrance,or calling to mind. Sometimes a man knows a place determinate,within the compass whereof he is to seek; and then his thoughts run overall the parts thereof, in the same manner as one would sweep a room to finda jewel, or as a spaniel ranges the field till he find a scent, or as a manshould run over the alphabet to start a rhyme." (Leviathan, 165, p. 10.)
[486] Theory of Practice, vol. i, p. 394.
[487]Ibid. p. 394.
[488] All association is called redintegration by Hodgson.
[489]Ibid. p. 400. Compare Bain, Emotions and Will, p. 377. "The outgoingsof the mind are necessarily random; the end alone is the thing thatis clear to the view, and with that there is a perception of the fitness ofevery passing suggestion. The volitional energy keeps up the attention onthe active search; and the moment that anything in point rises beforethe mind, it springs upon that like a wild beast upon its prey."
[490] Compare what is said of the principle of Similarity by F. H. Bradley,Principles of Logic, pp. 294 ff.; E. Rabier, Psychologie, 187 ff.;Paulhan, Critique Philosophique, 2me Série, i, 458; Rabier,ibid. 460;Pillon,ibid. ii, 55; B. P. Bowne, Introduction to Psych. Theory, 92;Ward, Encyclop. Britt. art. Psychology, p. 60; Wahle, Vierteljahrsch. f.wiss. Philos., ix, 426-431.
[491] Dr. McCosh is accordingly only logical when he sinks similarity inwhat he calls theLaw of Correlation, according to which, when we havediscovereda relation between things, the idea of one tends to bring up theothers, (Psychology, the Cognitive Powers, p. 130). The relations mentionedby this author are Identity, Whole and Parts, Resemblance, Space,Time, Quantity, Active Property, and Cause and Effect. If perceivedrelations among objects are to be treated as grounds for their appearancebefore the mind, similarity has of course no right to an exclusive, or evento a predominant, place.
[492] Cf. Bain, Senses and Intellect, 504 ff.; J. S. Mill, Note 39 to J. Mill'sAnalysis; Lipps, Grundtatsachen, 97.
[493] See, for farther details, Hamilton's Reid, Appendices D** and D***;and L. Ferri, La Psychologie de l'Association (Paris, 1883). Also Robertson,art. Association in Encyclop. Britannica.
[494] Treatise of Human nature, part i,. § iv.
[495] Observations on Man (London, 1749).
[496] Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829).
[497] Hartley's Theory, 2d ed. (1790) p. xxvii.
[498] [Current, that is, in France.—W. J.]
[499] La Psychologie Angloise, p. 242.
[500] Priestley,op. cit. p. xxx.
[501] Review of Bains's Psychology, by J.S. Mill, in Edinb. Review, Oct. 1,1859, p. 293.
[502] Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, J.S. Mill's edition,vol. i, p. 111.
[503] On the Associability of Relations between Feelings, in Principles ofPsychology, vol. i, p. 259. It is impossible to regard the "cohering of eachfeeling with previously-experienced feelings of the same class, order,genus, species, and, so far as may be, the same variety," which Spencer calls(p. 257) 'the sole process of association of feelings,' as any equivalent forwhat is commonly known as Association by similarity.
[504] The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 491-3.
[505] See his Time and Space, chapter v, and his Theory of Practice, §§ 53to 57.
[506] Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824), 2.
[507] Prof. Ribot, in chapter i of his 'Contemporary German Psychology,'has given a good account of Herbart and his school, and of Beneke,his rival and partial analogue. See also two articles on the HerbartianPsychology, by G. F. Stout, in Mind for 1888. J. D. Morrell's Outlines ofMental Philosophy (2d ed., London, 1862) largely follows Herbart andBeneke. I know of no other English book which does so.
[508] See his Grundtatsachen des Bewusstseins (1883), chap. viet passim,especially pp. 106 ff., 364.
[509] The most burdensome and utterly gratuitous of them are perhapsSteinthal's, in his Einleitung in die Psychologie, 2te Aufl. (1881). Cf. alsoG. Glogau: Steinthal's Psychologische Formeln (1886).
[510] Leçons de Philosophie, i. Psychologie, chap. xvi (1884).
[511] Mr. F. H. Bradley seems to me to have been guilty of something verylike thisignoratio elenchi in the, of course, subtle and witty but decidedlylong-winded critique of the association of ideas, contained in book ii,part ii, chap. i, of his Principles of Logic.
In the next two chapters I shall deal with what is sometimescalled internal perception, or the perception oftime,and of events as occupying a date therein, especially whenthe date is a past one, in which case the perception inquestion goes by the name ofmemory. To remember athing as past, it is necessary that the notion of 'past' shouldbe one of our 'ideas.' We shall see in the chapter on Memorythat many things come to be thought by us as past,not because of any intrinsic quality of their own, but ratherbecause they are associated with other things which for ussignify pastness. But how do these things gettheir pastness?What is theoriginal of our experience of pastness,from whence we get the meaning of the term? It is thisquestion which the reader is invited to consider in the presentchapter. We shall see that we have a constant feelingsui generis of pastness, to which every one of our experiencesin turn falls a prey. To think a thing as past is tothink it amongst the objects or in the direction of the objectswhich at the present moment appear affected by thisquality. This is the original of our notion of past time,upon which memory and history build their systems. Andin this chapter we shall consider this immediate senseof time alone.
If the constitution of consciousness were that of a stringof bead-like sensations and images, all separate,
"we never could have any knowledge except that of the present instant.The moment each of our sensations ceased it would be gone for ever;and we should be as if we had never been.... We should be wholly[Pg 606]incapable of acquiring experience.... Even if our ideas were associatedin trains, but only as they are in imagination, we should still bewithout the capacity of acquiring knowledge. One idea, upon thissupposition, would follow another. But that would be all. Each ofour successive states of consciousness, the moment it ceased, would begone forever. Each of those momentary states would be our wholebeing."[513]
We might, nevertheless, under these circumstances,actin a rational way, provided the mechanism which producedour trains of images produced them in a rational order.We should make appropriate speeches, though unaware ofany word except the one just on our lips; we should decideupon the right policy without ever a glimpse of the totalgrounds of our choice. Our consciousness would be like aglow-worm spark, illuminating the point it immediatelycovered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness. Whethera very highly developed practical life be possible undersuch conditions as these is more than doubtful; it is, however,conceivable.
I make the fanciful hypothesis merely to set off ourreal nature by the contrast. Our feelings are not thus contracted,and our consciousness never shrinks to the dimensionsof a glow-worm spark.The knowledge of some otherpart of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is alwaysmixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.
A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstraction,and all our concrete states of mind are representationsof objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the complexityis the echo of the objects just past, and, in a lessdegree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive. Objectsfade out of consciousness slowly. If the presentthought is of ABCDEFG, the next one will be ofBCDEFGH, and the one after that of CDEFGHI—thelingerings of the past dropping successively away, andthe incomings of the future making up the loss. Theselingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are thegerms of memory and expectation, the retrospective and theprospective sense of time. They give that continuity to[Pg 607]consciousness without which it could not be called astream.[514]
Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice orattend to, thepresent moment of time. One of the mostbaffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? Ithas melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone inthe instant of becoming. As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodgson,says,
"Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi,"
and it is only as entering into the living and moving organizationof a much wider tract of time that the strict presentis apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether idealabstraction, not only never realized in sense, but probablynever even conceived of by those unaccustomed to philosophicmeditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion[Pg 609]that itmust exist, but that itdoes exist can never be a factof our immediate experience. The only fact of our immediateexperience is what Mr. E. R. Clay has well called 'thespecious present.' His words deserve to be quoted in full:[515]
"The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied.Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referredto by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminousof the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present.The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—arecent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes betweenthe past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and letthe past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past.All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in thepresent. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to becontained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series,no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then,considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz.,the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future.Omitting the specious present, it consists of three ... nonentities—thepast, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and theirconterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies tous in the fiction of the specious present."
In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-edge,but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its ownon which we sit perched, and from which we look in twodirections into time. The unit of composition of our perceptionof time is aduration, with a bow and a stern, as itwere—a rearward- and a forward-looking end.[516] It is only[Pg 610]as parts of thisduration-block that the relation ofsuccessionof one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feelone end and then feel the other after it, and from the perceptionof the succession infer an interval of time between,but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with itstwo ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outseta synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensibleperception its elements are inseparable, although attentionlooking back may easily decompose the experience, anddistinguish its beginning from its end.
When we come to study the perception of Space, weshall find it quite analogous to time in this regard. Datein time corresponds to position in space; and although wenow mentally construct large spaces by mentally imaginingremoter and remoter positions, just as we now constructgreat durations by mentally prolonging a series of successivedates, yet the original experience of both space andtime is always of something already given as a unit, insideof which attention afterward discriminates parts in relationto each other. Without the parts already given asin a timeandin a space, subsequent discrimination of them couldhardly do more than perceive them asdifferent from eachother; it would have no motive for calling the differencetemporal order in this instance and spatial position in that.
And just as in certain experiences we may be consciousof an extensive space full of objects, without locating eachof them distinctly therein; so, when many impressions followin excessively rapid succession in time, although wemay be distinctly aware that they occupy some duration,and are not simultaneous, we may be quite at a loss to tellwhich comes first and which last; or we may even inverttheir real order in our judgment. In complicated reaction-timeexperiments, where signals and motions, and clicksof the apparatus come in exceedingly rapid order, one isat first much perplexed in deciding what the order is, yetof the fact of its occupancy of time we are never in doubt.
We must now proceed to an account of thefacts of time-perceptionin detail as preliminary to our speculative conclusion.Many of the facts are matters of patient experimentation,others of common experience.
First of all, we note a markeddifference between the elementarysensations of duration and those of space. The formerhave a much narrower range; the time-sense may be calleda myopic organ, in comparison with the eye, for example.The eye sees rods, acres, even miles, at a single glance, andthese totals it can afterward subdivide into an almost infinitenumber of distinctly identified parts. The units ofduration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is ableto take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds,and within these units very few subdivisions—perhapsforty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearlydiscerned. The durations we have practically most to dealwith—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolicallyconceived, and constructed by mental addition, after thefashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward,which in the field of space are beyond the range ofmost men's practical interests altogether. To 'realize' aquarter of a mile we need only look out of the window andfeel its length by an act which, though it may in part resultfrom organized associations, yet seems immediately performed.To realize an hour, we must count 'now!—now!—now!—now!—'indefinitely. Each 'now' is the feelingof a separatebit of time, and the exact sum of the bitsnever makes a very clear impression on our mind.
How many bits can we clearly apprehend at once?Very few if they are long bits, more if they are extremelyshort, most if they come to us in compound groups, eachincluding smaller bits of its own.
Hearing is the sense by which the subdivision of durationsis most sharply made. Almost all the experimentalwork on the time-sense has been done by means of strokesof sound. How long a series of sounds, then, can we groupin the mind so as not to confound it with a longer or ashorter series?
Our spontaneous tendency is to break up any monotonouslygiven series of sounds into some sort of a rhythm.We involuntarily accentuate every second, or third, orfourth beat, or we break the series in still more intricateways. Whenever we thus grasp the impressions in rhythmicform, we can identify a longer string of them without confusion.
Each variety of verse, for example, has its 'law'; andthe recurrent stresses and sinkings make us feel with peculiarreadiness the lack of a syllable or the presence ofone too much. Divers verses may again be bound togetherin the form of a stanza, and we may then say of anotherstanza, "Its second verse differs by so much from that ofthe first stanza," when but for the felt stanza-form the twodiffering verses would have come to us too separately to becompared at all. But these superposed systems of rhythmsoon reach their limit. In music, as Wundt[517] says, "whilethe measure may easily contain 12 changes of intensity ofsound (as in 12/8 time), the rhythmical group may embrace6 measures, and the period consist of 4, exceptionally of 5[8?] groups."
Wundt and his pupil Dietze have both tried to determineexperimentally themaximal extent of our immediatedistinct consciousness for successive impressions.
Wundt found[518] that twelve impressions could be distinguishedclearly as a united cluster, provided they werecaught in a certain rhythm by the mind, and succeeded eachother at intervals not smaller than 0.3 and not larger than0.5 of a second. This makes the total time distinctly apprehendedto be equal to from 3.6 to 6 seconds.
Dietze[519] gives larger figures. The most favorable intervalsfor clearly catching the strokes were when they came atfrom 0.3 second to 0.18 second apart.Forty strokes mightthen be remembered as a whole, and identified without errorwhen repeated, provided the mind grasped them in five sub-groupsof eight, or in eight sub-groups of five strokes each.When no grouping of the strokes beyond makingcouples of[Pg 613]them by the attention was allowed—and practically it wasfound impossible not to group them in at least this simplestof all ways—16 was the largest number that could be clearlyapprehended as a whole.[520] This would make 40 times 0.8second, or 12 seconds, to be themaximum filled duration ofwhich we can be bothdistinctly and immediately aware.
The maximum unfilled, orvacant duration, seems to liewithin the same objective range. Estel and Mehner, alsoworking in Wundt's laboratory, found it to vary from 5 or6 to 12 seconds, and perhaps more. The differences seemeddue to practice rather than to idiosyncrasy.[521]
These figures may be roughly taken to stand for the mostimportant part of what, with Mr. Clay, we called, a fewpages back, thespecious present. The specious present has,in addition, a vaguely vanishing backward and forwardfringe; but its nucleus is probably the dozen seconds orless that have just elapsed.
If these are the maximum, what, then, is theminimumamount of duration which we can distinctly feel?
The smallest figure experimentally ascertained was byExner, who distinctly heard the doubleness of two successiveclicks of a Savart's wheel, and of two successive snaps[Pg 614]of an electric spark, when their interval was made as smallas about 1/500 of a second.[522]
With the eye, perception is less delicate. Two sparks,made to fall beside each other in rapid succession on thecentre of the retina, ceased to be recognized as successive byExner when their interval fell below 0.044''.[523]
Where, as here, the succeeding impressions are only twoin number, we can easiest perceive the interval betweenthem. President Hall, who experimented with a modifiedSavart's wheel, which gave clicks in varying number and atvarying intervals, says:[524]
"In order that their discontinuity may be clearly perceived, four oreven three clicks or beats must be farther apart than two need to be.When two are easily distinguished, three or four separated by the sameinterval ... are often confidently pronounced to be two or threerespectively. It would be well if observations were so directed as toascertain, at least up to ten or twenty, the increase [of interval] requiredby each additional click in a series for the sense of discontinuityto remain constant throughout."[525]
Where the first impression falls on one sense, and thesecond on another, the perception of the intervening timetends to be less certain and delicate, and it makes a differencewhich impression comes first. Thus, Exner found[526]the smallest perceptible interval to be, in seconds:
| From sight to touch | 0.071 |
| From touch to sight | 0.053 |
| From sight to hearing | 0.16 |
| From hearing to sight | 0.06 |
| From one ear to another | 0.064 |
To be conscious of a time interval at all is one thing; totell whether it be shorter or longer than another interval is adifferent thing. A number of experimental data are on handwhich give us a measure of the delicacy of this latter perception.The problem is that of thesmallest differencebetween two times which we can perceive.
The difference is at its minimum when the times themselvesare very short. Exner,[527] reacting as rapidly as possiblewith his foot, upon a signal seen by the eye (spark),noted all the reactions which seemed to him either slow orfast in the making. He thought thus that deviations ofabout 1/100 of a second either way from the average were[Pg 616]correctly noticed by him at the time. The average washere 0.1840''. Hall and Jastrow listened to the intervalsbetween the clicks of their apparatus. Between two suchequal intervals of 4.27'' each, a middle interval was included,which might be made either shorter or longer than theextremes. "After the series had been heard two or eventhree times, no impression of the relative length of themiddle interval would often exist, and only after hearingthe fourth and last [repetition of the series] would thejudgment incline to theplus orminus side. Inserting thevariable between two invariable and like intervals greatlyfacilitated judgment, which between two unlike terms is farless accurate."[528] Three observers in these experimentsmade no error when the middle interval varied 1/60 from theextremes. When it varied 1/120, errors occurred, but werefew. This would make the minimumabsolute differenceperceived as large as 0.355''.
This minimum absolute difference, of course, increasesas the times compared grow long. Attempts have beenmade to ascertain whatratio it bears to the times themselves.According to Fechner's 'Psychophysic Law' itought always to bear the same ratio. Various observers,however, have found this not to be the case.[529] On the contrary,very interestingoscillations in the accuracy of judgmentand in the direction of the error—oscillations dependentupon the absolute amount of the times compared—havebeen noticed by all who have experimented with thequestion. Of these a brief account may be given.
In the first place,in every list of intervals experimentedwith there will be found what Vierordt calls an 'indifference-point;'that is to say, an interval which we judge with maximumaccuracy, a time which we tend to estimate as neitherlonger or shorter than it really is, and away from which,[Pg 617]in both directions, errors increase their size.[530] This timevaries from one observer to another, but its average is remarkablyconstant, as the following table shows.[531]
The times, noted by the ear, and the average indifference-points(given in seconds) were, for—
| Wundt[532] | 0.72 |
| Kollert[533] | 0.75 |
| Estel (probably) | 0.75 |
| Mehner | 0.71 |
| Stevens[534] | 0.71 |
| Mach[535] | 0.35 |
| Buccola (about)[536] | 0.40 |
The odd thing about these figures is the recurrence theyshow in so many men of about three fourths of a second,[Pg 618]as the interval of time most easy to catch and reproduce,Odder still, both Estel and Mehner found thatmultiples ofthis time were more accurately reproduced than the time-intervalsof intermediary length;[537] and Glass found a certainperiodicity, with the constant increment of 1.25 sec., in hisobservations. There would seem thus to exist somethinglike a periodic or rhythmic sharpening of our time-sense, ofwhich the period differs somewhat from one observer tothe next.
Our sense of time, like other senses,seems subject tothe law of contrast. It appeared pretty plainly in Estel'sobservations that an interval sounded shorter if a long onehad immediately preceded it, and longer when the oppositewas the case.
Like other senses, too,our sense of time is sharpenedby practice. Mehner ascribes almost all the discrepanciesbetween other observers and himself to this cause alone.[538]
Tracts of time filled (with clicks of sound)seem longerthan vacant ones of the same duration, when the latterdoes not exceed a second or two.[539] This, which remindsone of what happens with spaces seen by the eye, becomesreversed when longer times are taken. It is, perhaps, inaccordance with this law that aloud sound, limiting a shortinterval of time, makes it appear longer, aslight soundshorter. In comparing intervals marked out by sounds,we must take care to keep the sounds uniform.[540]
There is a certain emotionalfeeling accompanying theintervals of time, as is well known in music.The sense ofhaste goes with one measure of rapidity, that of delay withanother; and these two feelings harmonize with differentmental moods. Vierordt listened to series of strokes performedby a metronome at rates varying from 40 to 200 a[Pg 619]minute, and found that they very naturally fell into sevencategories, from 'very slow' to 'very fast.'[541] Each categoryof feeling included the intervals following each other withina certain range of speed, and no others. This is a qualitative,not a quantitative judgment—an æsthetic judgment,in fact. The middle category, of speed that was neutral,or, as he calls it, 'adequate,' contained intervals that weregrouped about 0.62 second, and Vierordt says that thismade what one might almost call anagreeable time.[542]
The feeling of time and accent in music, of rhythm, isquite independent of that of melody. Tunes with markedrhythm can be readily recognized when simply drummedon the table with the finger-tips.
Although subdividing the time by beats of sensationaids our accurate knowledge of the amount of it thatelapses, such subdivision does not seem at the first glanceessential to our perception of its flow. Let one sit withclosed eyes and, abstracting entirely from the outer world,attend exclusively to the passage of time, like one whowakes, as the poet says, "to hear time flowing in the middleof the night, and all things moving to a day of doom."There seems under such circumstances as these no varietyin the material content of our thought, and what we noticeappears, if anything, to be the pure series of durationsbudding, as it were, and growing beneath our indrawn gaze.Is this really so or not? The question is important, for,if the experience be what it roughly seems, we have a sortof special sense for pure time—a sense to which emptyduration is an adequate stimulus; while if it be an illusion,it must be that our perception of time's flight, in the experiencesquoted, is due to thefilling of the time, and to ourmemory of a content which it had a moment previous, andwhich we feel to agree or disagree with its content now.
It takes but a small exertion of introspection to show[Pg 620]that the latter alternative is the true one, and thatwe canno more intuit a duration than we can intuit an extension,devoid of all sensible content. Just as with closed eyes weperceive a dark visual field in which a curdling play of obscurestluminosity is always going on; so, be we never soabstracted from distinct outward impressions, we are alwaysinwardly immersed in what Wundt has somewhere calledthe twilight of our general consciousness. Our heart-beats,our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments ofwords or sentences that pass through our imagination, arewhat people this dim habitat. Now, all these processes arerhythmical, and are apprehended by us, as they occur, intheir totality; the breathing and pulses of attention, ascoherent successions, each with its rise and fall; the heart-beatssimilarly, only relatively far more brief; the words notseparately, but in connected groups. In short, empty ourminds as we may, some form ofchanging process remains forus to feel, and cannot be expelled. And along with the senseof the process and its rhythm goes the sense of the lengthof time it lasts. Awareness ofchange is thus the conditionon which our perception of time's flow depends; but thereexists no reason to suppose that empty time's own changesare sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused.The change must be of some concrete sort—an outwardor inward sensible series, or a process of attention or volition.[543]
And here again we have an analogy with space. Theearliest form of distinct space-perception is undoubtedlythat of a movement over some one of our sensitive surfaces,and this movement is originally given as a simple whole offeeling, and is only decomposed into its elements—successivepositions successively occupied by the moving body—whenour education in discrimination is much advanced.[Pg 622]But a movement is a change, a process; so we see that inthe time-world and the space-world alike the first knownthings are not elements, but combinations, not separateunits, but wholes already formed. The condition ofbeingof the wholes may be the elements; but the condition ofourknowing the elements is our having already felt thewholes as wholes.
In the experience of watching empty time flow—'empty'to be taken hereafter in the relative sense just set forth—wetell it off in pulses. We say 'now! now! now!' or wecount 'more! more! more!' as we feel it bud. This compositionout of units of duration is called the law of time'sdiscrete flow. The discreteness is, however, merely due tothe fact that our successive acts ofrecognition orapperceptionofwhat it is are discrete. The sensation is as continuousas any sensation can be. All continuous sensations arenamed in beats. We notice that a certain finite 'more' ofthem is passing or already past. To adopt Hodgson'simage, the sensation is the measuring-tape, the perceptionthe dividing-engine which stamps its length. As we listento a steady sound, wetake it in in discrete pulses of recognition,calling it successively 'the same! the same! thesame!' The case stands no otherwise with time.
After a small number of beats our impression of theamount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our onlyway of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing theclock, or through some other symbolic conception.[544] Whenthe times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutelysymbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solelyas aname, or by running over a few salientdates therein,with no pretence of imagining the full durations that liebetween them. No one has anything like aperception of thegreater length of the time between now and the first centurythan of that between now and the tenth. To an historian,[Pg 623]it is true, the longer interval will suggest a host of additionaldates and events, and so appear a moremultitudinous thing.And for the same reason most people will think they directlyperceive the length of the past fortnight to exceed that ofthe past week. But there is properly no comparative timeintuition in these cases at all. It is but dates and events.representing time; their abundancesymbolizing its length.I am sure that this is so, even where the times comparedare no more than an hour or so in length. It is the samewith Spaces of many miles, which we always compare witheach other by the numbers which measure them.[545]
From this we pass naturally to speak of certain familialvariations in our estimation of lengths of time.In general,a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seemsshort in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand,a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing,but in retrospect short. A week of travel and sight-seeingmay subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory;and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories thana day. The length in retrospect depends obviously on themultitudinousness of the memories which the time affords.Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediatelywiden the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony,familiarity, make it shrivel up. In Von Holtei's'Vagabonds' one Anton is described as revisiting his nativevillage.
"Seven years," he exclaims, "seven years since I ran away! Morelike seventy it seems, so much has happened. I cannot think of it allwithout becoming dizzy—at any rate not now. And yet again, when Ilook at the village, at the church-tower, it seems as if I could hardlyhave been seven days away."
Prof. Lazarus[546] (from whom I borrow this quotation),thus explains both of these contrasted illusions by ourprinciple of the awakened memories being multitudinousor few:
"The circle of experiences, widely extended, rich in variety, whichhe had in view on the day of his leaving the village rises now in hismind as its image lies before him. And with it—in rapid successionand violent motion, not in chronologic order, or from chronologicmotives, but suggesting each other by all sorts of connections—arisemassive images of all his rich vagabondage and roving life. They rolland wave confusedly together, first perhaps one from the first year,then from the sixth, soon from the second, again from the fifth, the[Pg 625]first, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, andhe reels with the fulness of his vision.... Then the inner eye turnsaway from all this past. The outer one turns to the village, especiallyto the church-tower. The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, sothat the consciousness is filled with that alone, or almost alone. Theone vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so unchanged,that it seems as if only a week of time could have come between."
The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older—thatis, the days, the months, and the years do so; whetherthe hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds toall appearance remain about the same.
"Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only questionhimself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have spedmuch more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Letany one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of acentury. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it isthe space of an hour."
So writes Prof. Paul Janet,[547] and gives a solution which canhardly be said to diminish the mystery. There is a law, hesays, by which the apparent length of an interval at a givenepoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length ofthe life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his wholelife—a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparentlypreserving a constant length. This formula roughly expressesthe phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly bean elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in greatpart at least, the foreshortening of the years as we growolder is due to the monotony of memory's content, and theconsequent simplification of the backward-glancing view.In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjectiveor objective, every hour of the day. Apprehensionis vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of thattime, like those of a time spent in rapid and interestingtravel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out.But as each passing year converts some of thisexperience into automatic routine which we hardly note atall, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollectionto contentless units, and the years grow hollow andcollapse.
So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time inretrospect. They shortenin passing whenever we are sofully occupied with their content as not to note the actualtime itself. A day full of excitement, with no pause, is saidto pass 'ere we know it.' On the contrary, a day full ofwaiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a smalleternity.Tædium, ennui, Langweile, boredom, are words forwhich, probably, every language known to man has itsequivalent. It comes about whenever, from the relativeemptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentiveto the passage of the time itself. Expecting, and beingready for, a new impression to succeed; when it fails tocome, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experiences,ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably awareof the extent of the mere time itself.[548] Close your eyes andsimply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute haselapsed. The full length of your leisure with it seems incredible.You engulf yourself into its bowels as into thoseof that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and findyourself wondering that history can have overcome manysuch periods in its course. All because you attend soclosely to the mere feeling of the timeper se, and becauseyour attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grainedsuccessive subdivision. Theodiousness of the whole experiencecomes from its insipidity; forstimulation is the indispensablerequisite for pleasure in an experience, and thefeeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience wecan have.[549] The sensation of tæedium is aprotest, saysVolkmann, against the entire present.
Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousnessof space. A road we walk back over, hoping to find at eachstep an object we have dropped, seems to us longer thanwhen we walked over it the other way. A space we measureby pacing appears longer than one we traverse with nothought of its length. And in general an amount of spaceattended to in itself leaves with us more impression of spaciousnessthan one of which we only note the content.[550]
I do not say thateverything in these fluctuations of estimatecan be accounted for by the time's content beingcrowded and interesting, or simple and tame. Both in theshortening of time by old age and in its lengthening byennui some deeper causemay be at work. This cause canonly be ascertained, if it exist, by finding outwhy we perceivetime at all. To this inquiry let us, though withoutmuch hope, proceed.
If asked why we perceive the light of the sun, or thesound of an explosion, we reply, "Because certain outerforces, ether-waves or air-waves, smite upon the brain,awakening therein changes, to which the conscious perceptions,light and sound, respond." But we hasten to addthat neither light nor soundcopy ormirror the ether- orair-waves; they represent them only symbolically. Theonly case, says Helmholtz, in which such copying occurs,and in which
"our perceptions can truly correspond with outer reality, is that ofthetune-succession of phenomena. Simultaneity, succession, and theregular return of simultaneity or succession, can obtain as well in sensationsas in outer events. Events, like our perceptions of them, takeplace in time, so that the time-relations of the latter can furnish a truecopy of those of the former. The sensation of the thunder follows thesensation of the lightning just as the sonorous convulsing of the air bythe electric discharge reaches the observer's place later than that of theluminiferous ether."[551]
One experiences an almost instinctive impulse, in pursuingsuch reflections as these, to follow them to a sort ofcrude speculative conclusion, and to think that he has atlast got the mystery of cognition where, to use a vulgarphrase, 'the wool is short.' What more natural, we say,than that the sequences and durations of thingsshould becomeknown? The succession of the outer forces stampsitself as a like succession upon the brain. The brain'ssuccessive changes are copied exactly by correspondinglysuccessive pulses of the mental stream. The mental stream,feeling itself, must feel the time-relations of its own states.But as these are copies of the outward time-relations, somust it know them too. That is to say, these latter time-relationsarouse their own cognition; or, in other words,the mere existence of time in those changes out of the mindwhich affect the mind is a sufficient cause why time is perceivedby the mind.
This philosophy is unfortunately too crude. Eventhough wewere to conceive the outer successions as forcesstamping their image on the brain, and the brain's successionsas forces stamping their image on the mind,[552] still,between the mind's own changesbeing successive, andknowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as betweenthe object and subject of any case of cognition in theworld.A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feelingof succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feelingof their own succession is added, that must be treated as an[Pg 629]additional fact requiring its own special elucidation, which thistalk about outer time-relations stamping copies of themselveswithin, leaves all untouched.
I have shown, at the outset of the article, that what ispast, to be known as past, must be knownwith what ispresent, andduring the 'present' spot of time. As theclear understanding of this point has some importance, letme, at the risk of repetition, recur to it again. Volkmannhas expressed the matter admirably, as follows:
"One might be tempted to answer the question of the origin of thetime-idea by simply pointing to the train of ideas, whose various members,starting from the first, successively attain to full clearness. Butagainst this it must be objected that the successive ideas are not yetthe idea of succession, because successionin thought is not the thoughtof succession. If idea A follows idea B, consciousness simply exchangesone for another. That Bcomes after A is for our consciousness a non-existentfact; for thisafter is given neither in B nor in A; and nothird idea has been supposed. The thinking of the sequence of B uponA is another kind of thinking from that which brought forth A andthen brought forth B; and this first kind of thinking is absent so longas merely the thinking of A and the thinking of B are there. In short,when we look at the matter sharply, we come to this antithesis, that ifA and B are to be representedas occurring in succession they must besimultaneously represented; if we are to thinkof them as one after theother, we mustthink them both at once."[553]
If we represent the actual time-stream of our thinkingby an horizontal line, the thoughtof the stream or of anysegment of its length, past, present, or to come, might befigured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at acertain point. The length of this perpendicular stands fora certain object or content, which in this case is the timethought of, and all of which is thought of together at theactual moment of the stream upon which the perpendicularis raised. Mr. James Ward puts the matter very well inhis masterly article 'Psychology' in the ninth edition ofthe Encyclopædia Britannica, page 64. He says:
"We may, if we represent succession as a line, represent simultaneityas a second line at right angles to the first; empty time—ortime-length without time-breadth, we may say—is a mere abstraction.Now, it is with the former line that we have to do in treating of time[Pg 630]as it is, and with the latter in treating of our intuition of time, where,just as in a perspective representation of distance, we are confined tolines in a plane at right angles to the actual line of depth. In a successionof events, say of sense-impressions, A B C D E..., the presenceof B means the absence of A and C, but the presentation of this successioninvolves the simultaneous presence in some mode or other of twoor more of the presentations A B C D. In reality, past, present, andfuture are differences in time, but in presentation all that correspondsto these differences is in consciousness simultaneously."
There is thus a sort ofperspective projection of past objectsupon present consciousness, similar to that of widelandscapes upon a camera-screen.
And since we saw a while ago that our maximum distinctintuition of duration hardly covers more than a dozenseconds (while our maximum vague intuition is probablynot more than that of a minute or so), we must suppose thatthis amount of duration is pictured fairly steadily in eachpassing instant of consciousness by virtue of some fairly constantfeature in the brain-process to which the consciousnessis tied.This feature of the brain-process, whatever it be,must be the cause of our perceiving the fact of time at all.[554] Theduration thus steadily perceived is hardly more than the'specious present,' as it was called a few pages back. Itscontent is in a constant flux, events dawning into its forwardend as fast as they fade out of its rearward one, and eachof them changing its time-coefficient from 'not yet,' or 'notquite yet,' to 'just gone' or 'gone,' as it passes by. Meanwhile,the specious present, the intuited duration, standspermanent, like the rainbow on the waterfall, with its ownquality unchanged by the events that stream through it.Each of these, as it slips out, retains the power of beingreproduced; and when reproduced, is reproduced with theduration and neighbors which it originally had. Pleaseobserve, however, that the reproduction of an event,afterit has once completely dropped out of the rearward end ofthe specious present, is an entirely different psychic factfrom its direct perception in the specious present as a thingimmediately past. A creature might be entirely devoid ofreproductive memory, and yet have the time-sense; but the[Pg 631]latter would be limited, in his case, to the few seconds immediatelypassing by. Time older than that he would neverrecall. I assume reproduction in the text, because I amspeaking of human beings who notoriously possess it. Thusmemory gets strewn withdated things—dated in the senseof being before or after each other.[555] The date of a thingis a mere relation ofbefore orafter the present thing or somepast or future thing. Some things we date simply by mentallytossing them into the past or futuredirection. So inspace we think of England as simply to the eastward, ofCharleston as lying south. But, again, we may date an eventexactly, by fitting it between two terms of a past or futureseries explicitly conceived, just as we may accurately thinkof England or Charleston being just so many miles away.[556]
The things and events thus vaguely or exactly datedbecome thenceforward those signs and symbols of longertime-spaces, of which we previously spoke. According aswe think of a multitude of them, or of few, so we imaginethe time they represent to be long or short. Butthe originalparagon and prototype of all conceived times is the speciouspresent, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantlysensible.
Now, to what element in the brain-process may this sensibilitybe due? It cannot, as we have seen, be due to the mereduration itself of the process; it must be due to an elementpresent at every moment of the process, and this elementmust bear the same inscrutablesort of relation to its correlativefeeling which all other elements of neural activitybear to their psychic products, be the latter what theymay. Several suggestions have been made as to what theelement is in the case of time. Treating of them in anote,[557] I will try to express briefly the only conclusion which[Pg 633]seems to emerge from a study of them and of the facts—unripethough that conclusion be.
The phenomena of 'summation of stimuli' in the nervoussystem prove that each stimulus leaves some latent activity[Pg 635]behind it which only gradually passes away. (See above,pp. 82-85.) Psychological proof of the same fact isafforded by those 'after-images' which we perceive when asensorial stimulus is gone. We may read off peculiaritiesin an after-image, left by an object on the eye, which wefailed to note in the original. We may 'hark back' andtake in the meaning of a sound several seconds after it hasceased. Delay for a minute, however, and the echo itselfof the clock or the question is mute; present sensationshave banished it beyond recall. With the feeling of thepresent thing there must at all times mingle the fading echoof all those other things which the previous few secondshave supplied. Or, to state it in neural terms,there is atevery moment a cumulation of brain-processes overlapping eachother, of which the fainter ones are the dying phases of processeswhich but shortly previous were active in a maximal degree.Theamount of the overlappingdetermines the feeling of theduration occupied. What eventsshall appear to occupy theduration depends on justwhat processesthe overlapping processesare. We know so little of the intimate nature of thebrain's activity that even where a sensation monotonouslyendures, we cannot say that the earlier moments of it do[Pg 636]not leave fading processes behind which coexist with thoseof the present moment.Duration and events together formour intuition of the specious present with its content.[558]Whysuch an intuition should result from such a combination ofbrain-processes I do not pretend to say. All I aim at is tostate the mostelemental form of the psycho-physical conjunction.
I have assumed that the brain-processes are sensationalones. Processes of active attention (see Mr. Ward's accountinFootnote 556) will leave similar fading brain-processesbehind. If the mental processes are conceptual, acomplication is introduced of which I will in a momentspeak. Meanwhile, still speaking of sensational processes, aremark of Wundt's will throw additional light on theaccount I give. As is known, Wundt and others haveproved that every act of perception of a sensorial stimulustakes an appreciable time. When two different stimuli—e.g.a sight and a sound—are given at once or nearly atonce, we have difficulty in attending to both, and maywrongly judge their interval, or even invert their order.Now, as the result of his experiments on such stimuli.Wundt lays down this law:[559] that of the three possible determinationswe may make of their order—
"namely, simultaneity, continuous transition, and discontinuous transition—onlythe first and last are realized,never the second. Invariably,when we fail to perceive the impressions as simultaneous, wenotice a shorter or longer empty time between them,which seems tocorrespond to the sinking of one of the ideas and to the rise of theother.... For our attention may share itself equally between thetwo impressions, which will then compose one total percept [and besimultaneously felt]; or it may be so adapted to one event as to cause[Pg 637]it to be perceived immediately, and then the second event can be perceivedonly after a certain time of latency, during which the attentionreaches its effective maximum for it and diminishes for the first event.In this case the events are perceived astwo, and in successive order—thatis, as separated by a time-interval in which attention is not sufficientlyaccommodated to either to bring a distinct perception about....While we are hurrying from one to the other, everything between themvanishes in the twilight of general consciousness."[560]
One might call this thelaw of discontinuous succession intime, of percepts to which we cannot easily attend at once. Eachpercept then requires a separate brain-process; and whenone brain-process is at its maximum, the other would appearperforce to be in either a waning or a waxing phase.If our theory of the time-feeling be true, empty timemustthen subjectively appear to separate the two percepts, nomatter how close together they may objectively be; for,according to that theory, the feeling of a time-duration isthe immediate effect of such an overlapping of brain-processes[Pg 638]of different phase—wherever and from whatevercause it may occur.
To pass, now, to conceptual processes: Suppose I thinkof the Creation, then of the Christian era, then of the battleof Waterloo, all within a few seconds. These matters havetheir dates far outside the specious present. The processesby which I think them, however, all overlap. Whatevents, then, does the specious present seem to contain?Simply my successiveacts of thinking these long-pastthings, not the long-past things themselves. As the instantly-presentthought may be of a long-past thing, so thejust-past thought may be of another long-past thing. Whena long-past event is reproduced in memory and conceivedwith its date, the reproduction and conceiving traverse thespecious present. The immediate content of the latter isthus all mydirect experiences, whether subjective or objective.Some of these meanwhile may berepresentative ofother experiences indefinitely remote.
The number of these direct experiences which thespecious present and immediately-intuited past may embracemeasures the extent of our 'primary,' as Exner callsit, or, as Richet calls it, of our 'elementary' memory.[561] Thesensation resultant from the overlapping is that of theduration which the experiences seem to fill. As is the numberof any larger set of events to that of these experiences,so we suppose is the length of that duration to this duration.But of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizingsense.' The variations in our appreciation of the sameamount of real time may possibly be explained by alterationsin the rate of fading in the images, producing changesin the complication of superposed processes, to whichchanges changed states of consciousness may correspond.But howeverlong we may conceive a space of time to be, theobjective amount of it which isdirectly perceived at any onemoment by us can never exceed the scope of our 'primarymemory' at the moment in question.[562]
We have every reason to think that creatures may possiblydiffer enormously in the amounts of duration which theyintuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that mayfill it. Von Bær has indulged[563] in some interesting computationsof the effect of such differences in changing theaspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the lengthof a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the samenumber of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. Weshould live less than a month, and personally know nothingof the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believein summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferousera. The motions of organic beings would be so slowto our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun wouldstand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change,and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose abeing to get only one 1000th part of the sensations thatwe get in a given time, and consequently to live 1000 timesas long. Winters and summers will be to him like quartersof an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants willshoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneouscreations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earthlike restlessly boiling-water springs; the motions of animalswill be as invisible as are to us the movements of bulletsand cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky likea meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. That suchimaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) maybe realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would berash to deny.
"A gnat's wings," says Mr Spencer,[564] "make ten or fifteen thousandstrokes a second. Each stroke implies a separate nervous action. Eachsuch nervous action or change in a nervous centre is probably as appreciableby the gnat as is a quick movement of his arm by a man.And if this, or anything like this, is the fact, then the time occupied bya given external change, measured by many movements in the onecase, must seem much longer than in the other case, when measuredby one movement."
In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in theapparent time-perspective. We utter a sentence, and ere[Pg 640]the end is reached the beginning seems already to date fromindefinitely long ago. We enter a short street, and it is asif we should never get to the end of it. This alterationmight conceivably result from an approach to the conditionof Von Bær's and Spencer's short-lived beings. If our discriminationof successions became finer-grained, so that wenoted ten stages in a process where previously we onlynoted one; and if at the same time the processes faded tentimes as fast as before; we might have a specious presentof the same subjective length as now, giving us the sametime-feeling and containing as many distinguishable successiveevents, but out from the earlier end of it wouldhave dropped nine tenths of the real events it now contains.They would have fallen into the general reservoir of merelydated memories, reproducible at will. The beginning ofour sentences would have to be expressly recalled; eachword would appear to pass through consciousness at a tenthof its usual speed. The condition would, in short, be exactlyanalogous to the enlargement of space by a microscope;fewer real things at once in the immediate field ofview, but each of them taking up more than its normalroom, and making the excluded ones seem unnaturally faraway.
Under other conditions, processes seem to fade rapidlywithout the compensating increase in the subdivisibility ofsuccessions. Here the apparent length of the speciouspresent contracts. Consciousness dwindles to a point, andloses all intuitive sense of the whence and whither of itspath. Express acts of memory replace rapid bird's-eyeviews. In my own case, something like this occurs in extremefatigue. Long illnesses produce it. Occasionally, itappears to accompany aphasia.[565] It would be vain to seek[Pg 641]to imagine the exact brain-change in any of these casesBut we must admit the possibility that to some extent thevariations of time-estimate between youth and age, and excitementandennui, are due to such causes, more immediatethan to the one we assigned some time ago.
But whether our feeling of the time which immediately-past[566]events have filled be of something long or of something short, itis not what it is because those events are past, butbecause theyhave left behind them processes which are present. To those processes,however caused, the mind would still respond by feeling aspecious present, with one part of it just vanishing or vanishedinto the past. As the Creator is supposed to have madeAdam with a navel—sign of a birth which never occurred—soHe might instantaneously make a man with a brain inwhich were processes just like the 'fading' ones of an ordinarybrain. The first real stimulus after creation would setup a process additional to these. The processes would overlap;and the new-created man would unquestionably havethe feeling, at the very primal instant of his life, of havingbeen in existence already some little space of time.
Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly consciousof a certain duration—the specious present—varyingin length from a few seconds to probably not more than aminute, and that this duration (with its content perceivedas having one part earlier and the other part later) is theoriginal intuition of time. Longer times are conceived byadding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguelybounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically.Kant's notion of anintuition of objective time as aninfinite necessary continuum has nothing to support it.Thecause of the intuition which we really have cannot betheduration of our brain-processes or our mental changes.That duration is rather theobject of the intuition which,being realized at every moment of such duration, must bedue to a permanently present cause. This cause—probablythe simultaneous presence of brain-processes of differentphase—fluctuates; and hence a certain range of variationin the amount of the intuition, and in its subdivisibility,accrues.
[512] This chapter is reprinted almost verbatim from the Journal of SpeculativePhilosophy, vol. xx, p. 374.
[513] James Mill, Analysis, vol. x, p. 319 (J. S. Mill's edition).
[514] "What I find, when I look at consciousness at all, is, that what I cannotdivest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have consciousnessat all, is a sequence of different feelings.... The simultaneous perceptionof both sub-feelings, whether as parts of a coexistence or of a sequence,is the total feeling—the minimum of consciousness—and this minimum hasduration.... Time-duration, however, is inseparable from the minimum,notwithstanding that, in an isolated moment, we could not tell which partof it came first, which last.... We do not require to know that the sub-feelingscome in sequence, first one, then the other; nor to know whatcoming in sequence means. But we have, in any artificially isolated minimumof consciousness, therudiments of the perception of former and latterin time, in the sub-feeling that grows fainter, and the sub-feeling thatgrows stronger, and the change between them....
"In the next place, I remark that the rudiments of memory are involvedin the minimum of consciousness. The first beginnings of it appear in thatminimum, just as the first beginnings of perception do. As each memberof the change or difference which goes to compose that minimum is therudiment of a single perception, so the priority of one member to the other,although both are given to consciousness in one empirical present moment,is the rudiment of memory. The fact that the minimum of consciousnessis difference or change in feelings, is the ultimate explanation of memoryas well as of single perceptions. A former and a latter are included in theminimum of consciousness; and this is what is meant by saying that allconsciousness is in the form oftime, or that time is the form of feeling, theform of sensibility. Crudely and popularly we divide the course of timeinto past, present, and future; but, strictly speaking, there is no present;it is composed of past and future divided by an indivisible point or instant.That instant, or time-point, is the strictpresent. What we call, loosely,the present, is an empirical portion of the course of time, containing atleast a minimum of consciousness, in which the instant of change is thepresent time-point.... If we take this as the present time-point, it is clearthat the minimum of feeling contains two portions—a sub-feeling that goesand a sub-feeling that comes. One is remembered, the other imagined.The limits of both are indefinite at beginning and end of the minimum, andready to melt into other minima, proceeding from other stimuli.
"Time and consciousness do not come to us ready marked out intominima; we have to do that by reflection, asking ourselves, What is theleast empirical moment of consciousness? That least empirical moment iswhat we usually call the present moment; and even this is too minute forordinary use; the present moment is often extended practically to a fewseconds, or even minutes, beyond which we specify what length of time wemean, as the present hour, or day, or year, or century.
"But this popular way of thinking imposes itself on great numbers evenof philosophically-minded people, and they talk about thepresent as if itwas adatum—as if time came to us marked into present periods like ameasuring-tape." (S. H. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, vol. i, pp.248-254.)
"The representation of time agrees with that of space in that a certainamount of it must be presented together—included between its initial andterminal limit. A continuous ideation, flowing from one point to another,would indeedoccupy time, but notrepresent it, for it would exchange oneelement of succession for another instead of grasping the whole successionat once. Both points—the beginning and the end—are equally essential tothe conception of time, and must be present with equal clearness together."(Herbart: Psychol. als W., § 115.)
"Assume that ... similar pendulum-strokes follow each other at regularintervals in a consciousness otherwise void. When the first one isover, an image of it remains in the fancy until the second succeeds. This,then, reproduces the first by virtue of the law of association by similarity,but at the same time meets with the aforesaid persisting image.... Thusdoes the simple repetition of the sound provide all the elements of time-perception.The first sound [as it is recalled by association] gives thebeginning, the second the end, and the persistent image in the fancy representsthe length of the interval. At the moment of the second impression,the entire time-perception exists at once, for then all its elements arepresented together, the second sound and the image in the fancy immediately,and the first impression by reproduction. But, in the same act, weare aware of a state in which only the first sound existed, and of anotherin which only its image existed in the fancy. Such a consciousness as thisis that of time....In it no succession of ideas takes place." (Wundt:Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. pp. 681-2.) Note here the assumption that thepersistence and thereproduction of an impression are two processes whichmay go on simultaneously. Also that Wundt's description is merely anattempt to analyze the 'deliverance' of a time-perception, and noexplanationof the manner in which it comes about.
[515] The Alternative, p. 167.
[516] Locke, in his dim way, derived the sense of duration from reflectionon the succession of our ideas (Essay, book ii, chap. xiv, § 3; chap.xv, § 12). Reid justly remarks that if ten successive elements are to makeduration, "then one must make duration, otherwise duration must bemade up of parts that have no duration, which is impossible.... I conclude,therefore, that there must be duration in every single interval orelement of which the whole duration is made up. Nothing, indeed, ismore certain than that every elementary part of extension must have extension. Now, itmust be observed that in these elements of duration, or single intervals ofsuccessive ideas, there is no succession of ideas, yet we must conceive themto have duration; whence we may conclude with certainty thatthere is aconception of duration where there is no succession of ideas in the mind."(Intellectual Powers, essay iii, chap. v.) "Qu'on ne cherche point," saysRoyer-Collard in the Fragments added to Jouffroy's Translation of Reid,"la durée dans la succession; on ne l'y trouvera jamais; la durée a précédéla succession; la notion de la durée a précédé la notion de la succession.Elle en est donc tout-à-fait indépendante, dira-t-on? Oui, elle en est tout-à-faitindépendante."
[517] Physiol. Psych., ii, 54, 55.
[518]Ibid. ii, 213.
[519] Philosophische Studien, ii, 362.
[520]Counting was of course not permitted. It would have given a symbolicconcept and no intuitive or immediate perception of the totality ofthe series. With counting we may of course compare together series ofany length—series whose beginnings have faded from our mind, and ofwhose totality we retain no sensible impression at all. To count a series ofclicks is an altogether different thing from merely perceiving them as discontinuous.In the latter case we need only be conscious of the bits ofempty duration between them; in the former we must perform rapid actsof association between them and as many names of numbers.
[521] Estel in Wundt's Philosophische Studien, ii, 50. Mehner,ibid. ii,571. In Dietze's experiments even numbers of strokes were better caughtthan odd ones, by the ear. Therapidity of their sequence had a great influenceon the result. At more than 4 seconds apart it was impossible to perceiveseries of them as units in all (cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., ii, 214).They were simply counted as so many individual strokes. Below 0.21 to0.11 second, according to the observer, judgment again became confused.It was found that the rate of succession most favorable for grasping longseries was when the strokes were sounded at intervals of from 0.3'' to 0.18'apart. Series of 4, 6, 8, 16 were more easily identified than series of 10, 12,14, 18. The latter could hardly be clearly grasped at all. Among oddnumbers 3, 5, 7 were the series easiest caught; next, 9, 15; hardest of all,11 and 13; and 17 was impossible to apprehend.
[522] The exact interval of the sparks was 0.00205''. The doubleness oftheir snap was usually replaced by a single-seeming sound when it fell to0.00198'', the sound becominglouder when the sparks seemed simultaneous.Thedifference between these two intervals is only 7/100000 of a second; and,as Exner remarks, our ear and brain must be wonderfully efficient organsto get distinct feelings from so slight an objective difference as this. SeePflüger's Archiv, Bd. xi.
[523]Ibid. p. 407. When the sparks fell so close together that their irradiation-circlesoverlapped, they appeared likeone spark moving from the positionof the first to that of the second; and they might then follow eachother as close as 0.015'' without thedirection of the movement ceasing to beclear. When one spark fell on the centre, the other on the margin, of theretina, the time-interval for successive apprehension had to be raised to0.076''.
[524] Hall and Jastrow: Studies of Rhythm. Mind, xi, 58.
[525] Nevertheless, multitudinous impressions may be felt as discontinuous,though separated by excessively minute intervals of time. Grünhagensays (Pflüger's Archiv, vi, 175) that 10,000 electric shocks a second are feltas interrupted, by the tongue (!). Von Wittich (ibid. ii, 329), that between1000 and 2000 strokes a second are felt as discrete by the finger. W.Preyer, on the other hand (Die Grenzen des Empfindungsvermögens, etc.,1868, p. 15), makes contacts appear continuous to the finger when 36.8 ofthem follow in a second. Similarly, Mach (Wiener Sitzgsb., li, 2, 142)gives about 26. Lalanne (Comptes Rendus, i/xxxii, p. 1314) found summationof finger contacts after 22 repetitions in a second. Such discrepantfigures are of doubtful worth. On the retina 20 to 30 impressions a secondat the very utmost can be felt as discrete when they fail on the same spot.The ear, which begins to fuse stimuli together into a musical tone when theyfollow at the rate of a little over 30 a second, can still feel 132 of them asecond as discontinuous when they take the shape of 'beats' (Helmholtz,Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. p. 270).
[526] Pflüger's Archiv, xi, 428. Also in Herrmann's Hdbh. d. Physiol., 2Bd. i, Thl. pp. 260-2.
[527] Pflüger's Archiv, vii, 639. Tigerstedt (Bihang till Kongl. SvenskaVetenskaps Akad, Handl., Bd. 8, Häfte 2, Stockholm, 1884) revises Exner'sfigures, and shows that his conclusions are exaggerated. According toTigerstedt, two observers almost always rightly appreciated 0.05 or 0.06''of reaction-time difference. Half the time they did it rightly when thedifference sank to 0.03'', though from 0.03'' and 0.06'' differences wereoften not noticed at all. Buccola found (La Legge del Tempo nei Fenomenidei Pensiero, Milano, 1883, p. 371) that, after much practice in makingrapid reactions upon a signal, he estimated directly, in figures, his ownreaction-time, in 10 experiments, with an error of from 0.016'' to 0.018'';in 6, with one of 0.005'' to 0.069''; in one, with one of 0.002''; and in 3,with one of 0.003''.
[528] Mind, xi, 61 (1886).
[529] Mach, Wiener Sitzungsb., li, 2. 133 (1865); Estel,loc. cit. p. 65;Mehner,loc. cit. p. 586; Buccola,op. cit. p. 378. Fechner labors to provethat his law is only overlaid by other interfering laws in the figures recordedby these experimenters; but his case seems to me to be one of desperateinfatuation with a hobby. (See Wundt's Philosphische Studieniii, 1.)
[530] Curious discrepancies exist between the German and the American observerswith respect to thedirection of the error below and above the pointof indifference—differences perhaps due thefatigue involved in theAmerican method. The Germans lengthened intervals below it and shortenedthose above. With seven Americans experimented on by Stevensthis was exactly reversed. The German method was to passively listen tothe intervals, then judge; the American was to reproduce them activelyby movements of the hand. In Mehner's experiments there was found asecond indifference point at about 5 seconds, beyond which times werejudged again too long. Glass, whose work on the subject is the latest(Philos. Studien, iv, 423) found (when corrections were allowed for) thatall times except 0.8 sec. were estimated too short. He found a series ofpoints of greatest relative accuracy, viz. at 1.5, 2.5, 3.75, 5, 6.25, etc.,seconds respectively, and thought that his observations roughly corroboratedWeber's law. As 'maximum' and 'minimum' are printed interchangeablyin Glass's article it is hard to follow.
[531] With Vierordt and his pupils the indifference point lay as high asfrom 1.5 sec to 4.9 sec, according to the observer (cf. Der Zeitsinn, 1868,p. 112). In most of these experiments the time heard was actively reproduced,after a short pause, by movements of the hand, which were recorded.Wundt gives good reasons (Physiol. Psych., ii, 289, 290) for rejectingVierordt's figures as erroneous. Vierordt's book, it should be said,is full of important matter, nevertheless.
[532] Physiol. Psych., ii, 286, 290.
[533] Philosophische Studien, i, 86.
[534] Mind, xi, 400.
[535]Loc cit. p. 144.
[536]Op. cit. p. 376. Mach's and Buccola's figures, it will be observed,are aboutone half of the rest—sub-multiples, therefore. It ought to beobserved, however, that Buccola's figure has little value, his observationsnot being well fitted to show this particular point.
[537] Estel's figures led him to think thatall the multiples enjoyed this privilege;with Mehner, on the other hand, only theodd multiples showeddiminution of the average error; thus, 0.71, 2.15, 3.55, 5, 6.4, 7.8, 9.3, and10.65 second were respectively registered with the least error. Cf. Phil.Studien, ii, pp. 57, 562-5.
[538] Cf. especially pp. 558-561.
[539] Wundt: Physiol. Psych., ii, 287. Hall and Jastrow: Mind, xi, 62.
[540] Mehner:loc. cit. p. 553.
[541] The number of distinguishabledifferences of speed between these limitsis, as he takes care to remark, very much larger that 7. (Der Zeitsinn, p.137).
[542] P. 19, § 18, p. 112.
[543] I leave the text just as it was printed in the Journal of SpeculativePhilosophy (for 'Oct. 1886') in 1887. Since then Münsterberg in hismasterly Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie (Heft 2, 1889) seems tohave made it clear what the sensible changes are by which we measure thelapse of time. When the time which separates two sensible impressions isless than one third of a second, he thinks it is almost entirely the amount towhich the memory-image of the first impression has faded when the second oneovertakes it, which makes us feel how wide they are apart (p. 29). When thetime is longer than this, we rely, he thinks, exclusively upon the feelingsof muscular tension and relaxation, which we are constantly receivingalthough we give to them so little of our direct attention. These feelingsare primarily in the muscles by which we adopt our sense-organs in attendingto the signals used, some of the muscles being in the eye and ear themselves,some of them in the head, neck, etc. We here judge two time-intervalsto be equal when between the beginning and end of each we feelexactly similar relaxations and subsequent expectant tensions of thesemuscles to have occurred. In reproducing intervals ourselves we try tomake our feelings of this sort just what they were when we passively heardthe interval. These feelings by themselves, however, can only be usedwhen the intervals are very short, for the tension anticipatory of the terminalstimulus naturally reaches its maximum very soon. With longer intervalswetake the feeling of our inspirations and expirations into account. With ourexpirations all the other muscular tensions in our body undergo a rhythmicaldecrease; with our inspirations the reverse takes place. When, therefore,we note a time-interval of several seconds with intent to reproduce it,what we seek is to make the earlier and later interval agree in the numberand amount of these respiratory changes combined with sense-organadjustments with which they are filled. Münsterberg has studied carefullyin his own ease the variations of the respiratory factor. They aremany; but he sums up his experience by saying that whether he measuredby inspirations that were divided by momentary pauses into six parts,or by inspirations that were continuous; whether with sensory tension duringinspiration and relaxation during expiration, or by tension during bothinspiration and expiration, separated by a sudden interpolated relaxation;whether with special notice taken of the cephalic tensions, or of those inthe trunk and shoulders, in all cases alike and without exception he involuntarilyendeavored, whenever he compared two times or tried to makeone the same as the other, to get exactly the same respiratory conditionsand conditions of tension,all the subjective conditions, in short,exactly thesame during the second interval as they were during the first. Münsterbergcorroborated his subjective observations by experiments. The observer ofthe time had to reproduce as exactly as possible an interval between twosharp sounds given him by an assistant. The only condition imposed uponhim was that he should not modify his breathing for the purposes ofmeasurement. It was then found that when the assistant broke in atrandom with his signals, the judgment of the observer was vastly lessaccurate than when the assistant carefully watched the observer's breathingand made both the beginning of the time given him and that of the timewhich he was to give coincide with identical phases thereof.—Finally,Münsterberg with great plausibility tries to explain the discrepancies betweenthe results of Vierordt, Estel, Mehner, Glass, etc., as due to the factthat theydid not all use the same measure. Some breathe a little faster,some a little slower. Some break their inspirations into two parts, somedo not, etc. The coincidence of the objective times measured with definitenatural phases of breathing would very easily give periodical maxima offacility in measuring accurately.
[544] "Any one wishing yet further examples of this mental substitutionwill find one on observing how habitually he thinks of the spaces on theclock-face instead of the periods they stand for; how, on discovering it tobe half an hour later than be supposed, he does not represent the half hourin its duration, but scarcely passes beyond the sign of it marked by thefinger." (H. Spencer: Psychology, § 336.)
[545] The only objections to this which I can think of are: (1) The accuracywith which some men judge of the hour of day or night without lookingat the clock; (2) the faculty some have of waking at a preappointed hour;(3) the accuracy of time-perception reported to exist in certain trance-subjects.It might seem that in these persons some sort of a sub-conscious record waskept of the lapse of timeper se. But this cannot be admitted until it isproved that there are no physiological processes, the feeling of whose coursemay serve as asign of how much time has sped, and so lead us to infer thehour. That there are such processes it is hardly possible to doubt. Aningenious friend of mine was long puzzled to know why each day ofthe week had such a characteristic physiognomy to him. That of Sundaywas soon noticed to be due to the cessation of the city's rumbling, and thesound of people's feet shuffling on the sidewalk; of Monday, to come fromthe clothes drying in the yard and casting a white reflection on the ceiling;of Tuesday, to a cause which I forget; and I think my friend did not getbeyond Wednesday. Probably each hour in the day has for most of ussome outer or inner sign associated with it as closely as these signs with thedays of the week. It must be admitted, after all, however, that the greatimprovement of the time-perception during sleep and trance is a mysterynot as yet cleared up. All my life I have been struck by the accuracy withwhich I will wake at the same exact minute night after night and morningafter morning, if only the habit fortuitously begins. The organic registrationin me is independent of sleep. After lying in bed a long time awakeI suddenly rise without knowing the time, and for days and weeks togetherwill do so at an identical minute by the clock, as if some inward physiologicalprocess caused the act by punctually running down.—Idiots aresaid sometimes to possess the time-measuring faculty in a marked degree.I have an interesting manuscript account of an idiot girl which says: "Shewas punctual almost to a minute in her demand for food and other regularattentions. Her dinner was generally furnished her at 12.30 p. m., and atthat hour she would begin to scream if it were not forthcoming. If onFast-day or Thanksgiving it were delayed, in accordance with the NewEngland custom, she screamed from her usual dinner-hour until the foodwas carried to her. On the next day, however, she again made known herwants promptly at 12.30. Any slight attention shown her on one day wasdemanded on the next at the corresponding hour. If an orange were givenher at 4 p. m. on Wednesday, at the same hour on Thursday she madeknown her expectation, and if the fruit were not given her she continuedto call for it at intervals for two or three hours. At four on Friday theprocess would be repeated but would last less long; and so on for two orthree days. If one of her sisters visited her accidentally at a certain hour,the sharp piercing scream was sure to summon her at the same hour thenext day," etc., etc.—For these obscure matters consult C. Du Prel: ThePhilosophy of Mysticism, chap. iii, § 1.
[546] Ideale Fragen (1878). p. 219 (Essay, 'Zeit und Weile').
[547] Revue Philosophique, vol. iii, p. 496.
[548] "Empty time is most strongly perceived when it comes as apause inmusic or in speech. Suppose a preacher in the pulpit, a professor at hisdesk, to stick still in the midst of his discourse; or let a composer (as issometimes purposely done) make all his instruments stop at once; we awaitevery instant the resumption of the performance, and, in this awaiting, perceive,more than in any other possible way, the empty time. To changethe example, let, in a piece of polyphonic music—a figure, for instance, inwhich a tangle of melodies are under way—suddenly a single voice beheard, which sustains a long note, while all else is hushed.... This onenote will appear very protracted—why? Because weexpect to hear accompanyingit the notes of the other instruments, but they fail to come."(Herbart: Psychol. als W., § 115.)—Compare also Münsterberg, Beiträge,Heft 2, p. 41.
[549] A night of pain will seem terribly long: we keep looking forward toa moment which never comes—the moment when it shall cease. But theodiousness of this experience is not namedennui orLangweile, like theodiousness of time that seems long from its emptiness. The more positiveodiousness of the pain, rather, is what tinges our memory of the night.What we feel, as Prof. Lazarus says (op. cit. p. 202), is the long time of thesuffering, not the suffering of the long timeper se.
[550] On these variations of time-estimate, cf. Romanes, Consciousness ofTime, in Mind, vol. iii, p. 297; J. Sully, Illusions, pp. 245-261, 302-305;W. Wundt. Physiol. Psych., ii, 287, 288; besides the essays quoted fromLazarus and Janet. In German, the successors of Herbart have treated ofthis subject: compare Volkmann's Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 89, and for referencesto other authors his note 3 to this section. Lindner (Lbh. d. empir.Psych.), as a parallel effect, instances Alexander the Great's life (thirty-threeyears), which seems to us as if it must be long, because it was soeventful. Similarly the English Commonwealth, etc.
[551] Physiol. Optik, p. 445.
[552] Succession, timeper se, is no force. Our talk about its devouringtooth, etc., is all elliptical. Its contents are what devour. The law of inertiais incompatible with time's being assumed as an efficient cause of anything.
[553] Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 87. Compare also H. Lotze, Metaphysik, § 154.
[554] The cause of the perceiving, not the object perceived!
[555] "'No more' and 'not yet' are the proper time-feelings, and we areaware of time in no other way than through these feelings," says Volkmann(Psychol., § 87). This, which is not strictly true of our feeling oftime per se, as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling ofdatein its events.
[556] We construct the miles just as we construct the years. Travelling inthe cars makes a succession of different fields of view pass before our eyes.When those that have passed from present sight revive in memory, theymaintain their mutual order because their contents overlap. We thinkthem as having been before or behind each other; and, from the multitudeof the views we can recall behind the one now presented, we compute thetotal space we have passed through.
It is often said that the perception of time develops later than that ofspace, because children have so vague an idea of all dates before yesterdayand after to-morrow. But no vaguer than they have of extensions thatexceed as greatly their unit of space-intuition. Recently I heard my childof four tell a visitor that he had been 'as much as one week' in the country.As he had been there three months, the visitor expressed surprise; whereuponthe child corrected himself by saying he had been there 'twelveyears.' But the child made exactly the same kind of mistake when heasked if Boston was not one hundred miles from Cambridge, the distancebeing three miles.
[557] Most of these explanations simply give thesigns which, adhering toimpressions, lead us to date them within a duration, or, in other words, toassign to them their order. Why it should be atime-order, however, isnot explained. Herbart's would-be explanation is a simple description oftime-perception. He says it comes when, with the last member of a seriespresent to our consciousness, we also think of the first; and then the wholeseries revives in our thought at once, but with strength diminishing in thebackward direction (Psychol. als Wiss., § 115; Lehrb. zur Psychol., §§ 171,172, 175). Similarly Drobisch, who adds that the series must appear as onealreadyelapsed (durchlaufene), a word which shows even more clearly thequestion-begging nature of this sort of account (Empirische Psychol., § 59).Th. Waitz is guilty of similar question-begging when he explains our time-consciousnessto be engendered by a set of unsuccessful attempts to makeour percepts agree with ourexpectations (Lehrb. d. Psychol., § 52). Volkmann'smythological account of past representations striving to drive presentones out of the seat of consciousness, being drivenback by them, etc.,suffers from the same fallacy (Psychol., § 87). But all such accounts agreein implying one fact—viz., that the brain-processes of various events mustbe active simultaneously, and in varying strength, for a time-perception tobe possible. Later authors have made this idea more precise. Thus, Lipps:"Sensations arise, occupy consciousness, fade into images, and vanish.According as two of them,a andb, go through this process simultaneously,or as one precedes or follows the other, thephases of their fading will agreeor differ; and the difference will be proportional to the time-differencebetween their several moments of beginning. Thus there are differencesofquality in the images, which the mind maytranslate into correspondingdifferences of their temporal order. There is no other possible middleterm between the objective time-relations and those in the mind than thesedifferences of phase." (Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, p. 588.) Lippsaccordingly calls them 'temporal signs,' and hastens explicitly to add thatthe soul's translation of their order of strength into a time-order is entirelyinexplicable (p. 591). M. Guyau's account (Revue Philosophique, xix, 353)hardly differs from that of his predecessors, except in picturesqueness ofstyle. Every change leaves a series oftrainées lumineuses in the mind likethe passage of shooting stars. Each image is in a more fading phase,according as its original was more remote. This group of images givesduration, the mere time-form, the 'bed' of time. The distinction of past,present, and future within the bed comes from our active nature. Thefuture (as with Waitz) is what I want, but have not yet got, and must waitfor. All this is doubtless true, but is noexplanation.
Mr. Ward gives, in his Encyclopædia Britannica article (Psychology,p. 65, col. 1), a still more refined attempt to specify the 'temporal sign.'The problem being, among a number of other things thought as successive,but simultaneously thought, to determine which is first and which last,he says: "After each distinct representation,a b c d, there may intervenethe representation of thatmovement of attention of which we are awarein passing from one object to another. In our present reminiscence wehave, it must be allowed, little direct proof of this intervention; thoughthere is, I think, indirect evidence of it in the tendency of the flow of ideasto follow the order in which the presentations were at first attended to.With the movement itself when the direction of attention changes, we arefamiliar enough, though the residua of such movements are not ordinarilyconspicuous. These residua, then, are our temporal signs.... But temporalsigns alone will not furnish all the pictorial exactness of the time-perspective.These give us only a fixed series; but the law of obliviscence, byinsuring a progressive variation in intensity as we pass from one member ofthe series to the other, yields the effect which we call time-distance. Bythemselves such variations in intensity would leave us liable to confoundmore vivid representations in the distance with fainter ones nearer thepresent, but from this mistake the temporal signs save us; where thememory-continuum is imperfect such mistakes continually occur. Onthe other hand, where these variations are slight and imperceptible, thoughthe memory-continuum preserves the order of events intact, we have still nosuch distinct appreciation of comparative distance in time as we have nearerto the present, where these perceptive effects are considerable.... Lockespeaks of our ideas succeeding each other 'at certain distances not muchunlike the images in the inside of a lantern turned round by the heat of acandle,' and 'guesses' that 'this appearance of theirs in train varies notvery much in a waking man.'Now what is this 'distance' that separatesa from b, b from c, and so on; and what means have we of knowing that itis tolerably constant in waking life?It is, probably, that, the residuum ofwhich I have called a temporal sign; or, in other words, it is the movement ofattention from a to b." Nevertheless, Mr. Ward does not call our feelingof this movement of attention theoriginal of our feeling of time, or itsbrain-process the brain-process which directly causes us to perceive time.He says, a moment later, that "though the fixation of attention does ofcourse really occupy time, it is probably not in the first instance perceivedas time—i.e. as continuous 'protensity,' to use a term of Hamilton's—butas intensity. Thus, if this supposition be true, there is an element in ourconcrete time perceptions which has no place in our abstract conception ofTime. In Time physically conceived there is no trace of intensity; in timepsychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude, andso far literally a perception." Its 'original' is, then, if I understand MrWard, something like afeeling which accompanies, as pleasure and painmay accompany, the movements of attention. Its brain-process must, itwould seem, be assimilated in general type to the brain-processes of pleasureand pain. Such would seem more or less consciously to be Mr. Ward'sown view, for he says: "Everybody knows what it is to be distracted by arapid succession of varied impressions, and equally what it is to be weariedby the slow and monotonous recurrence of the same impressions. Nowthese 'feelings' of distraction and tedium owe their characteristic qualitiesto movements of attention. In the first, attention is kept incessantly onthe move; before it is accommodated toa, it is disturbed by the suddenness,intensity, and novelty ofb; in the second, it is kept all but stationaryby the repeated presentation of the same impression. Such excess anddefect of surprises make one realize a fact which in ordinary life is soobscure as to escape notice. But recent experiments have set this fact in amore striking light, and made clear what Locke had dimly before his mindin talking of a certain distance between the presentations of a waking man.In estimating very short periods of time of a second or less, indicated, say,by the beats of a metronome, it is found that there is a certain period forwhich the mean of a number of estimates is correct, while shorter periodsare on the whole over-, and longer periods under-estimated. I take this tobe evidence of the time occupied in accommodating or fixing attention."Alluding to the fact that a series of experiences,a b c d e, may seemshort in retrospect, which seemed everlasting in passing, he says: "Whattells in retrospect is the seriesa b c d e, etc.; what tells in the present is theinterveningt1 t2 t3, etc., or rather the original accommodation of whichthese temporal signs are the residuum." And he concludes thus: "Weseem to have proof that our perception of duration rests ultimately uponquasi-motor objects of varying intensity, the duration of which we do notdirectly experience as duration at all."
Wundt also thinks that the interval of about three-fourths of a second,which is estimated with the minimum of error, points to a connectionbetween the time-feeling and the succession of distinctly 'apperceived'objects before the mind. The 'association-time' is also equal to aboutthree fourths of a second. This association-time he regards as a sort ofinternal standard of duration to which we involuntarily assimilate all intervalswhich we try to reproduce, bringing shorter ones up to it and longerones down. [In the Stevens result we should have to saycontrast insteadof assimilate, for the longer intervals there seem longer, and the shorterones shorter still.] "Singularly enough," he adds (Physiol. Psych., ii,286), "this time is about that in which in rapid walking, according to theWebers, our legs perform their swing. It seems thus not unlikely thatboth psychical constants, that of the average speed of reproduction and thatof the surest estimation of time, have formed themselves under the influenceof those most habitual movements of the body which we also use whenwe try to subdivide rhythmically longer tracts of time."
Finally, Prof. Mach makes a suggestion more specific still. After sayingvery rightly that we have a realsensation of time—how otherwise shouldwe identify two entirely different airs as being played in the same 'time'?how distinguish in memory the first stroke of the clock from the second,unless to each there clove its special time-sensation, which revived with it?—hesays "it is probable that this feeling is connected with that organicconsumption which is necessarily linked with the production of consciousness,and that the time which we feel is probably due to the [mechanical?]work of [the process of?]attention. When attention is strained, time seemslong; during easy occupation, short, etc.... The fatigue of the organ ofconsciousness, as long as we wake, continually increases, and the work ofattention augments as continually. Those impressions which are conjoinedwith agreater amount of work of attention appear to us as thelater." Theapparent relative displacement of certain simultaneous events and certainanachronisms of dreams are held by Mach to be easily explicable as effectsof a splitting of the attention between two objects, one of which consumesmost of it (Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 103 foll.). Mach'stheory seems worthy of being better worked out. It is hard to say nowwhether he, Ward, and Wundt mean at bottom the same thing or not. Thetheory advanced in my own text, it will be remarked, does not pretend tobe anexplanation, but only an elementary statement of the 'law' whichmakes us aware of time. The Herbartian mythology purports toexplain.
[558] It would be rash to say definitely just how many seconds long thisspecious present must needs be, for processes fade 'asymptotically,' andthe distinctly intuited present merges into a penumbra of mere dimrecencybefore it turns into the past which is simply reproduced and conceived.Many a thing which we do not distinctly date by intercalating it in a placebetween two other things will, nevertheless, come to us with this feeling ofbelonging to anear past. This sense of recency is a feelingsui generis, andmay affect things that happened hours ago. It would seem to show thattheir brain-processes are still in a state modified by the foregoing excitement,still in a 'fading' phase, in spite of the long interval.
[559] Physiol. Psych, ii, 263.
[560] I leave my text as it was printed before Münsterberg's essay appeared(seeFootnote 542, above). He denies that we measure any but minimaldurations by the amount of fading in the ideational processes, and talksalmost exclusively of our feelings of muscular tension in his account,whereas I have made no mention of such things in mine. I cannot, however,see that there is any conflict between what he and I suggest. I ammainly concerned with the consciousness of duration regarded as a specificsort of object, he is concerned with this object's measurement exclusively.Feelings of tension might be the means of the measurement, whilst overlappingprocesses of any and every kind gave the object to be measured. Theaccommodative and respiratory movements from which the feelings oftension come form regularly recurring sensations divided by their 'phases'into intervals as definite as those by which a yardstick is divided by themarks upon its length.
Leta1, a2, a3, a4, be homologous phases in four successive movementsof this kind. If four outer stimuli 1, 2, 3, 4, coincide each with one ofthese successive phases, then their 'distances apart' are felt asequal, otherwisenot. But there is no reason whatever to suppose that the mere overlappingof the brain-process of 2 by the fading process of 1, or that of 3 bythat of 2, etc., does not give thecharacteristic quality of content which wecall 'distance apart' in this experience, and which by aid of the muscularfeelings gets judged to be equal. Doubtless the muscular feelings cangive us the object 'time' as well as its measure, because their earlierphases leave fading sensations which constantly overlap the vivid sensationof the present phase. But it would be contrary to analogy to suppose thatthey should be the only experiences which give this object. I do notunderstand Herr Münsterberg to claim this for them. He takes oursense of time for granted, and only discusses its measurement.
[561] Exner in Hermann's Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. ii, Thl. ii, p. 281.Richet in Revue Philosophique, xxi, 568 (juin, 1886). See the next chapter,pp. 642-646.
[562] I have spoken offading brain-processes alone, but only for simplicity'ssake.Dawning processes probably play as important a part in giving thefeeling of duration to the specious present.
[563] Reden (St. Petersburg, 1864), vol. i, pp. 255-268.
[564] Psychology, § 91.
[565] "The patient cannot retain the image of an object more than amoment. His memory is as short for sounds, letters, figures, and printedwords. If we cover a written or printed word with a sheet of paper inwhich a little window has been cut, so that only the first letter is visiblethrough the window, he pronounces this letter. If, then, the sheet ismoved so as to cover the first letter and make the second one visible, he pronouncesthe second, but forgets the first, and cannot pronounce the firstand second together." And so forth to the end. "If he closes his eyes anddraws his finger exploringly over a well-known object like a knife or key,he cannot combine the separate impressions and recognize the object. Butif it is put into his hand so that he can simultaneously touch it with severalfingers, he names it without difficulty. This patient has thus lost the capacityfor grouping successive ... impressions ... into a whole and perceivingthem as a whole." (Grashey, in Archiv für Psychiatrie, Bd. xvi,pp. 672-673.) It is hard to believe that in such a patient the time intuitedwas not clipped off like the impressions it held, though perhaps not so muchof it.
I have myself often noted a curious exaggeration of time-perspective atthe moment of a falling asleep. A person will be moving or doing somethingin the room, and a certain stage of his act (whatever it may be) will bemy last waking perception. Then a subsequent stage will wake me to a newperception. The two stages of the act will not be more than a few secondsapart; and yet it always seems to me as if, between the earlier and the laterone, a long interval has passed away. I conjecturally account for thephenomenon thus, calling the two stages of the acta andb respectively:Were I awake,a would leave a fading process in my sensorium whichwould overlap the process ofb when the latter came, and both would thenappear in the same specious present,a belonging to its earlier end. Butthe sudden advent of the brain-change called sleep extinguishesa's fadingprocess abruptly. Whenb then comes and wakes me,a comes back, it istrue, but not as belonging to the specious present. It has to be speciallyrevoked in memory. This mode of revocation usually characterizes long-pastthings—whence the illusion.
[566] Again I omit the future, merely for simplicity's sake.
In the last chapter what concerned us was the directintuition of time. We found it limited to intervals of considerablyless than a minute. Beyond its borders extendsthe immense region ofconceived time, past and future, intoone direction or another of which we mentally project allthe events which we think of as real, and form a systematicorder of them by giving to each a date. The relation of conceivedto intuited time is just like that of the fictitious spacepictured on the flat back-scene of a theatre to the actualspace of the stage. The objects painted on the former (trees,columns, houses in a receding street, etc.) carry back theseries of similar objects solidly placed upon the latter, andwe think we see things in a continuous perspective, whenwe really see thus only a few of them and imagine that wesee the rest. The chapter which lies before us deals withthe way in which we paint the remote past, as it were, upona canvas in our memory, and yet often imagine that wehave direct vision of its depths.
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segmentsfall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some,no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others,it is confined to a few moments, hours, or days. Others,again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by meansof which they may be recalled as long as life endures. Canwe explain these differences?
The first point to be noticed is thatfor a state of mindto survive in memory it must have endured, for a certain lengthof time. In other words, it must be what I call a substantivestate. Prepositional and conjunctival states of mindare not remembered as independent facts—we cannot recall[Pg 644]just how we felt when we said 'how' or 'notwithstanding.'Our consciousness of these transitive states is shut up totheir own moment—hence one difficulty in introspectivepsychologizing.
Any state of mind which is shut up to its own momentand fails to become an object for succeeding states ofmind, is as if it belonged to another stream of thought. Orrather, it belongs only physically, not intellectually, to itsown stream, forming a bridge from one segment of it toanother, but not being appropriated inwardly by former segmentsor appearing as part of the empirical self, in themanner explained inChapter X. All the intellectual valuefor us of a state of mind depends on our after-memory of it.Only then is it combined in a system and knowingly madeto contribute to a result. Only then does itcount for us.So thattheeffectiveconsciousness we have of our states is theafter-consciousness; and the more of this there is, the moreinfluence does the original state have, and the more permanenta factor is it of our world. An indelibly-imprintedpain may color a life; but, as Professor Richet says:
"To suffer for only a hundredth of a second is not to suffer at all;and for my part I would readily agree to undergo a pain, however acuteand intense it might be, provided it should last only a hundredth of asecond, and leave after it neither reverberation nor recall."[567]
Not that a momentary state of consciousness need bepractically resultless. Far from it: such a state, thoughabsolutely unremembered, might at its own moment determinethe transition of our thinking in a vital way, and decideour action irrevocably.[568] But theidea of it could not[Pg 645]afterwards determine transition and action, its contentcould not be conceived as one of the mind's permanentmeanings: that is all I mean by saying that its intellectualvalue lies in after-memory.
As a rule sensations outlast for some little time the objectivestimulus which occasioned them. This phenomenonis the ground of those 'after-images' which are familiar inthe physiology of the sense-organs. If we open our eyesinstantaneously upon a scene, and then shroud them incomplete darkness, it will be as if we saw the scene in ghostlylight through the dark screen. We can read off details init which were unnoticed whilst the eyes were open.[569]
In every sphere of sense, an intermittent stimulus, oftenenough repeated, produces a continuous sensation. Thisis because the after-image of the impression just gone byblends with the new impression coming in. The effects ofstimuli may thus be superposed upon each other manystages deep, the total result in consciousness being an increasein the feeling's intensity, and in all probability, aswe saw in the last chapter, an elementary sense of the lapseof time (seep. 635).
Exner writes:
"Impressions to which we are inattentive leave so brief an image inthe memory that it is usually overlooked. When deeply absorbed, wedo not hear the clock strike. But our attention may awake after thestriking has ceased, and we may then count off the strokes. Such examplesare often found in daily life. We can also prove the existenceof thisprimary memory-image, as it may be called, in another person,even when his attention is completely absorbed elsewhere. Ask someone,e.g., to count the lines of a printed page as fast as he can, andwhilst this is going on walk a few steps about the room. Then, whenthe person has done counting, ask him where you stood. He willalways reply quite definitely that you have walked. Analogous experimentsmay be made with vision. This primary memory-image is,whether attention have been turned to the impression or not, an extremelylively one, but is subjectively quite distinct from every sort ofafter-image or hallucination.... It vanishes, if not caught by attention,in the course of a few seconds. Even when the original impressionis attended to, the liveliness of its image in memory fades fast."[570]
The physical condition in the nerve-tissue of this primarymemory is called by Richet 'elementary memory.'[571] Imuch prefer to reserve the word memory for the consciousphenomenon. What happens in the nerve-tissue is but anexample of that plasticity or of semi-inertness, yieldingto change, but not yielding instantly or wholly, and neverquite recovering the original form, which, inChapter V, wesaw to be the groundwork of habit. Elementaryhabitwould be the better name for what Professor Richet means.Well, the first manifestation of elementary habit is theslow dying away of an impressed movement on the neuralmatter, and its first effect in consciousness is this so-calledelementary memory. But what elementary memory makesus aware of is thejust past. The objects we feel in thisdirectly intuited past differ from properly recollected objects.An object which is recollected, in the proper senseof that term, is one which has been absent from consciousnessaltogether, and now revives anew. It is brought back,recalled, fished up, so to speak, from a reservoir in which,with countless other objects, it lay buried and lost fromview. But an object of primary memory is not thus[Pg 647]brought back; it never was lost; its date was never cutoff in consciousness from that of the immediately presentmoment. In fact it comes to us as belonging to the rearwardportion of the present space of time, and not to thegenuine past. In the last chapter we saw that the portionof time which we directly intuit has a breadth ofseveral seconds, a rearward and a forward end, and may becalled the specious present. All stimuli whose first nerve-vibrationshave not yet ceased seem to be conditions ofour getting this feeling of the specious present. They giverise to objects which appear to the mind as events justpast.[572]
When we have been exposed to an unusual stimulus formany minutes or hours, a nervous process is set up whichresults in the haunting of consciousness by the impressionfor a long time afterwards. The tactile and muscular feelingsof a day of skating or riding, after long disuse ofthe exercise, will come back to us all through the night.Images of the field of view of the microscope will annoythe observer for hours after an unusually long sitting at theinstrument. A thread tied around the finger, an unusualconstriction in the clothing, will feel as if still there, longafter they have been removed. These revivals (called phenomenaofSinnesgedächtniss by the Germans) have somethingperiodical in their nature.[573] They show that profoundrearrangements and slow settlings into a new equilibriumare going on in the neural substance, and they form thetransition to that more peculiar and proper phenomenon ofmemory, of which the rest of this chapter must treat. The[Pg 648]first condition which makes a thing susceptible of recallafter it has been forgotten is that the original impressionof it should have been prolonged enough to give rise to arecurrent image of it, as distinguished from one of those primaryafter-images which very fleeting impressions mayleave behind, and which contain in themselves no guaranteethat they will ever come back after having once faded away.[574]A certain length of stimulation seems demanded by theinertia of the nerve-substance. Exposed to a shorter influence,its modification fails to 'set,' and it retains noeffective tendency to fall again into the same form of vibrationat which the original feeling was due. This, as Isaid at the outset, may be the reason why only 'substantive'and not 'transitive' states of mind are as a rule recollected,at least as independent things. The transitive statespass by too quickly.
Memory proper, or secondary memory as it might bestyled, is the knowledge of a former state of mind after ithas already once dropped from consciousness; or ratheritis the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime wehave not been thinking,with the additional consciousness thatwe have thought or experienced it before.
The first element which such a knowledge involves wouldseem to be the revival in the mind of an image or copy ofthe original event.[575] And it is an assumption made bymany writers[576] that the revival of an image is all that isneeded to constitute the memory of the original occurrence.But such a revival is obviously not amemory, whatever elseit may be; it is simply a duplicate, a second event, havingabsolutely no connection with the first event except that ithappens to resemble it. The clock strikes to-day; it struckyesterday; and may strike a million times ere it wears out.The rain pours through the gutter this week; it did so lastweek; and will do soin sæcula sæculorum. But does thepresent clock-stroke become aware of the past ones, or thepresent stream recollect the past stream, because they repeatand resemble them? Assuredly not. And let it not be saidthat this is because clock-strokes and gutters are physicaland not psychical objects; for psychical objects (sensationsfor example) simply recurring in successive editions willremember each otheron that account no more than clock-strokesdo. No memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence.The successive editions of a feeling are so many[Pg 650]independent events, each snug in its own skin. Yesterday'sfeeling is dead and buried; and the presence of to-day's isno reason why it should resuscitate. A farther conditionis required before the present image can be held to standfor apast original.
That condition is that the fact imaged beexpressly referredto the past, thought asin the past. But how can we thinka thing as in the past, except by thinking of the past togetherwith the thing, and of the relation of the two? Andhow can we think of the past? In the chapter on Time-perceptionwe have seen that our intuitive or immediate consciousnessof pastness hardly carries us more than a fewseconds backward of the present instant of time. Remoterdates are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically bynames, such as 'last week,' '1850;' or thought of by eventswhich happened in them, as the year in which we attendedsuch a school, or met with such a loss.—So that if we wishto think of a particular past epoch, we must think of a nameor other symbol, or else of certain concrete events, associatedtherewithal. Both must be thought of, to think the pastepoch adequately. And to 'refer' any special fact to thepast epoch is to think that factwith the names and eventswhich characterize its date, to think it, in short, with a lotof contiguous associates.
But even this would not be memory. Memory requiresmore than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must bedated inmy past. In other words, I must think that I directlyexperienced its occurrence. It must have that'warmth and intimacy' which were so often spoken of inthe chapter on the Self, as characterizing all experiences'appropriated' by the thinker as his own.
A general feeling of the past direction in time, then, aparticular date conceived as lying along that direction, andI defined by its name or phenomenal contents, an event imaginedas located therein, and owned as part of my experience,—suchare the elements of every act of memory.
It follows that what we began by calling the 'image,' or'copy,' of the fact in the mind, is really not there at all inthat simple shape, as a separate 'idea.' Or at least, if it bethere as a separate idea, no memory will go with it. What[Pg 651]memory goes with is, on the contrary, a very complex representation,that of the fact to be recalledplus its associates,the whole forming one 'object' (as explained onpage 275,Chapter IX), known in one integral pulse of consciousness(as set forth onpp. 276 ff.) and demanding probably avastly more intricate brain-process than that on which anysimple sensorial image depends.
Most psychologists have given a perfectly clear analysisof the phenomenon we describe. Christian Wolff, for example,writes:
"Suppose you have seen Mevius in the temple, but now afresh inTitus' house. I say yourecognize Mevius, that is, are conscious of havingseen him before because, although now you perceive him with yoursenses along with Titus' house, your imagination produces an image of himalong with one of the temple, and of the acts of your own mind reflectingon Mevius in the temple. Hence the idea of Mevius which is reproduced insense is contained in another series of perceptions than that whichformerly contained it, and this difference is the reason why we are consciousof having had it before.... For whilst now you see Mevius inthe house of Titus, your imagination places him in the temple, andrenders you conscious of the state of mind which you found in yourselfwhen you beheld him there. By this you know that you have seen himbefore, that is, you recognize him. But you recognize him because hisidea is now contained in another series of perceptions from that in whichyou first saw him."[577]
Similarly James Mill writes:
"In my remembrance of George III., addressing the two houses ofparliament, there is, first of all, the mere idea, or simple apprehension,the conception, as it is sometimes called, of the objects. There is combinedwith this, to make it memory, my idea of my having seen andheard those objects. And this combination is so close that it is not inmy power to separate them. I cannot have the idea of George III.:his person and attitude, the paper he held in his hand, the sound of hisvoice while reading from it; without having the other idea along withit, that of my having been a witness of the scene.... If this explanationof the case in which we remember sensations is understood,the explanation of the case in which we remember ideas cannot occasionmuch of difficulty. I have a lively recollection of Polyphemus's cave,and the actions of Ulysses and the Cyclops, as described by Homer. Inthis recollection there is, first of all, the ideas, or simple conceptions ofthe objects and acts; and along with these ideas, and so closely combined[Pg 652]as not to be separable, the idea of my having formerly had thosesame ideas. And this idea of my having formerly had those ideas is avery complicated idea; including the idea of myself of the present momentremembering, and that of myself of the past moment conceiving;and the whole series of the states of consciousness, which intervenedbetween myself remembering, and myself conceiving."[578]
Memory is then the feeling of belief in a peculiar complexobject; but all the elements of this object may beknown to other states of belief; nor is there in the particularcombination of them as they appear in memory anythingso peculiar as to lead us to oppose the latter to other sortsof thought as something altogethersui generis, needing aspecial faculty to account for it. When later we come toour chapter on Belief we shall see that any representedobject which is connected either mediately or immediatelywith our present sensations or emotional activities tendsto be believed in as a reality. The sense of a peculiaractive relation in it to ourselves is what gives to anobject the characteristic quality of reality, and a merelyimagined past event differs from a recollected one only inthe absence of this peculiar-feeling relation. The electriccurrent, so to speak, between it and our present selfdoes not close. But in their other determinations the re-recollectedpast and the imaginary past may be much thesame. In other words, there is nothing unique in theobjectof memory, and no special faculty is needed to account forits formation. It is a synthesis of parts thought of as relatedtogether, perception, imagination, comparison andreasoning being analogous syntheses of parts into complexobjects. The objects of any of these faculties may awakenbelief or fail to awaken it;the object of memory is only anobject imagined in the past (usually very completely imaginedthere)to which the emotion of belief adheres.
Such being thephenomenon of memory, or the analysisof its object, can we see how it comes to pass? can welay bare its causes?
Its complete exercise presupposes two things:
1) Theretention of the remembered fact;
2) Itsreminiscence, recollection, reproduction, orrecall.
Nowthe cause both of retention and of recollection is the lawof habit in the nervous system, working as it does in the 'associationof ideas.'
Associationists have long explainedrecollection by association.James Mill gives an account of it which I am unableto improve upon, unless it might be by translating his word'idea' into 'thing thought of,' or 'object,' as explained sooften before.
"There is," he says, "a state of mind familiar to all men, in whichwe are said to remember. In this state it is certain we have not in themind the idea which we are trying to have in it.[579] How is it, then, thatwe proceed in the course of our endeavor, to procure its introductioninto the mind? If we have not the idea itself, we have certain ideasconnected with it. We run over those ideas, one after another, in hopesthat some one of them will suggest the idea we are in quest of;and if any one of them does, it is always one so connected with it asto call it up in the way of association. I meet an old acquaintance,whose name I do not remember, and wish to recollect. I run over anumber of names, in hopes that some of them may be associated with theidea of the individual. I think of all the circumstances in which I haveseen him engaged; the time when I knew him, the persons along withwhom I knew him, the things he did, or the things he suffered; and,if I chance upon any idea with which the name is associated, then immediatelyI have the recollection; if not, my pursuit of it is vain.[580] Thereis another set of cases, very familiar, but affording very important evidenceon the subject. It frequently happens that there are matterswhich we desire not to forget. What is the contrivance to which wehave recourse for preserving the memory—that is, for making sure thatit will be called into existence, when it is our wish that it should? Allmen invariably employ the same expedient. They endeavor to form[Pg 654]an association between the idea of the thing to be remembered, andsome sensation, or some idea, which they know beforehand will occur ator near the time when they wish the remembrance to be in their minds.If this association is formed, and the association or idea with which it hasbeen formed occurs; the sensation, or idea, calls up the remembrance;and the object of him who formed the association is attained. To use avulgar instance: a man receives a commission from his friend, and, thathe may not forget it, ties a knot in his handkerchief. How is this fact tobe explained? First of all, the idea of the commission is associated withthe making of the knot. Next, the handkerchief is a thing which it isknown beforehand will be frequently seen, and of course at no greatdistance of time from the occasion on which the memory is desired.The handkerchief being seen, the knot is seen, and this sensation recallsthe idea of the commission, between which and itself the associationhad been purposely formed."[581]
In short, we make search in our memory for a forgottenidea, just as we rummage our house for a lost object. Inboth cases we visit what seems to us the probableneighborhoodof that which we miss. We turn over the things underwhich, or within which, or alongside of which, it maypossibly be; and if it lies near them, it soon comes to view.But these matters, in the case of a mental object sought,are nothing but itsassociates. The machinery of recall isthus the same as the machinery of association, and themachinery of association, as we know, is nothing but theelementary law of habit in the nerve-centres.
And this same law of habit is the machinery of retentionalso. Retention meansliability to recall, and it means nothingmore than such liability. The only proof of there beingretention is that recall actually takes place. The retentionof an experience is, in short, but another name for thepossibilityof thinking it again, or thetendency to think it again,with its past surroundings. Whatever accidental cue mayturn this tendency into an actuality, the permanentgroundof the tendency itself lies in the organized neural paths bywhich the cue calls up the experience on the proper occasion,together with its past associates, the sense that theself was there, the belief that it really happened, etc., etc.,just as previously described. When the recollection is ofthe 'ready' sort, the resuscitation takes place the instant[Pg 655]the occasion arises; when it is slow, resuscitation comesafter delay. But be the recall prompt or slow, the conditionwhich makes it possible at all (or in other words, the'retention' of the experience) is neither more nor less thanthe brain-paths whichassociate the experience with theoccasion and cue of the recall.When slumbering, these pathsare the condition of retention; when active, they are the conditionof recall.
A simple scheme will now make the whole cause ofmemory plain. Letn be a pastevent;o its 'setting' (concomitants,date, self present, warmthand intimacy, etc., etc., as alreadyset forth); andm some presentthought or fact which may appropriatelybecome the occasion of itsrecall. Let the nerve-centres, activein the thought ofm, n, ando,be represented by M, N, and O, respectively;then theexistence of the paths M—N and N—Owill be the fact indicated by the phrase 'retention of theeventn in the memory,' and theexcitement of the brain alongthese paths will be the condition of the eventn's actual recall.Theretention ofn, it will be observed, is no mysteriousstoring up of an 'idea' in an unconscious state. It is not afact of the mental order at all. It is a purely physical phenomenon,a morphological feature, the presence of these'paths,' namely, in the finest recesses of the brain's tissue.The recall or recollection, on the other hand, is apsycho-physicalphenomenon, with both a bodily and a mental side.The bodily side is the functional excitement of the tractsand paths in question; the mental side is the consciousvision of the past occurrence, and the belief that we experiencedit before.
These habit-worn paths of association are a clear renderingof what authors mean by 'predispositions,' 'vestiges,''traces,' etc., left in the brain by past experience. Mostwriters leave the nature of these vestiges vague; few think[Pg 656]of explicitly assimilating them to channels of association.Dr. Maudsley, for example, writes:
"When an idea which we have once had is excited again, there is areproduction of the same nervous current, with the conscious additionthat it is a reproduction—it is the same ideaplus the consciousness thatit is the same. The question then suggests itself, What is the physicalcondition of this consciousness? What is the modification of the anatomicalsubstrata of fibres and cells, or of their physiological activity, whichis the occasion of thisplus element in the reproduced idea? It may besupposed that the first activity did leave behind it, when it subsided,some after-effect, some modification of the nerve-element, whereby thenerve-circuit was disposed to fall again readily into the same action;such disposition appearing in consciousness as recognition or memory.Memory is, in fact, the conscious phase of this physiological dispositionwhen it becomes active or discharges its functions on the recurrence ofthe particular mental experience. To assist our conception of whatmay happen, let us suppose the individual nerve-elements to be endowedwith their own consciousness, and let us assume them to be, asI have supposed, modified in a certain way by the first experience; itis hard to conceive that when they fall into the same action on anotheroccasion they should not recognize or remember it; for the secondaction is a reproduction of the first, with the addition of what it containsfrom the after-effects of the first. As we have assumed the processto be conscious, this reproduction with its addition would be a memoryor remembrance."[582]
In this passage Dr. Maudsley seems to mean by the'nerve-element,' or 'anatomical substratum of fibres andcells,' something that corresponds to the N of our diagram.And the 'modification' he speaks of seems intended to beunderstood as an internal modification of this same particulargroup of elements. Now the slightest reflection will convinceanyone that there is no conceivable ground for supposingthat with the mere re-excitation of N there should arisethe 'conscious addition' that it is a re-excitation. The twoexcitations are simply two excitations, their consciousnessesare two consciousnesses, they have nothing to do with eachother. And a vague 'modification,' supposed to be leftbehind by the first excitation, helps us not a whit. For,according to all analogy, such a modification can only resultin making the next excitation more smooth and rapid. Thismight make it lessconscious, perhaps, but could not endow[Pg 657]it with any reference to the past. The gutter is worndeeper by each successive shower, but not for that reasonbrought into contact with previous showers. Psychology(which Dr. Maudsley in his next sentence says "affords usnot the least help in this matter") puts us on the track ofan at least possible brain-explanation. As it is thesettingo of the idea, when it recurs, which makes us consciousof it as past, so it can be nointrinsic modification of the'nerve-element' N which is the organic condition of memory,but something extrinsic to it altogether, namely, its connectionswith those other nerve-elements which we calledO—that letter standing in the scheme for the cerebral substratumof a great plexus of things other than the principalevent remembered, dates, names, concrete surroundings,realized intervals, and what not. The 'modification' is theformation in the plastic nerve-substance of the system ofassociative paths between N and O.
The only hypothesis, in short, to which the facts ofinward experience give countenance is thatthe brain-tractsexcited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, arein part different from each other. If we could revive thepast event without any associates we should exclude thepossibility of memory, and simply dream that we were undergoingthe experience as if for the first time.[583] Wherever,[Pg 658]in fact, the recalled event does appear without a definitesetting, it is hard to distinguish it from a mere creation offancy. But in proportion as its image lingers and recalls associateswhich gradually become more definite, it grows moreand more distinctly into a remembered thing. For example,I enter a friend's room and see on the wall a painting. Atfirst I have the strange, wondering consciousness, 'surelyI have seen that before,' but when or how does not becomeclear. There only clings to the picture a sort of penumbraof familiarity,—when suddenly I exclaim: "I have it, it isa copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos in the FlorentineAcademy—I recollect it there!" But the motive tothe recall doesnot lie in the fact that the brain-tract nowexcited by the painting was once before excited in a similarway; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with thatbrain-tract other tracts also are excited: those which sustainmy friend's room with all its peculiarities, on the onehand; those which sustain the mental image of the FlorenceAcademy, on the other hand, with the circumstances of myvisit there; and finally those which make me (more dimly)think of the years I have lived through between these twotimes. The result of this total brain-disturbance is athought with a peculiar object, namely, that I who nowstand here with this picture before me, stood so many yearsago in the Florentine Academy looking at its original.
M. Taine has described the gradual way in which amental image develops into an object of memory, in hisusual vivid fashion. He says:
"I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I amacquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him before.Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about therevaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for[Pg 659]some time, and surrounds itself with new details. 'When I saw him hewas bare-headed, with a working-jacket on, painting in a studio; he isso-and-so, of such-and-such a street. But when was it? It was notyesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it: he told me that hewas waiting for the first leaves to come out to go into the country. Itwas before the spring. But at what exact date? I saw, the same day,people carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses: it was PalmSunday!' Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various shiftingsto front and rear along the line of the past; each of these mentalsentences has been a swing of the balance. When confronted withthe present sensation and with the latent swarm of indistinct imageswhich repeat our recent life, the figure first recoiled suddenly to anindeterminate distance. Then, completed by precise details, and confrontedwith all the shortened images by which we sum up the proceedingsof a day or a week, it again receded beyond the present day, beyondyesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond theill-defined mass constituted by our recent recollections. Then somethingsaid by the painter was recalled, and it at once receded againbeyond an almost precise limit, which is marked by the image of thegreen leaves and denoted by the word spring. A moment afterwards,thanks to a new detail, the recollection of the branches, it has shiftedagain, but forward this time, not backward; and, by a reference to thecalendar, is situated at a precise point, a week further back than Easter,and five weeks nearer than the carnival, by the double effect of thecontrary impulsions, pushing it, one forward and the other backward,and which are, at a particular moment, annulled by one another."[584]
The remembered fact beingn, then, the path N—O iswhat arouses forn its setting when itis recalled, and makesit other than a mere imagination. The path M—N, on theother hand, gives the cue or occasion of its being recalledat all.Memory being this altogether conditioned on brain-paths,its excellence in a given individual will depend partly onthe number and partly on the persistence of these paths.
The persistence or permanence of the paths is a physiologicalproperty of the brain-tissue of the individual, whilsttheir number is altogether due to the facts of his mentalexperience. Let the quality of permanence in the paths becalled the native tenacity, or physiological retentiveness.This tenacity differs enormously from infancy to old age,and from one person to another. Some minds are like wax[Pg 660]under a seal—no impression, however disconnected withothers, is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to everytouch, but under usual conditions retain no permanentmark. These latter minds, before they can recollect a fact,must weave it into their permanent stores of knowledge.They have nodesultory memory. Those persons, on thecontrary, who retain names, dates and addresses, anecdotes,gossip, poetry, quotations, and all sorts of miscellaneousfacts, without an effort, have desultory memory in a highdegree, and certainly owe it to the unusual tenacity of theirbrain-substance for any path once formed therein. Noone probably was ever effective on a voluminous scale withouta high degree of this physiological retentiveness. Inthe practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisitionsstick is the man who is always achieving and advancing,whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearningwhat they once knew but have forgotten, simply holdtheir own. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a WalterScott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editionsof mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of thepurely physiological sort. Men without this retentivenessmay excel in thequality of their work at this point or atthat, but will never do such mighty sums of it, or be influentialcontemporaneously on such a scale.[585]
But there comes a time of life for all of us when we cando no more than hold our own in the way of acquisitions,when the old paths fade as fast as the new ones form in ourbrain, and when we forget in a week quite as much as wecan learn in the same space of time. This equilibrium maylast many, many years. In extreme old age it is upset in thereverse direction, and forgetting prevails over acquisitionor rather there is no acquisition. Brain-paths are so transientthat in the course of a few minutes of conversation thesame question is asked and its answer forgotten half a dozentimes. Then the superior tenacity of the paths formed inchildhood becomes manifest: the dotard will retrace thefacts of his earlier years after he has lost all those of laterdate.
So much for the permanence of the paths. Now fortheir number.
It is obvious that the more there are of such paths asM—N in the brain, and the more of such possible cues oroccasions for the recall ofn in the mind, the prompter andsurer, on the whole, the memory ofn will be, the more[Pg 662]frequently one will be reminded of it, the more avenues ofapproach to it one will possess. In mental terms,the moreother facts a fact is associated with in the mind, the better possessionof it our memory retains. Each of its associates becomesa hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up bywhen sunk beneath the surface. Together, they form anetwork of attachments by which it is woven into theentire tissue of our thought. The 'secret of a good memory'is thus the secret of forming diverse and multipleassociations with every fact we care to retain. But thisforming of associations with a fact, what is it butthinkingabout the fact as much as possible? Briefly, then, of twomen with the same outward experiences and the sameamount of mere native tenacity,the one whothinksover hisexperiences most, and weaves them into systematic relationswith each other,will be the one with the best memory.We see examples of this on every hand. Most menhave a good memory for facts connected with their ownpursuits. The college athlete who remains a dunce at hisbooks will astonish you by his knowledge of men's 'records'in various feats and games, and will be a walking dictionaryof sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantlygoing over these things in his mind, and comparingand making series of them. They form for him not somany odd facts, but a concept-system—so they stick. So themerchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians'speeches and votes, with a copiousness which amazes outsiders,but which the amount of thinking they bestow onthese subjects easily explains. The great memory for factswhich a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their books is notincompatible with the possession on their part of a brainwith only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness.Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifyingsuch a theory as that of evolution, and facts will sooncluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Theirrelations to the theory will hold them fast; and the moreof these the mind is able to discern, the greater the eruditionwill become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, ifany, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnotedby him and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance[Pg 663]almost as encyclopædic as his erudition may coexist withthe latter, and hide, as it were, in the interstices of its web.Those who have had much to do with scholars andsavantswill readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
In a system, every fact is connected with every other bysome thought-relation. The consequence is that every factis retained by the combined suggestive power of all theother facts in the system, and forgetfulness is well-nighimpossible.
The reason whycramming is such a bad mode of studyis now made clear. I mean by cramming that way of preparingfor examinations by committing 'points' to memoryduring a few hours or days of intense application immediatelypreceding the final ordeal, little or no work havingbeen performed during the previous course of the term.Things learned thus in a few hours, on one occasion, forone purpose, cannot possibly have formed many associationswith other things in the mind. Their brain-processes areled into by few paths, and are relatively little liable to beawakened again. Speedy oblivion is the almost inevitablefate of all that is committed to memory in this simple way.Whereas, on the contrary, the same materials taken ingradually, day after day, recurring in different contexts,considered in various relations, associated with other externalincidents, and repeatedly reflected on, grow into such asystem, form such connections with the rest of the mind'sfabric, lie open to so many paths of approach, that theyremain permanent possessions. This is theintellectual reasonwhy habits of continuous application should be enforcedin educational establishments. Of course there is no moralturpitude in cramming. If it led to the desired end ofsecure learning it would be infinitely the best method ofstudy. But it does not; and students themselves shouldunderstand the reason why.
It will now appear clear thatall improvement of thememory lies in the line ofelaborating the associates ofeach of the several things to be remembered.No amountof culture would seem capable of modifying a man'sgeneral[Pg 664]retentiveness. This is a physiological quality, given oncefor all with his organization, and which he can never hopeto change. It differs no doubt in disease and health; andit is a fact of observation that it is better in fresh andvigorous hours than when we are fagged or ill. We maysay, then, that a man's native tenacity will fluctuate somewhatwith his hygiene, and that whatever is good for histone of health will also be good for his memory. We mayeven say that whatever amount of intellectual exercise isbracing to the general tone and nutrition of the brain willalso be profitable to the general retentiveness. But morethan this we cannot say; and this, it is obvious, is far lessthan most people believe.
It is, in fact, commonly thought that certain exercises,systematically repeated, will strengthen, not only a man'sremembrance of the particular facts used in the exercises,but his faculty for remembering facts at large. And aplausible case is always made out by saying that practicein learning words by heart makes it easier to learn newwords in the same way.[586] If this be true, then whatI have just said is false, and the whole doctrine of memoryas due to 'paths' must be revised. But I am disposedto think the alleged fact untrue. I have carefullyquestioned several mature actors on the point, and all havedenied that the practice of learning parts has made anysuch difference as is alleged. What it has done for themis to improve their power ofstudying a part systematically.Their mind is now full of precedents in the way of intonation,emphasis, gesticulation; the new words awaken distinctsuggestions and decisions; are caught up, in fact, intoa pre-existing net-work, like the merchant's prices, or theathlete's store of 'records,' and are recollected easier, althoughthe mere native tenacity is not a whit improved,and is usually, in fact, impaired by age. It is a case of betterremembering by betterthinking. Similarly when schoolboysimprove by practice in ease of learning by heart, theimprovement will, I am sure, be always found to reside in[Pg 665]themode of study of the particular piece (due to the greaterinterest, the greater suggestiveness, the generic similaritywith other pieces, the more sustained attention, etc., etc.),and not at all to any enhancement of the brute retentivepower.
The error I speak of pervades an otherwise useful andjudicious book, 'How to Strengthen the Memory,' by Dr.Holbrook of New York.[587] The author fails to distinguishbetween the general physiological retentiveness and the retentionof particular things, and talks as if both must bebenefited by the same means.
"I am now treating," he says, "a case of loss of memory in a personadvanced in years, who did not know that his memory had failedmost remarkably till I told him of it. He is making vigorous effortsto bring it back again, and with partial success. The method pursuedis to spend two hours daily, one in the morning and one in the evening,in exercising this faculty. The patient is instructed to give the closestattention to all that he learns, so that it shall be impressed on his mindclearly. He is asked to recall every evening all the facts and experiencesof the day, and again the next morning. Every name heard iswritten down and impressed on his mind clearly, and an effort madeto recall it at intervals. Ten names from among public men are orderedto be committed to memory every week. A verse of poetry is tobe learned, also a verse from the Bible, daily. He is asked to rememberthe number of the page in any book where any interesting fact isrecorded. These and other methods are slowly resuscitating a failingmemory."[588]
I find it very hard to believe that the memory of thepoor old gentleman is a bit the better for all this tortureexcept in respect of the particular facts thus wrought intoit, the occurrences attended to and repeated on those days,the names of those politicians, those Bible verses, etc., etc.In another place Dr. Holbrook quotes the account given bythe late Thurlow Weed, journalist and politician, of hismethod of strengthening his memory.
"My memory was a sieve. I could remember nothing. Dates,names, appointments, faces—everything escaped me. I said to mywife, 'Catherine, I shall never make a successful politician, for I cannotremember, and that is a prime necessity of politicians.' My wife[Pg 666]told me I must train my memory. So when I came home that night, Isat down alone and spent fifteen minutes trying silently to recall withaccuracy the principal events of the day. I could remember but littleat first; now I remember that I could not then recall what I had forbreakfast. After a few days' practice I found I could recall more.Events came back to me more minutely, more accurately, and morevividly than at first. After a fortnight or so of this, Catherine said,'Why don't you relate to me the events of the day, instead of recallingthem to yourself? It would be interesting, and my interest in it wouldbe a stimulus to you.' Having great respect for my wife's opinion, Ibegan a habit of oral confession, as it were, which was continued foralmost fifty years. Every night, the last thing before retiring, I toldher everything I could remember that had happened to me or about meduring the day. I generally recalled the dishes I had had for breakfast,dinner, and tea; the people I had seen and what they had said;the editorials I had written for my paper, giving her a brief abstract ofthem. I mentioned all the letters I had sent and received, and the verylanguage used, as nearly as possible; when I had walked or ridden—Itold her everything that had come within my observation. I found Icould say my lessons better and better every year, and instead of thepractice growing irksome, it became a pleasure to go over again theevents of the day. I am indebted to this discipline for a memory ofsomewhat unusual tenacity, and I recommend the practice to all who wishto store up facts, or expect to have much to do with influencing men."[589]
I do not doubt that Mr. Weed's practical commandof his past experiences was much greater after fifty yearsof this heroic drill than it would have been without it.Expecting to give his account in the evening, he attendedbetter to each incident of the day, named and conceived itdifferently, set his mind upon it, and in the evening wentover it again. He didmore thinking about it, and it stayedwith him in consequence. But I venture to affirm prettyconfidently (although I know how foolish it often is to denya fact on the strength of a theory) that the same matter,casually attended to and not thought about, would have stuckin his memory no better at the end than at the beginningof his years of heroic self-discipline. He had acquired abetter method of noting and recording his experiences, buthis physiological retentiveness was probably not a bit improved.[590]
All improvement of memory consists, then, in the improvementof one's habitual methods of recording facts.[Pg 668]In the traditional terminology methods are divided intothe mechanical, the ingenious, and the judicious.
Themechanical methods consist in the intensification, prolongation,andrepetition of the impression to be remembered.The modern method of teaching children to read by blackboardwork, in which each word is impressed by the four-foldchannel of eye, ear, voice, and hand, is an example ofan improved mechanical method of memorizing.
Judicious methods of remembering things are nothing butlogical ways of conceiving them and working them intorational systems, classifying them, analyzing them intoparts, etc., etc. All the sciences are such methods.
Ofingenious methods, many have been invented, under thename of technical memories. By means of these systemsit is often possible to retain entirely disconnected facts,lists of names, numbers, and so forth, so multitudinous asto be entirely unrememberable in a natural way. Themethod consists usually in a framework learned mechanically,of which the mind is supposed to remain in secureand permanent possession. Then, whatever is to be rememberedis deliberately associated by some fancifulanalogy or connection with some part of this framework,and this connection thenceforward helps its recall. Thebest known and most used of these devices is the figure-alphabet.To remember numbers, e.g., a figure-alphabetis first formed, in which each numerical digit is representedby one or more letters. The number is then translated intosuch letters as will best make a word, if possible a wordsuggestive of the object to which the number belongs.[Pg 669]The word will then be remembered when the numbersalone might be forgotten.
"The most common figure-alphabet is this:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. t, n, m, r, l, sh, g, f, b, s, d, j, k, v, p, c, ch, c, z, g, qu. "To briefly show its use, suppose it is desired to fix 1142 feet in asecond as the velocity of sound: t, t, r, n, are the letters and orderrequired. Fill up with vowels forming a phrase, like 'tight run' andconnect it by some such flight of the imagination as that if a man triedto keep up with the velocity of sound, he would have a tight run.When you recall this a few days later great care must be taken not toget confused with the velocity of light, nor to think he had ahard runwhich would be 3000 feet too fast."[591]
Dr. Pick and others use a system which consists inlinking together any two ideas to be remembered by meansof an intermediate idea which will be suggested by thefirst and suggest the second, and so on through the list.Thus,
"Let us suppose that we are to retain the following series of ideas:garden, hair, watchman, philosophy, copper, etc.... We can combinethe ideas in this manner:garden, plant, hair of plant—hair; hair,bonnet,watchman;—watchman, wake, study,philosophy; philosophy,chemistry,copper; etc. etc." (Pick.)[592]
It is matter of popular knowledge that an impressionis remembered the better in proportion as it is
1) More recent;
2) More attended to; and
3) More often repeated.
The effect of recency is all but absolutely constant. Oftwo events of equal significance the remoter one will bethe one more likely to be forgotten. The memories ofchildhood which persist in old age can hardly be comparedwith the events of the day or hour which are forgotten, forthese latter are trivial once-repeated things, whilst the[Pg 670]childish reminiscences have been wrought into us duringthe retrospective hours of our entire intervening life.Otherthings equal, at all times of life recency promotes memory.The only exception I can think of is the unaccountablememory of certain moments of our childhood, apparentlynot fitted by their intrinsic interest to survive, but which areperhaps the only incidents we can remember out of theyear in which they occurred. Everybody probably hasisolated glimpses of certain hours of his nursery life, theposition in which he stood or sat, the light of the room,what his father or mother said, etc. These moments sooddly selected for immunity from the tooth of time probablyowe their good fortune to historical peculiarities whichit is now impossible to trace. Very likely we were remindedof them again soon after they occurred; that becamea reason why we should again recollect them, etc.,so that at last they became ingrained.
Theattention which we lend to an experience is proportionalto its vivid or interesting character; and it is a notoriousfact that what interests us most vividly at the timeis, other things equal, what we remember best. An impressionmay be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave ascar upon the cerebral tissues; and thus originates a pathologicaldelusion. "A woman attacked by robbers takesall the men whom she sees, even her own son, for brigandsbent on killing her. Another woman sees her child runover by a horse; no amount of reasoning, not even the sightof the living child, will persuade her that he is not killed.A woman called 'thief' in a dispute remains convinced thatevery one accuses her of stealing (Esquirol). Another, attackedwith mania at the sight of the fires in her streetduring the Commune, still after six months sees in her deliriumflames on every side about her (Luys), etc., etc."[593]
On the general effectiveness of both attention and repetitionI cannot do better than copy what M. Taine haswritten:
"If we compare different sensations, images, or ideas, we find thattheir aptitudes for revival are not equal. A large number of them are[Pg 671]obliterated, and never reappear through life; for instance, I drovethrough Paris a day or two ago, and though I saw plainly some sixtyor eighty new faces, I cannot now recall any one of them; some extraordinarycircumstance, a fit of delirium, or the excitement of haschishwould be necessary to give them a chance of revival. On the otherhand, there are sensations with a force of revival which nothing destroysor decreases. Though, as a rule, time weakens and impairs ourstrongest sensations, these reappear entire and intense, without havinglost a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force. M. Brierrede Boismont, having suffered when a child from a disease of the scalp,asserts that 'after fifty-five years have elapsed he can still feel his hairpulled out under the treatment of theskull-cap.'—For my own part,after thirty years, I remember feature for feature the appearance of thetheatre to which I was taken for the first time. From the third row ofboxes, the body of the theatre appeared to me an immense well, redand flaming, swarming with heads; below, on the right, on a narrowfloor, two men and a woman entered, went out, and re-entered, madegestures, and seemed to me like lively dwarfs: to my great surprise,one of these dwarfs fell on his knees, kissed the lady's hand, then hidbehind a screen; the other, who was coming in, seemed angry, andraised his arm. I was then seven, I could understand nothing of whatwas going on; but the well of crimson velvet was so crowded, gilded,and bright, that after a quarter of an hour I was, as it were, intoxicated,and fell asleep.
"Every one of us may find similar recollections in his memory, andmay distinguish in them a common character. The primitive impressionhas been accompaniedby an extraordinary degree of attention,either as being horrible or delightful, or as being new, surprising, andout of proportion to the ordinary run of our life; this it is we expressby saying that we have been strongly impressed; that we were absorbed,that we could not think of anything else; that our other sensationswere effaced; that we were pursued all the next day by the resultingimage; that it beset us, that we could not drive it away; thatall distractions were feeble beside it. It is by force of this disproportionthat impressions of childhood are so persistent; the mind beingquite fresh, ordinary objects and events are surprising. At present,after seeing so many large halls and full theatres, it is impossible forme, when I enter one, to feel swallowed up, engulfed, and, as it were,lost in a huge dazzling well. The medical man of sixty, who has experiencedmuch suffering, both personally and in imagination, would beless upset now by a surgical operation than when he was a child.
"Whatever may be the kind of attention, voluntary or involuntary,it always acts alike; the image of an object or event is capable of revival,and of complete revival, in proportion to the degree of attentionwith which we have considered the object or event. We put thisrule in practice at every moment in ordinary life. If we are applyingourselves to a book or are in lively conversation, while an air[Pg 672]is being sung in the adjoining room, we do not retain it; we knowvaguely that there is singing going on, and that is all. We thenstop our reading or conversation, we lay aside all internal preoccupationsand external sensations which our mind or the outer world canthrow in our way; we close our eyes, we cause a silence within andabout us, and, if the air is repeated, we listen. We say then that wehave listened with all our ears, that we have applied our whole minds.If the air is a fine one, and has touched us deeply, we add that we havebeen transported, uplifted, ravished, that we have forgotten the worldand ourselves; that for some minutes our soul was dead to all butsounds....
"This exclusive momentary ascendency of one of our states of mindexplains the greater durability of its aptitude for revival and for morecomplete revival. As the sensation revives in the image, the imagereappears with a force proportioned to that of the sensation. What wemeet with in the first state is also to be met with in the second, sincethe second is but a revival of the first. So, in the struggle for life, inwhich all our images are constantly engaged, the one furnished at theoutset with most force retains in each conflict, by the very law of repetitionwhich gives it being, the capacity of treading down its adversaries;this is why it revives, incessantly at first, then frequently, untilat last the laws of progressive decay, and the continual accession ofnew impressions take away its preponderance, and its competitors,finding a clear field, are able to develop in their turn.
"A second cause of prolonged revivals is repetition itself. Everyone knows that to learn a thing we must not only consider it attentively,but consider it repeatedly. We say as to this in ordinary language,that an impression many times renewed is imprinted more deeply andexactly on the memory. This is how we contrive to retain a language,airs of music, passages of verse or prose, the technical terms and propositionsof a science, and still more so the ordinary facts by which ourconduct is regulated. When, from the form and color of a currant-jelly,we think of its taste, or, when tasting it with our eyes shut, weimagine its red tint and the brilliancy of a quivering slice, the imagesin our mind are brightened by repetition. Whenever we eat, or drink,or walk, or avail ourselves of any of our senses, or commence or continueany action whatever, the same thing happens. Every man andevery animal thus possesses at every moment of life a certain stock ofclear and easily reviving images, which had their source in the past ina confluence of numerous experiences, and are now fed by a flow of renewedexperiences. When I want to go from the Tuileries to the Panthéon,or from my study to the dining-room, I foresee at every turnthe colored forms which will present themselves to my sight; it is otherwisein the case of a house where I have spent two hours, or of atown where I have stayed three days; after ten years have elapsed theimages will be vague, full of blanks, sometimes they will not exist, andI shall have to seek my way or shall lose myself.—This new property of[Pg 673]images is also derived from the first. As every sensation tends to revivein its image, the sensation twice repeated will leave after it a doubletendency, that is, provided the attention be as great the second time asthe first; usually this is not the case, for, the novelty diminishing, theinterest diminishes; but if other circumstances renew the interest, or ifthe will renovates the attention, the incessantly increasing tendencywill incessantly increase the chances of the resurrection and integrityof the image."[594]
If a phenomenon is met with, however, too often, andwith too great a variety of contexts, although its image isretained and reproduced with correspondingly great facility,it fails to come up with any one particular setting, andthe projection of it backwards to a particular past dateconsequently does not come about. Werecognize but donotremember it—its associates form too confused a cloud.No one is said to remember, says Mr. Spencer,
"that the object at which he looks has an opposite side; or that a certainmodification of the visual impression implies a certain distance;or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal. To ask a manwhether he remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns, that iron ishard, would be a misuse of language. Even the almost fortuitous connectionsamong our experiences cease to be classed as memories whenthey have become thoroughly familiar. Though, on hearing the voicecf some unseen person slightly known to us, we say we recollect towhom the voice belongs, we do not use the same expression respectingthe voices of those with whom we live. The meanings of words whichin childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult life to beimmediately present."[595]
These are cases where too many paths, leading to toodiverse associates, block each other's way, and all that themind gets along with its object is a fringe of felt familiarityor sense that thereare associates. A similar result comesabout when a definite setting is only nascently aroused. Wethen feel that we have seen the object already, but when orwhere we cannot say, though we may seem to ourselves tobe on the brink of saying it. That nascent cerebral excitationscan effect consciousness with a sort of sense of theimminence of that which stronger excitations would makeus definitely feel, is obvious from what happens when we[Pg 674]seek to remember a name. It tingles, it trembles on theverge, but does not come. Just such a tingling and tremblingof unrecovered associates is the penumbra of recognitionthat may surround any experience and make itseem familiar, though we know not why.[596]
There is a curious experience which everyone seems tohave had—the feeling that the present moment in its completenesshas been experienced before—we were saying justthis thing, in just this place, to just these people, etc. This'sense of pre-existence' has been treated as a great mysteryand occasioned much speculation. Dr. Wigan consideredit due to a dissociation of the action of the two hemispheres,one of them becoming conscious a little later thanthe other, but both of the same fact.[597] I must confess that[Pg 676]the quality of mystery seems to me a little strained. I haveover and over again in my own case succeeded in resolvingthe phenomenon into a case of memory, so indistinct thatwhilst some past circumstances are presented again,the others are not. The dissimilar portions of the past donot arise completely enough at first for the date to be identified,All we get is the present scene with a general suggestionof pastness about it. That faithful observer, Prof.Lazarus, interprets the phenomenon in the same way;[598] andit is noteworthy that just as soon as the past context growscomplete and distinct the emotion of weirdness fades fromthe experience.
have recently been made in Germany. Professor Ebbinghaus,in a really heroic series of daily observationsof more than two years' duration, examined the powers ofretention and reproduction. He learned lists of meaninglesssyllables by heart, and tested his recollection of themfrom day to day. He could not remember more than 7after a single reading. It took, however, 16 readings to remember12, 44 readings to remember 24, and 55 readingsto remember 26 syllables, the moment of 'remembering'being here reckoned as the first moment when the list couldbe recited without a fault.[599] When a 16-syllable list wasread over a certain number of times on one day, and thenstudied on the day following until remembered, it wasfound that the number of seconds saved in the study onthe second day was proportional to the number of readingson the first—proportional, that is, within certain rathernarrow limits, for which see the text.[600] No amount of repetitionspent on nonsense-verses over a certain length enabledDr. Ebbinghaus to retain them without error for 24hours. In forgetting such things as these lists of syllables,the loss goos on very much more rapidly at first than lateron. He measured the loss by the number of seconds required[Pg 677]torelearn the list after it had been once learned.Roughly speaking, if it took a thousand seconds to learnthe list, and five hundred to relearn it, the loss between thetwo learnings would have been one half. Measured in thisway, full half of the forgetting seems to occur within thefirst half-hour, whilst only four fifths is forgotten at theend of a month. The nature of this result might havebeen anticipated, but hardly its numerical proportions.Dr. Ebbinghaus says:
"The initial rapidity, as well as the final slowness, as these were ascertainedunder certain experimental conditions and for a particularindividual,... may well surprise us. An hour after the work of learninghad ceased, forgetting was so far advanced that more than half ofthe original work had to be applied again before the series of syllablescould once more be reproduced. Eight hours later two thirds of theoriginal labor had to be applied. Gradually, however, the process ofoblivion grew slower, so that even for considerable stretches of timethe losses were but barely ascertainable. After 24 hours a third, after6 days a fourth, and after a whole month a good fifth of the originallabor remain in the shape of its after-effects, and made the relearningby so much the more speedy."[601]
But the most interesting result of all those reached bythis author relates to the question whether ideas are recalledonly by those that previously came immediately beforethem, or whether an idea can possibly recall anotheridea with which it was never inimmediate contact, withoutpassing through the intermediate mental links. The questionis of theoretic importance with regard to the way inwhich the process of 'association of ideas' must be conceived;and Dr. Ebbinghaus's attempt is as successful asit is original, in bringing two views, which seem at firstsight inaccessible to proof, to a direct practical test, andgiving the victory to one of them. His experiments conclusivelyshow that an idea is not only 'associated' directlywith the one that follows it, and with the restthrough that,but that it isdirectly associated withall that are near it,though in unequal degrees. He first measured the timeneeded to impress on the memory certain lists of syllables,and then the time needed to impress lists of the samesyllables with gaps between them. Thus, representing the[Pg 678]syllables by numbers, if the first list were 1, 2, 3, 4,... 13,14, 15, 16, the second would be 1, 3, 5,... 15, 2, 4, 6,...16, and so forth, with many variations.
Now, if 1 and 3 in the first list were learned in that ordermerely by 1 calling up 2, and by 2 calling up 3, leaving outthe 2 ought to leave 1 and 3 with no tie in the mind; andthe second list ought to take as much time in the learningas if the first list had never been heard of. If, on the otherhand, 1 has adirect influence on 3 as well as on 2, that influenceshould be exerted even when 2 is dropped out; anda person familiar with the first list ought to learn thesecond one more rapidly than otherwise he could. Thislatter case is what actually occurs; and Dr. Ebbinghaushas found that syllables originally separated by as many asseven intermediaries still reveal, by the increased rapiditywith which they are learned in order, the strength of thetie that the original learning established between them,over the heads, so to speak, of all the rest. These last resultsought to make us careful, when we speak of nervous'paths,' to use the word in no restricted sense. They addone more fact to the set of facts which prove that associationis subtler than consciousness, and that a nerve-processmay, without producing consciousness, be effective in thesame way in which consciousness would have seemed to beeffective if it had been there.[602] Evidently the path from 1[Pg 679]to 3 (omitting 2 from consciousness) is facilitated, broadenedperhaps, by the old path from 1 to 3 through 2—onlythe component which shoots round through this latter wayis too feeble to let 2 be thought as a distinct object.
Mr. Wolfe, in his experiments on recognition, used vibratingmetal tongues.
"These tongues gave tones differing by 2 vibrations only in the twolower octaves, and by 4 vibrations in the three higher octaves. In thefirst series of experiments a tone was selected, and, after sounding itfor one second, a second tone was sounded, which was either the sameas the first, or different from it by 4, 8, or 12 vibrations in differentseries. The person experimented upon was to answer whether thesecond tone was the same as the first, thus showing that he recognizedit, or whether it was different, and, if so, whether it was higher orlower. Of course, the interval of time between the two tones was animportant factor. The proportionate number of correct judgments,and the smallness of the difference of the vibration-rates of the twotones, would measure the accuracy of the tone-memory. It appearedthat one could tell more readily when the two tones were alike thanwhen they were different, although in both cases the accuracy of thememory was remarkably good.... The main point is the effect of thetime-interval between the tone and its reproduction. This was variedfrom 1 second to 30 seconds, or even to 60 seconds or 120 seconds insome experiments. The general result is, that the longer the interval,the smaller are the chances that the tone will be recognized; and thisprocess of forgetting takes place at first very rapidly, and then moreslowly.... This law is subject to considerable variations, one of whichseems to be constant and is peculiar; namely, there seems to be arhythm in the memory itself, which, after falling, recovers slightly, andthen fades out again."[603]
This periodical renewal of acoustic memory would seemto be an important element in the production of the agreeablenessof certain rates of recurrence in sound.
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as importanta function as recollecting.
Locke says, in a memorable page of his dear old book:
"The memory of some men, it is true, is very tenacious, even to amiracle; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas,[Pg 680]even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive:so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of thesenses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasionedthem, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us; andour minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching;where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptionsare effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The picturesdrawn in our minds are laid in fading colors; and, if not sometimesrefreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of ourbodies, and the make of our animal spirits, are concerned in this;and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in someit retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone,and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire,though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body doessometimes influence the memory; since we oftentimes find a diseasequite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a fewdays calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed tobe as lasting as if graven in marble."[604]
This peculiar mixture of forgetting with our rememberingis but one instance of our mind's selective activity.Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built.And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If weremembered everything, we should on most occasions beas ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take aslong for us to recall a space of time as it took the originaltime to elapse, and we should never get ahead with ourthinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, whatM. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening isdue to the omission of an enormous number of the factswhich filled them.
"As fast as the present enters into the past, our states of consciousnessdisappear and are obliterated. Passed in review at a few days' distance,nothing or little of them remains: most of them have made shipwreckin that great nonentity from which they never more will emerge, andthey have carried with them the quantity of duration which was inherentin their being. This deficit of surviving conscious states is thus adeficit in the amount of represented time. The process of abridgment,of foreshortening, of which we have spoken, presupposes this deficit.If, in order to reach a distant reminiscence, we had to go through theentire series of terms which separate it from our present selves, memorywould become impossible on account of the length of the operation. We[Pg 681]thus reach the paradoxical result that one condition of remembering isthat we should forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious numberof states of consciousness, and momentarily forgetting a large number,we could not remember at all. Oblivion, except in certain cases, isthus no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and itslife."[605]
There are many irregularities in the process of forgettingwhich are as yet unaccounted for. A thing forgottenon one day will be remembered on the next. Somethingwe have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but allin vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt,saunter into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says, as innocentlyas if it had never been sent for. Experiences ofbygone date will revive after years of absolute oblivion,often as the result of some cerebral disease or accidentwhich seems to develop latent paths of association, as thephotographer's fluid develops the picture sleeping in thecollodion film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Coleridge's:
"In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, whocould neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was saidby the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talkingLatin, Greek, and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were writtenout, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, buthaving slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, onlya few could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rabbinicaldialect. All trick was out of the question; the woman was asimple creature; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long beforeany explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be obtained.At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who determinedto trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble,discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by anold Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she livedtill his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man'scustom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into whichthe kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of hisbooks. The books were ransacked, and among them were found severalof the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rabbinicalwritings. In these works so many of the passages taken downat the young woman's bedside were identified that there could be noreasonable doubt as to their source."[606]
Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that has happenedin their trance. But in a succeeding trance they will oftenremember the events of a past one. This is like whathappens in those cases of 'double personality' in whichno recollection of one of the lives is to be found inthe other. We have already seen in an earlier chapterthat the sensibility often differs from one of the alternatepersonalities to another, and we have heard M. Pierre Janet'stheory that anæsthesias carry amnesias with them (seeabove,pp. 385 ff.). In certain cases this is evidently so;the throwing of certain functional brain-tracts out of gearwith others, so as to dissociate their consciousness fromthat of the remaining brain, throws them out for both sensorialand ideational service. M. Janet proved in variousways that what his patients forgot when anæsthetic theyremembered when the sensibility returned. For instance,he restored their tactile sense temporarily by means ofelectric currents, passes, etc., and then made them handlevarious objects, such as keys and pencils, or make particularmovements, like the sign of the cross. The moment theanæsthesia returned they found it impossible to recollectthe objects or the acts. 'They had had nothing in theirhands, they had done nothing,' etc. The next day, however,sensibility being again restored by similar processes, theyremembered perfectly the circumstance, and told whatthey had handled or had done.
All these pathological facts are showing us that thesphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think,and that in certain matters apparent oblivion is no proofagainst possible recall under other conditions. They giveno countenance, however, to the extravagant opinion that[Pg 683]nothing we experience can be absolutely forgotten. Inreal life, in spite of occasional surprises, most of what happensactually is forgotten. The only reasons for supposingthat if the conditions were forthcoming everything wouldrevive are of a transcendental sort. Sir Wm. Hamiltonquotes and adopts them from the German writer Schmid.Knowledge being a 'spontaneous self-energy' on the part ofthe mind,
"this energy being once determined, it is natural that it should persist,until again annihilated by other causes. This [annihilation] would bethe case, were the mind merely passive.... But the mental activity,the act of knowledge, of which I now speak, is more than this; it is anenergy of the self-active power of a subject one and indivisible: consequentlya part of the ego must be detached or annihilated, if a cognitiononce existent be again extinguished. Hence it is that the problemmost difficult of solution is not, how a mental activity endures, but howit ever vanishes."[607]
Those whom such an argument persuades may be lefthappy with their belief. Other positive argument there isnone, none certainly of a physiological sort.[608]
When memory begins to decay, proper names are whatgo first, and at all times proper names are harder to recollectthan those of general properties and classes of things.
This seems due to the fact that common qualities andnames have contracted an infinitely greater number of associationsin our mind than the names of most of the personswhom we know. Their memory is better organized. Propernames as well organized as those of our family and friends arerecollected as well as those of any other objects.[609] 'Organization'means numerous associations; and the more numerousthe associations, the greater the number of paths of recall.For the same reason adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions,and the cardinal verbs, those words, in short, whichform the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the[Pg 684]very last to decay. Kussmaul[610] makes the following acuteremark on this subject:
"The concreter a conception is, the sooner is its name forgotten.This is because our ideas of persons and things are less strongly boundup with their names than with such abstractions as their business, theircircumstances, their qualities. We easily can imagine persons andthings without their names, the sensorial image of them being moreimportant than that other symbolic image, their name. Abstract conceptions,on the other hand, are only acquired by means of the wordswhich alone serve to confer stability upon them. This is why verbs,adjectives, pronouns, and still more adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctionsare more intimately connected with our thinking than aresubstantives."
The disease called Aphasia, of which a little was saidinChapter II, has let in a flood of light on the phenomenonof Memory, by showing the number of ways in whichthe use of a given object, like a word, may be lost by themind. We may lose our acoustic idea or our articulatoryidea of it; neither without the other will give us propercommand of the word. And if we have both, but have lost thepaths of association between the brain-centres which supportthe two, we are in as bad a plight. 'Ataxic' and 'amnesic'aphasia, 'word-deafness,' and 'associative aphasia'are all practical losses of word-memory. We have thus, asM. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories.[611] Thevisual, the tactile, the muscular, the auditory memory mayall vary independently of each other in the same individual;and different individuals may have them developed in differentdegrees. As a rule, a man's memory is good in thedepartments in which his interest is strong; but those departmentsare apt to be those in which his discriminativesensibility is high. A man with a bad ear is not likely tohave practically a good musical memory, or a purblind personto remember visual appearances well. In a later chapterwe shall see illustrations of the differences in men'simagining power.[612] It is obvious that the machinery ofmemory must be largely determined thereby.
Mr. Galton, in his work on English Men of Science,[613] hasgiven a very interesting collation of cases showing individualvariations in the type of memory, where it is strong.Some have it verbal. Others have it good for facts andfigures, others for form. Most say that what is to be rememberedmust first be rationally conceived and assimilated.[614]
There is an interesting fact connected with remembering,which, so far as I know, Mr. R. Verdon was the firstwriter expressly to call attention to. We canset our memoryas it were to retain things for a certain time, and thenlet them depart.
"Individuals often remember clearly and well up to the time whenthey have to use their knowledge, and then, when it is no longer required,there follows a rapid and extensive decay of the traces. Manyschoolboys forget their lessons after they have said them, many barristersforget details got up for a particular case. Thus a boy learns thirtylines of Homer, says them perfectly, and then forgets them so thathe could not say five consecutive lines the next morning, and a barristermay be one week learned in the mysteries of making cog-wheels,but in the next he may be well acquainted with the anatomy of the ribsinstead."[615]
The rationale of this fact is obscure; and the existenceof it ought to make us feel how truly subtle are the nervousprocesses which memory involves. Mr. Verdon adds that
"When the use of a record is withdrawn, and attention withdrawnfrom it, and we think no more about it, we know that we experience afeeling of relief, and we may thus conclude that energy is in some wayliberated. If the ... attention is not withdrawn, so that we keepthe record in mind, we know that this feeling of relief does not takeplace.... Also we are well aware, not only that after this feeling ofrelief takes place, the record does not seem so well conserved as before,but that we have real difficulty in attempting to remember it."
This shows that we are not as entirely unconscious of atopic as we think, during the time in which we seem to bemerely retaining it subject to recall.
"Practically," says Mr. Verdon, "we sometimes keep a matter inhand not exactly by attending to it, but by keeping our attention referredto something connected with it from time to time. Translatingthis into the language of physiology, we mean that by referring attentionto a part within, or closely connected with, the system of traces[paths] required to be remembered, we keep it well fed, so that thetraces are preserved with the utmost delicacy."
This is perhaps as near as we can get to an explanation.Setting the mind to remember a thing involves a continualminimal irradiation of excitement into paths which leadthereto, involves the continued presence of the thing in the'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involveswithdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of the thing,and, after a time, obliteration of the paths.
A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things areimpressed better by active than by passive repetition. Imean that in learning by heart (for example), when we almostknow the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by aneffort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recoverthe words in the former way, we shall probably knowthem the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likelyneed the book once more.
The learning by heart means theformation of paths from a former set to a later set of cerebralword-processes: call 1 and 2 in the diagram the processesin question; then when we remember by inward effort, thepath is formed by discharge from 1 to 2, just as it will afterwardsbe used. But whenwe excite 2 by the eye, althoughthe path 1—2 doubtless is thenshot through also, the phenomenonwhich we are discussingshows that the direct dischargefrom 1 into 2, unaided by theeyes, ploughs the deeper andmore permanent groove. Thereis, moreover, a greater amountof tension accumulated in thebrain before the discharge from 1 to 2, when the lattertakes place unaided by the eye. This is proved by the generalfeeling of strain in the effort to remember 2; and this[Pg 687]also ought to make the discharge more violent and thepath more deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts forthe familiar fact that we remember our own theories, ourown discoveries, combinations, inventions, in short whatever'ideas' originate in our own brain, a thousand times betterthan exactly similar things which are communicated tous from without.
A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involvedin remembering. According to the assumptions of thisbook, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and thosethoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation isone which we can only write down empirically, confessingthat no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. Thatbrains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, thisis the one mystery which returns, no matter of what sortthe consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be.Sensations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery asmuch as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. Tothe platonizing tradition in philosophy, however, this isnot so. Sensational consciousness is somethingquasi-material,hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonderat.Relating consciousness is quite the reverse, and themystery of it is unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for example,in his usually excellent book,[616] after well showing thematter-of-fact dependence of retention and reproduction onbrain-paths, says:
"In the study of perception psycho-physicscan do much towards ascientific explanation. It can tell what qualities of stimuli producecertain qualities of sensations, it can suggest a principle relating thequantity of the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation; it caninvestigate the laws under which, by combined action of variousexcitations, thesensations are combined [?] into presentationsof sense; it can show how the time-relations of the sensationsand percepts in consciousness correspond to the objective relationsin time of the stimulations. But for that spiritual activitywhich actuallyputs together in consciousness the sensations, it cannoteven suggest the beginning of a physical explanation. Moreover,no cerebral process can be conceived of, which—in case itwere known to exist—could possibly be regarded as a fitting basisfor this unifyingactus of mind. Thus also, and even more emphatically,must we insist upon the complete inability of physiology to[Pg 688]suggest an explanation for conscious memory, in so far as it ismemory—thatis, in so far as it most imperatively calls for explanation....The very essence of the act of memory consists in the ability to say:This after-image is the image of a percept I had a moment since; orthis image of memory is the image of the percept I had at a certaintime—I do not remember precisely how long since. It would, then, bequite contrary to the facts to hold that, when an image of memory appearsin consciousness, it is recognized as belonging to a particularoriginal percept on account of its perceived resemblance to this percept.The original percept does not exist and will never bereproduced. Evenmore palpably false and absurd would it be to hold that any similarityof the impressions or processes in end organs or central organs explainsthe act of conscious memory. Consciousness knows nothing ofsuch similarity; knows nothing even of the existence of nervous impressionsand processes. Moreover, we could neverknow two impressionsor processes that are separated in time to be similar, withoutinvolving the same inexplicable act of memory. It is a fact of consciousnesson which all possibility of connected experience and ofrecorded and cumulative human knowledge is dependent that certainphases or products of consciousness appear with a claim to stand for(to represent)[617] past experiences to which they are regarded as in somerespect similar. It is this peculiar claim in consciousness which constitutesthe essence of an act of memory; it is this which makes thememory wholly inexplicable as a mere persistence or recurrence ofsimilar impressions. It is this which makes conscious memory aspiritual phenomenon, the explanation of which, as arising out of nervousprocesses and conditions, is not simply undiscovered in fact, bututterly incapable of approach by the imagination. When, then, wespeak of a physical basis of memory, recognition must be made of thecomplete inability of science to suggest any physical process which canbe conceived of as correlated with that peculiar and mysteriousactusof the mind,connecting its present and its past, which constitutes theessence of memory."
This passage seems to me characteristic of the reigninghalf-way modes of thought. It puts the difficulties in thewrong places. At one moment it seems to admit with thecruder sensationalists that the material of our thoughts isindependent sensations reproduced, and that the 'puttingtogether' of these sensations would be knowledge, if itcould only be brought about, the only mystery being as tothe what 'actus' can bring it about. At another moment itseems to contend that even this sort of 'combining' wouldnot be knowledge, because certain of the elements connected[Pg 689]must 'claim to represent or stand for' past originals,which is incompatible with their being mere images revived.The result is various confused and scattered mysteries andunsatisfied intellectual desires. But why not 'pool' ourmysteries into one great mystery, the mystery that brain-processesoccasion knowledge at all? It is surely no differentmystery tofeel myself by means of one brain-processwriting at this table now, and by means of a differentbrain-process a year hence toremember myself writing. Allthat psychology can do is to seek to determinewhat theseveral brain-processes are; and this, in a wretchedly imperfectway, is what such writings as the present chapterhave begun to do. But of 'images reproduced,' and 'claimingto represent,' and 'put together by a unifyingactus,'I have been silent, because such expressions either signifynothing, or they are only roundabout ways of simply sayingthat thepast is known when certain brain-conditionsare fulfilled, and it seems to me that the straightest andshortest way of saying that is the best.
For a history of opinion about Memory, and other bibliographicreferences, I must refer to the admirable littlemonograph on the subject by Mr. W. H. Burnham in theAmerican Journal of Psychology, vols. i and ii. Usefulbooks are: D. Kay's Memory, What It Is, and How toImprove It (1888); and F. Fauth's Das Gedächtniss, Studiezu einer Pädagogik, etc., 1888.
[567] L'Homme et l'Intelligence, p. 32.
[568] Professor Richet has therefore no right to say, as he does in anotherplace (Revue Philosophique, xxi, 570): "Without memory no conscioussensation, without memory no consciousness." All he is entitled to say is:"Without memory no consciousness known outside of itself." Of thesort of consciousness that is an object for later states, and becomes as itwere permanent, he gives a good example: "Who of us, alas! has not experienceda bitter and profound grief, the immense laceration cause by thedeath of some cherished fellow-being? Well, in these great griefs thepresent endures neither for a minute, for an hour, nor for a day, but forweeks and months. The memory of the cruel moment will not effaceitself from consciousness. It disappears not, but remains living, present,coexisting with the multitude of other sensations which are juxtaposed inconsciousness alongside of this one persistent emotion which is felt alwaysin the present tense. A long time is needed ere we can attain to forgettingit, ere we can make it enter into the past.Hæret lateri letalis arundo."(Ibid. 583.)
[569] This is the primary positive after-image. According to Helmholtz,one third of a second is the most favorable length of exposure to the lightfor producing it. Longer exposure, complicated by subsequent admissionof light to the eye, results in the ordinary negative and complementaryafter-images, with their changes, which may (if the original impressionwas brilliant and the fixation long) last for many minutes. Fechner givesthe name of memory-after-images (Psychophysik, ii, 492) to the instantaneouspositive effects, and distinguishes them from ordinary after imagesby the following characters: 1) Their originals must have beenattendedto, only such parts of a compound original as have been attended to appearing.This is not the case in common visual after-images. 2) Thestrain of attention towards them is inward, as in ordinary remembering,not outward, as in observing a common after-image. 3) A short fixationof the original is better for the memory-after-image, a long one for theordinary after-image. 4) The colors of the memory-after-image arenever complementary of those of the original.
[570] Hermann's Hdbch. ii, 2. 282.
[571] Rev. Philos., 562.
[572] Richet says: "The present has a certain duration, a variable duration,sometimes a rather long one, which comprehends all the time occupied bythe after-reverberation [retentissement, after-image] of a sensation. For example,if the reverberation of an electric shock within our nerves laststen minutes, for that electric shock there is a present of ten minutes. Onthe other hand, a feebler sensation will have a shorter present. But inevery case, for a conscious sensation [I should say for aremembered sensation]to occur, there must be a present of a certain duration, of a few secondsat least." We have seen in the last chapter that it is hard to trace thebackward limits of this immediately intuited duration, or specious present.The figures which M. Richet supposes appear to be considerably too large.
[573] Cf. Fechner, Psychophysik, ii, 499.
[574] The primary after-image itself cannot be utilized if the stimulus is toobrief. Mr. Cattell found (Psychologische Studien, iii, p. 93 ff.) that thecolor of a light must fall upon the eye for a period varying from 0.00275to 0.006 of a second, in order to be recognized for what it is. Lettersof the alphabet and familiar words require from 0.00075 to 0.00175sec.—truly an interval extremely short. Some letters, E for example, areharder than others. In 1871 Helmholtz and Baxt had ascertained thatwhen an impression was immediately followed by another, the latterquenched the former and prevented it from being known to later consciousness.The first stimulus was letters of the alphabet, the second a brightwhite disk. "With an interval of 0.0048 sec. between the two excitations[I copy here the abstract in Ladd's Physiological Psychology, p. 480],the disk appeared as scarcely a trace of a weak shimmer; with an intervalof 0.0096 sec., letters appeared in the shimmer—one or two which couldbe partially recognized when the interval increased to 0.0144 sec. Whenthe interval was made 0.0192 sec. the objects were a little more clearlydiscerned; at 0.00336 sec. four letters could be well recognized; at 0.0432sec., five letters; and at 0.0528 sec. all the letters could be read." (Pflüger'sArchiv, iv, 325 ff.)
[575] When the past is recalled symbolically, or conceptually only, it istrue that no such copy need be there. In no sort of conceptual knowledgeis it requisite that definitely resembling images be there (cf.pp. 471 ff.).But as all conceptual knowledge stands for intuitive knowledge, and terminatestherein, I abstract from this complication, and confine myself to thosememories in which the past is directly imaged in the mind, or, as we say,intuitively known.
[576] E.g. Spencer, Psychology, i, p. 448. How do the believers in thesufficiency of the 'image' formulate the cases where we remember thatsomething didnot happen—that we did not wind our watch, did not lockthe door, etc.? It is very hard to account for these memories of omission.The image of winding the watch is just as present to my mind nowwhen I remember that I did not wind it as if I remembered that I did.It must be a difference in the mode of feeling the image which leads meto such different conclusions in the two cases. When I remember that Idid wind it, I feel it grown together with its associates of past date andplace. When I remember that I did not, it keeps aloof; the associates fusewith each other, but not with it. This sense of fusion, of the belongingtogether of things, is a most subtle relation; the sense of non-fusion isan equally subtle one. Both relations demand most complex mental processesto know them, processes quite different from that mere presence orabsence of an image which does such service in the cruder books.
[577] Psychologia Empirica, § 174.
[578] Analysis, i, 330-1. Mill believed that the various things remembered,the self included, enter consciousness in the form of separate ideas, but sorapidly that they are 'all clustered into one.' "Ideas called up in closeconjunction ... assume, even when there is the greatest complexity, theappearance, not of many ideas, but of one" (vol. i, p. 123). This mythologydoes not impair the accuracy of his description of memory'sobject.
[580] Professor Bain adds, in a note to this passage of Mill's: "This processseems best expressed by laying down a law of Compound or CompositeAssociation, under which a plurality of feeble links of connection may bea substitute for one powerful and self-sufficing link."
[581] Analysis, chap. x.
[582] H. Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind (London, 1876), p. 513.
[583] The only fact which might plausibly be alleged against this view is thefamiliar one that we may feel the lapse of time in an experience so monotonousthat its earlier portions can have no 'associates' different from itslater ones. Sit with closed eyes, for example, and steadily pronounce somevowel-sound, thus,a—a—a—a—a— ... thinking only of the sound.Nothing changes during the time occupied by the experiment, and yet atthe end of it you know that its beginning was far away. I think, however,that a close attention to what happens during this experiment showsthat it does not violate in the least the conditions of recall laid downin the text; and that if the moment to which we mentally hark back liemany seconds behind the present instant, it always has different associatesby which we define its date. Thus it was when I had just breathedout, or in; or it was the 'first moment' of the performance, the one 'precededby silence;' or it was 'one very close to that;' or it was 'one whenwe were looking forward instead of back, as now;' or it is simply representedby a number and conceived symbolically with no definite imageof its date. It seems to me that I have no really intuitive discriminationof the different past moments after the experience has gone on some littletime, but that back of the 'specious present' they all fuse into a singleconception of thekind of thing that has been going on, with a more or lessclear sense of the total time it has lasted, this latter being based on anautomatic counting of the successive pulses of thought by which theprocess is from moment to moment recognized as being always the same.Within the few seconds which constitute the specious present there is anintuitive perception of the successive moments. But these moments, ofwhich we have a primary memory-image, are not properlyrecalled fromthe past, our knowledge of them is in no way analogous to a memory properlyso called. Cf.supra,p. 646.
[584] On Intelligence, i, 258-9.
[585] Not thatmere native tenacity will make a man great. It must becoupled with great passions and great intellect besides. Imbeciles sometimeshave extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes (EmpirischePsychol., p. 95) the case of a young man whom he examined. Hehad with difficulty been taught to read and speak. "But if two or threeminutes were allowed him to peruse an octavo page, he then could spellthe single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay openbefore him.... That there was no deception I could test by means of anew Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands, which henever could have seen, and of which both subject and language wereunknown to him. He read off [mentally] many lines, skipping about too,of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the experimenthad been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this caseas if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image ['primarymemory,'vide supra, p. 643]. But he adds that the youth 'rememberedhis pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan.1871 (vi, 6) is an account by Mr. W. D. Henkle (together with the stockclassic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvaniafarmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date hadfallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather it was, andwhat he was doing on each of more than fifteen thousand days. Pity thatsuch a magnificent faculty as this could not have found more worthy application!
What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a manneed bear no definite relation to his other mental powers. Men of thehighest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant.One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of thissort. He never keeps written note of anything, yet is never at a loss for afact which he has once heard. He remembers the old addresses of all hisNew York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they themselveshave long since moved away from and forgotten. He says that heshould probably recognize an individual fly, if he had seen him thirtyyears previous—he is, by the way, an entomologist. As an instance of hisdesultory memory, he was introduced to a certain colonel at a club. Theconversation fell upon the signs of age in man. The colonel challengedhim to estimate his age. He looked at him, and gave the exact day of hisbirth, to the wonder of all. But the secret of this accuracy was that, havingpicked up some days previously an army-register, he had idly turned overits list of names, with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached,and when the colonel's name was mentioned to him at the club, thesefigures, on which he had not bestowed a moment's thought, involuntarilysurged up in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon.
[586] Cf. Ebbinghaus: Ueber das Gedächtniss (1885), pp. 67, 45. One mayhear a person say: "I have a very poor memory, because I was never systematicallymade to learn poetry at school."
[587] How to Strengthen the Memory; or, The Natural and Scientific Methodsof Never Forgetting. By M. H. Holbrook, M.D. New York (no date).
[588] Page 39.
[589] Op. cit. p. 100.
[590] In order to test the opinion so confidently expressed in the text, I havetried to see whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetryby heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind ofpoetry. During eight successive days I learned 158 lines of Victor Hugo's'Satyr.' The total number of minutes required for this was 131 5/6—it shouldbe said that I had learned nothing by heart for many years. I then, workingfor twenty-odd minutes daily, learned the entire first book of ParadiseLost, occupying 38 days in the process. After this training I went back toVictor Hugo's poem, and found that 158 additional lines (divided exactly ason the former occasion) took me 151 1/2 minutes. In other words, I committedmy Victor Hugo to memory before the training at the rate of a line in50 seconds, after the training at the rate of a line in 57 seconds, just theopposite result from that which the popular view would lead one to expect.But as I was perceptibly fagged with other work at the time of the secondbatch of Victor Hugo, I thought that might explain the retardation; so Ipersuaded several other persons to repeat the test.
Dr. W. H. Burnham learned 16 lines of In Memoriam for 8 days; time,14-17 minutes—daily average 14 3/4. He then trained himself on Schiller'stranslation of the second book of the Æneid into German, 16 lines dailyfor 26 consecutive days. On returning to the same quantity of In Memoriamagain, he found his maximum time 20 minutes, minimum 10, average14 27/48. As he feared the outer conditions might not have been as favorablethis time as the first, he waited a few days and got conditions as near aspossible identical. The result was, minimum time 8 minutes; maximum19 1/2; average 14 3/48.
Mr. E. S. Drown tested himself on Virgil for 16 days, then again for16 days, after training himself on Scott. Average time before training,13 minutes 26 seconds; after training, 12 minutes 16 seconds. [Sixteendays is too long for the test, it gives time for training on the test-verse.]
Mr. C. H. Baldwin took 10 lines for 15 days as his test, trained himselfon 450 lines 'of an entirely different verse,' and then took 15 days moreof the former verse 10 lines a day. Average result: 3 minutes 41 secondsbefore, 3 minutes 2 seconds after, training. [Same criticism as before.]
Mr. E. A. Pease tested himself on Idyls of the King, and trained himselfon Paradise Lost. Average result of 6 days each time: 14 minutes 34seconds before, 14 minutes 55 seconds after, training. Mr. Burnham havingsuggested that to eliminate facilitating effect entirely from the trainingverses one ought to test one's selfà la Ebbinghaus on series of nonsense-syllables,having no analogy whatever with any system of expressive verses,I induced two of my students to perform that experiment also. The recordis unfortunately lost; but the result was a very considerable shortening ofthe average time of the second series of nonsense-syllables, learned aftertraining. This seems to me, however, more to show the effects of rapidhabituation to the nonsense-verses themselves than those of the poetryused between them. But I mean to prosecute the experiments farther,and will report in another place.
One of my students having quoted a clergyman of his acquaintancewho had marvellously improved by practice his power of learning hissermons by heart, I wrote to the gentleman for corroboration. I appendhis reply, which shows that the increased facility is due rather to a changein his methods of learning than to his native retentiveness having grownby exercise: "As for memory, mine has improved year by year, exceptwhen in ill-health, like a gymnast's muscle. Before twenty it took threeor four days to commit an hour-long sermon; after twenty, two days, oneday, half a day, and now one slow analytic, very attentive or adhesivereading does it. But memory seems to me the most physical of intellectualpowers. Bodily ease and freshness have much to do with it. Then thereis a great difference of facility in method. I used to commit sentence bysentence. Now I take the idea of the whole, then its leading divisions,then its subdivisions, then its sentences."
[591] E. Pick: Memory and its Doctors (1888), p. 7.
[592] This system is carried out in great detail in a book called 'MemoryTraining,' by Wm. L. Evans (1889).
[593] Paulhan, L'Activité mental, et les Éléments de l'Esprit (1889). p. 70.
[594] On Intelligence, i, 77-82.
[595] Psychology, § 201.
[596] Professor Höffding considers that the absence of contiguous associatesdistinctly thought-of is a proof that associative processes are not concernedin these cases of instantaneous recognition where we get a strong sense offamiliarity with the object, but no recall of previous time or place. Histheory of what happens is that the object before us, A, comes with a sense offamiliarity whenever it awakensa slumbering image, a, of its own past self,whilst without this image it seems unfamiliar. Thequality of familiarityis due to the coalescence of the two similar processes A +a in the brain(Psychologie, p. 188; Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., xiii, 432 [1889]). Thisexplanation is a very tempting one where the phenomenon of recognition isreduced to its simplest terms. Experiments have been performed in Wundt'slaboratory by Messrs. Wolfe, see below,p. 679, and Lehmann (PhilosophischeStudien, v, 96), in which a person had to tell out of several closely resemblingsensible impressions (sounds, tints of color) presented, which ofthem was the same with one presented a moment before. And it doesseem here as if the fading process in the just-excited tract must combinewith the process of the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar subjectivetinge which should separate it from the impressions which theother objects give. But recognition of this immediate sort is beyond ourpower after a very short time has intervened. A couple of minutes' intervalis generally fatal to it; so that it is impossible to conceive thatour frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having beenmet before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we associateahead of classification with the object, the time-interval hasmuch less effect. Dr. Lehmann could identify shades of gray muchmore successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names ornumbers to them. Here it is the recall of the contiguous associate,the number or name, which brings about the recognition. Where anexperience is complex, each element of the total object has had the otherelements for its past contiguous associates. Each element thus tends torevive the other elements from within, at the same time that the outwardobject is making them revive from without. We have thus, whenever wemeet a familiar object, that sense ofexpectation gratified which is so largea factor in our æsthetic emotions; and even were there no 'fringe of tendency'toward the arousal ofextrinsic associates (which there certainly always is),still thisintrinsic play of mutual association among the partswould give a character of ease to familiar percepts which would make ofthem a distinct subjective class. A process fills its old bed in a differentway from that in which it makes a new bed. One can appeal to introspectionfor proof. When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into whichI once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikesme with the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stainedface of the 'sticker,' whom I had long ceased to think of, is immediatelyrecognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and reddenedwoodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion of disgust,andall the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish themeelves asfamiliar occupants of my mind; theextraneous associates of the past timeare anything but prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving,say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his biography, I can do soonly partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actualface, am smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I wasstriving to resuscitate,—where in the experience is the element ofextrinsicassociation? In both these cases it surelyfeels as if the moment when thesense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when allextraneousassociates were most suppressed. The butcher's face recalls the formerwalls of the shambles; their thought recalls the groaning beasts, and theythe face again, just as I now experience them, with no different past ingredient.In like manner the peculiar deepening of my consciousness of theRajah's physiognomy at the moment when I open the book and say "Ah!that's the very face!" is so intense as to banish from my mind all collateralcircumstances, whether of the present or of former experiences. But hereit is the nose preparing tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them for themouth, the mouth preparing them for the nose again, all these processesinvolving paths of contiguous association, as defended in the text. I cannotagree, therefore, with Prof. Höffding, in spite of my respect for him asa psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is onlyexplicable through the recall and comparison of the thing with its ownpast image. Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional ground forreinstating the general notion which we have already rejected (supra,p.592) that a 'sensation' is ever received into the mind by an 'image' ofits own past self. It is received by contiguous associates; or if they formtoo faint a fringe, its neural currents run into a bed which is still 'warm'from just-previous currents, and which consequently feel different fromcurrents whose bed is cold. I agree, however, with Höffding that Dr.Lehmann's experiments (many of them) do not seem to prove the pointwhich he seeks to establish. Lehmann, indeed, seems himself to believethat we recognize a sensation A by comparing it with its own past imageα (loc. cit. p. 114), in which opinion I altogether fail to concur.
[597] Duality of the Mind, p. 84. The same thesis is defended by the lateMr. R. H. Proctor, who gives some cases rather hard to reconcile with myown proposed explanation, in 'Knowledge' for Nov. 8, 1884. See alsoRibot, Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 149 ff.
[598] Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsychologie u. s. w., Bd. v, p. 146.
[599] Ueber das Gedächtniss, experimentelle Untersuchungen (1885), p. 64.
[600]Ibid. § 23.
[601]Op. cit. p. 103.
[602] All the inferences for which we can give no articulate reasons exemplifythis law. In the chapter on Perception we shall have innumerableexamples of it. A good pathological illustration of it is given in the curiousobservations of M. Binet on certain hysterical subjects, with anæsthetichands, who saw what was done with their hands as an independent visionbut did not feel it. The hand being hidden by a screen, the patient wasordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual image whichmight project itself thereon. Numbers would then come, correspondingto the number of times the insensible member was raised, touched, etc.Colored lines and figures would come, corresponding to similar ones tracedon the palm; the hand itself, or its fingers, would come when manipulated;and, finally, objects placed in it would come; but on the hand itself nothingcould ever be felt. The whole phenomenon shows how an idea whichremains itself below the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasionassociative effects therein. The skin-sensations, unfelt by the patient'sprimary consciousness, awaken, nevertheless, their usual visual associatestherein.
[603] I copy from the abstract of Wolfe's paper in 'Science' for Nov. 19,1886. The original is in Psychologische Studien, iii, 534 ff.
[604] Essay conc. Human Understanding, ii, x, 5.
[605] Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 46.
[606] Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, i, 117 (quoted in Carpenter's MentalPhysiology, chapter x, which see for a number of other cases, all unfortunatelydeficient, like this one, in the evidence of exact verification which'psychical research 'demands). Compare also Th. Ribot, Diseases of Memory,chap. iv. The knowledge of foreign words, etc., reported in trancemediums, etc., may perhaps often be explained by exaltation of memory.An hystero-epileptic girl, whose case I quoted in Proc. of Am. Soc. forPsychical Research, automatically writes an 'Ingoldsby Legend' in severalcantos, which her parents say she 'had never read.' Of course she musthave read or heard it, but perhaps neverlearned it. Of some macaronicLatin-English verses about a sea-serpent which her hand also wrote unconsciously,I have vainly sought the original (see Proc., etc., p. 553).
[607] Lectures on Metaph., ii, 212.
[608] Cf. on this point J. Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1885), p. 119ff.; R. Verdon, Forgetfulness, in Mind, ii, 437.
[609] Cf. A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, p. 442.
[610] Störungen der Sprache, quoted by Ribot, Les Maladies de la M., p. 133.
[611] Op. cit. chap. iii.
[612] "Those who have a good memory for figures are in general thosewho know best how to handle them, that is, those who are most familiarwith their relations to each other and to things." (A. Maury, Le Sommeilet les Rêves, p. 443.)
[613] Pp. 107-121.
[614] For other examples see Hamilton's Lectures, ii, 219, and A. Huber:Das Gedächtniss, p. 36 ff.
[615] Mind, ii, 449.
[616] Physiological Psychology, pt. ii, chap. x, § 23.
[617] Why not say 'know'?—W. J.
A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. I. J. K. L. M. N. O. P. Q. R. S. T. U. V. W. X. Y. Z.
Authors the titles only of whose works are cited are not, as a rule, referred to inthis index.
Abbott, T. K., II. 221
Abstract ideas, I.468,508; II. 48
Abstract qualities, II. 329-37, 340
Abstraction, I.505; II. 346 ff. Seedistraction
Accommodation, feeling of, II. 93, 235
Acquaintance, I.220
Acquired characters, seeinheritance
Acquisitiveness, II. 422, 679
Actors, their emotions whilst playing, II. 464
Adaptation of mind to environment results in our knowing the impressing circumstances, II. 625 ff.
Æsthetic principles, II. 639, 672
After-images, I.645-7; II. 67, 200, 604
Agoraphobia, II. 421
Agraphia, I.40,62
Alfieri, II. 543
Allen, G., I.144; II. 631
Alteration of one impression by another one simultaneously taking place, II. 28 ff., 201
Alternating personality, I.379 ff.
Ambiguity of optical sensations, II. 231-7
Amidon, I.100
Amnesia in hysterical disease, I.384 ff.;
accompanies anæsthesia,386,682;
in hypnotic trance, II. 602.
Seeforgetting
Amputated limbs, feeling of, II. 38-9, 105
Anæsthesia, in hysterics, I.203 ff.;
involves correlated amnesia,386;
movements executed during, II. 105, 489-92, 520-1;
and emotion, 455-6;
in hypnotism, 606-9
Analogies, the perception of, I.530
Analysis, I.502; II. 344
Anger, II. 409, 460, 478
Aphasia, motor, I.37,62;
sensory, I.53-4-5;
optical, I.60;
amnesia in,640,684; II. 58
Apperception, II. 107 ff.
Apperception, transcendental Unity of, I.362
Appropriateness, characterizes mental acts, I.13
Apraxia, I.52
A priori connections exist only between objects of perception and movements, not between sensory ideas, II. 581.
A priori ideas and experience, Chapter XXVIII.
A priori propositions, II. 661-5
Archer, W., II. 464
Arithmetic, II. 654.
Articular sensibility, II. 189 ff.
Association,Chapter XIV:
is not of ideas, but of things thought of, I.554;
examples of,555 ff.;
its rapidity,557 ff.;
by contiguity,561;
elementary law of,566;
'mixed' association,571;
conditions of,575 ff.;
by similarity,578;
three kinds of association compared,580;
in voluntary thought,583;
by contrast,593;
history of the doctrine of,594;
association the means of localization, II. 158 ff.;
connection of association by similarity with reasoning, 345 ff.
Associationism, I.161
Associationist theory of the self, I.342,350 ff.;
of space-perception, II. 271 ff.
Asymbolia, I.52
Attention,Chapter XI: to how many things possible, I.405 ff.;
to simultaneous sight and sound,411 ff.;
its varieties,416;
passive,417;
voluntary,420 ff.;
its effects,424 ff.;
its influence on reaction-time,427-34;
accompanied by feelings of tension due to adaptation of sense-organs,434-8;
involves imagination or preperception of object,438-44;
conceivable as a mere effect,448 ff.
Aubert, H., II. 235
Auditory centre in brain, I.52-6
Auditory type of imagination, II. 60
'Ausfallserscheinungen,' I.75
Automatic writing, I.393 ff.
Austen, Jane, I.571
Automaton-Theory,Chapter V:
postulated rather than proved, I.134-8;
reasons against it,138-144;
applied to attention,448
disregarded in this book, II. 583
Azam, Dr., I.380.
Babe and candle, scheme of, I.25
Baby's first perception, II. 8, 84;
his early instinctive movements, 404 ff.
Bær, von, I.639
Bagehot, W., I.582; II. 283, 308
Bain, on series conscious of itself, I.162;
on self-esteem,313;
on self-love,328,354;
on attention,444;
on association,485,530,561,589,601,653; II. 6, 12, 69, 186, 271, 282, 296, 319, 322, 372-3, 463, 466, 551, 554-5
Ballard, I.266
Balzac, I.374
Bartels, I.432
Bastian, H. C., II. 488
Baumann, II. 409
Baxt, I.648
Beaunis, E., II. 492
Bechterew, I.407
Belief, Chapter XXI:
in sensations, II. 299 ff.;
in objects of emotion, 306 ff.;
in theories, 311 ff.;
and will, 319.
Seereality
Bell, C., II. 483, 492
Bergson, J., II. 609
Berkeley, I.254,469,476; II. 43, 49, 77, 212, 240, 666
Bernhardt, II. 502
Bernheim, I.206
Bertrand, A., II. 518
Bessel, I.413
Binet, A., I.203 ff.; II. 71, 74, 128 ff., 130, 167, 491, 520
Black, R. W., II. 339
Bleek, II. 358
Blind, the, their space-perception, II. 202 ff.;
after restoration to sight, 211-2;
hallucination of a blind man, 323;
dreams of the, 44
Blindness, mental, I.41,50,66. SeeSight,Hemianopsia, etc.
Blix, II. 170
Bloch, II. 515
Blood, its exciting effect on the nerves, II. 412-3
Blood, B. P., II. 284
Blood-supply to brain, I.97
Bourne, A., I.391
Bourru, Dr., I.388
Bowditch, H. P., his reaction-timer, I.87;
on contrast in seen motion, II. 247;
on knee-jerk, 380;
comparison of touch and sight, 520
Bowen, F., I.214
Bowne, B. P., on knowledge, I.219
Bradley, F. H., I.452,474,604; II. 7, 9, 284, 648
Brain, its functions, Chapter II:
of frog, I.14;
of dog,33;
of monkey,34;
of man,36;
lower centres compared with hemispheres,9-10,75;
circulation in,97;
instability,139;
its connection with Mind,176;
'entire' brain not a real physical fact,176;
its changes as subtle as those of thought,234;
its dying vibrations operative in producing consciousness,242
Influence of environment upon it,626 ff.
Brain-process, seeneural process
Brain-structure, the two modes of its genesis, II. 624
Brentano, I.187,547
Bridgeman, Laura, II. 62, 358, 420
Broca's convolution, I.39,54
Brodhun, I.542
Brown, Thos., I.248,277,371; II. 271
Brown-Séquard, I.43,67,69; II. 695
Brutes, the intellect of, II. 348 ff.
Bucke, R. M., II. 460
Bubnoff, I.82
Burke, II. 464
Burnham, W. H., I.689
Burot, Dr., I.388
Caird, E., I.366,469,471, II. ff.
Calmeil, A., II. 524
Campanella, II. 464
Campbell, G., I.261
Cardaillac, I.247
Carlyle, T., I.311
Carpenter, W. B., on formation of habits, I.110;
ethical remarks on habit,120;
mistakes in speech,257;
lapses of memory,374;
on not feeling pain,419;
on ideo-motor action, II. 522
Carville, I.69
Catalepsy, I.229; II. 583
Cattell, on reaction-time, I.92,432;524;
on recognition,407,648;
on attention,420;
on association-time,558 ff.
Cause, consciousness a, I.187; II. 583, 592
Centres, cortical, I.30 ff.;
motor,31;
visual,41;
auditory,52;
olfactory,57;
gustatory,58;
tactile,58
Cerebral process, seeneural process
Cerebrum, seeBrain,Hemispheres
Chadbourne, P A., II. 383
Characters, general, II. 329 ff.
Charcot, I.54-5; II. 58, 596
Chloroform, I.531
Choice, seeselection,interest
Circulation in brain, I.97;
effects of sensory stimuli upon, II. 374 ff.;
in grief, 443-4
Classic and romantic, II. 469
Classifications, II. 646
Clay, E. C. R., I.609
Cleanliness, II. 434
Clearness, I.426
Clifford, I.130-2
Clouston, II. 114, 284-5, 537, 539
Cobbe, F. P., I.374
Cochlea, theory of its action, II. 169
Cognition, seeknowing
Cohen, H., I.365
Coleridge, S. T., I.572,681
Collateral innervation, seevicarious function
Comparison,Chapter XIII:
relations discovered by comparison have nothing to do with the time and space order of their terms, II. 641;
mediate, 489, 644;
seedifference,likeness
Composition, of Mind out of its elements, seeMind-Stuff theory;
differences due to, I.491
Comte, A., I.187
Conceivability, I.463
Conceptions,Chapter XII:
defined, I.461;
their permanence,464 ff.;
do not develop of themselves,466 ff.;
abstract,468;
universal,478;
essentially teleological, II. 332
Conceptual order different from perceptual, I.482
Concomitants, law of varying, I.506
Confusion, II. 352
Consciousness, its seat, I.65;
its distribution,142-3;
its function of selection,139-41;
ispersonal in form,225;
is continuous,237,488;
of lack,251;
of self not essential,273;
ofobject comes first,274;
always partial and selective,284 ff., seeSelection;
of the process of thinking,300 ff.;
the span of,405
Consent, in willing, II. 568
Considerations, I.20
Constructiveness, II. 426
Contiguity, association by, I.561
Continuity of object of consciousness, I.488
Contrast, of colors, II. 13-27;
of temperatures, 14;
two theories of, 17 ff., 245;
of movements, 245 ff., 250
Convolutions, motor, I.41
Cortex, of brain, experiments on, I.31 ff.
Cramming, I.663
Credulity, our primitive, II. 319
Cudworth, R., II. 9
'Cue,' the mental, II. 497, 518
Cumberland, S., II. 525
Curiosity, II. 429
Czermak, II. 170, 175
Darwin, C., II. 432, 446, 479, 484, 678, 681-2-4
Darwinism, scholastic reputation of, II. 670
Data, the, of psychology, I.184
Davidson, T., I.474
Deaf-mute's thought in infancy, I.266
Deafness, mental, I.50,55-6. Seehearing
Dean, S., I.394
Decision, five types of, II. 531
Degenerations, descending in nerve-centres, I.37,52
Delabarre, E., II. 13-27, 71
Delbœuf, J., I.455,531,541,542,548-9; II. 100, 189, 249, 264, 605, 609, 612
Deliberation, II. 528 ff.
Delusions, insane, I.375; II. 114 ff.
Depth, seethird dimension
Descartes, I.180,200,214,344
Destutt de Tracy, I.247
Determinism must be postulated by psychology, II. 576
Dewey, J., I.473
Dichotomy in thinking, II. 654
Dickens, C., I.374
Dietze, I.407,617
Difference, not resolvable into composition, I.490;
noticed most between species of a genus,529;
the magnitude of,531;
least discernible,537 ff.;
methods for ascertaining,540 ff.
Difference, local, II. 167 ff.;
genesis of our perception of, 642
Diffusion of movements, the law of, II. 372
Dimension, third, II. 134 ff., 212 ff., 220
Dipsomania, II. 543
Disbelief, II. 284
Discrimination,Chapter XIII:
conditions which favor it, I.494;
improves by practice,508;
spatial, II. 167 ff.
Seedifference
Dissociation, I.486-7;
law of, by varying concomitants,506
Dissociation, ditto, II. 345, 359
Dissociation, of one part of the mind from another, seeJanet, Pierre
Distance, between terms of a series, I.530
Distance, in space, seethird dimension
Distraction, I.401. Seeinattention
Dizziness, seevertigo
Dog's cortical centres, after Ferrier, I.33;
after Munk, I.44-5;
after Luciani, I.46,53,58,60;
for special muscles,64;
hemispheres ablated,70
Donaldson, II. 170
Donders, II. 235
Double images, II. 225-30, 252
Doubt, II. 284, 318 ff.;
the mania of, 545
Dougal, J. D., II. 222
Drainage of one brain-cell by another, II. 583 ff.
Dreams, II. 294
Drobisch, I.632,660
Drunkard, II. 565
Drunkenness, I.144; II. 543, 565, 628
Dualism of object and knower, I.218,220
Duality, of Brain, I.390,399
Dudley, A. T., on mental qualities of an athlete, II. 539
Dufour, II. 211
Dunan, Ch., II. 176, 206, 208-9
Duration, the primitive object in time-perception, I.609;
our estimate of short,611 ff.
'Dynamogeny,' II. 379 ff., 491
Ebbinghaus, H., I.548,676
Eccentric projection of sensations, II. 31 ff., 195 ff.
Education of hemispheres, I.76
Seepedagogic remarks
Effort, II. 534-7;
Muscular effort, 562;
Moral effort, 549, 561, 578-9
Egger, V., I.280-1-2; II. 256
Ego, Empirical, I.291 ff.;
pure,342 ff.;
'transcendental,'362;
criticised,364
Elementary factors of mind, seeUnits of consciousness
Elsas, I.548
Emerson, R. W., I.582, II. 307
Emotion, Chapter XXV:
continuous with instinct, II. 442;
description of typical emotions, 443-9;
results from reflex effects of stimulus upon organism, 449 ff.;
their classification, 454;
in anæsthetic subjects, 455;
in the absence of normal stimulus, 458-60;
effects of expressing, 463 ff.;
of repressing, 466;
the subtler, 469 ff.;
the neural process in, 472;
differences in individuals, 474;
evolution of special emotions, 477 ff.
Empirical ego, I.290
Empirical propositions, II. 644
Emulation, II. 409
Ennui, I.626
Entoptic sensations, I.515 ff.
Equation, personal, I.413
'Equilibration,' direct and indirect, II. 627
Essences, their meaning, II. 329 ff.;
sentimental and mechanical, 665
Essential qualities, seeessences
Estel, I.613,618
Evolutionism demands a 'mind-dust,' I.146
Exner, on human cortical centres, I.36;
on 'circumvallation' of centres,65;
his psychodometer,87;
on reaction-time,91;
on perception of rapid succession,409;
on attention,439;
on time-perception,615,638,646;
on feeling of motion, II. 172
Experience, I.402,487;
Relation of experience to necessary judgments, Chapter XXVIII;
Experience defined, II. 619 ff., 628
Experimentation in psychology, I.192
Extradition of sensations, II. 31 ff., 195 ff.
Fallacy, the Psychologist's, I.196,278,153; II. 281
Familiarity, sense of, seerecognition
Fatalism, II. 574
Fatigue, diminishes span of consciousness, I.640
Fear, instinct of, II. 396, 415;
the symptoms of, 446;
morbid, 460;
origin of, 478
Fechner, I.435-6,533,539 ff.,549,616,645; II. 50, 70, 137 ff., 178, 464
Feeling, synonym for consciousness in general in this book, I.186;
feelings of relation,243
Félida X., I.380-4
Féré, Ch., II. 68, 378 ff.
Ferrier, D., I.31,46-7-8,53,57-8-9,445; II. 503
Ferrier, Jas., I.274,475
Fiat, of the will, II. 501, 526, 561, 564; 568.
Seedecision
Fichte, I.365
Fick, I.150
Fiske, J., II. 577
Fixed ideas. Seeinsistent ideas
Flechsig's Pyramidenbahn, I.37
Flint, R., II. 425
Flourens, P., I.30
Force, supposed sense of, II. 518
Forgetting, I.679 ff.; II. 870-1. Seeamnesia
Fouillée, A., II. 500, 570
François-Franck, I.70
Franklin, Mrs.C. L., II. 94
Franz, Dr., II. 63
Freedom, of the will, II. 569 ff.
'Fringe' of object, I.258,281-2,471-2,478
Frog's nerve-centres, I.14
Fusion of feelings unintelligible, I.157-62; II. 2. SeeMind-stuff theory
Fusion of impressions into one object, I.484,502; II. 103, 183
Galton, F., I.254,265,685;
on mental imagery, II. 51-7;
on gregariousness, 430
General propositions, what they involve, II. 337 ff. Seeuniversal conceptions
Genesis of brain-structure, its two modes, II. 624
Genius, I.423,530; II. 110, 352, 360
Gentleman, the mind of the, II. 370
Geometry, II. 658
Giddiness, seevertigo
Gilman, B. I., I.95
Gley, E., II. 514-5, 525
Goldscheider, II. 170, 192 ff., 200
Goltz, I.9,31,33,34,45,46,58,62,67,69,70,74,77
Gorilla, II. 416
Graefe, A., II. 507, 510
Grashey, I.640
Grassman, R., II. 654
Gregariousness, II. 430
Green, T. H., I.247,274,366-8; II. 4, 10, 11
Grief, II. 448, 480
Griesinger, W., II. 298
Grubelsucht, II. 284
Guinea-pigs, epileptic, etc., II. 682-7
Guislain, II. 546
Gurney, E., I.209; II. 117, 130, 469, 610
Guyau, II. 414, 469
Habit,Chapter IV:
due to plasticity of brain-matter, I.105;
depends onpaths in nerve-centres,107;
origination of,109-13;
mechanism of concatenated habits,114-8;
they demand some sensation,118;
ethical and pedagogic maxims,121-7;
is the ground of association,566;
of memory,655
Habits may inhibit instincts, II. 394;
Habit accounts for one large part of our knowledge, 632
Hall, G. S., I.96-7,558,614,616; II. 155, 247, 281, 423
Hallucination, sensation a veridical, II. 33;
of lost limbs, 38, 105;
of emotional feeling, 459
Hallucinations, II. 114 ff.;
hypnagogic, 124;
the brain-process in, 122 ff.;
hypnotic, 604
Hamilton, W., I.214,215,274,406,419,569,578,682; II. 113
Hammond, E., II. 673
Haploscopic method, II. 226
Harless, II. 497
Hartley, I.553,561,564,600
Hartmann, R., II. 416
Hasheesh-delirium, II. 121
Hearing, its cortical centre, I.52
Heat, of mental work, I.100
Hecker, II. 480
Hegel, I.163,265,366,369,666
Heidenhain, I.82
Helmholtz, H., I.285;
on attention,422,487,441;
on discrimination,504,516-21;
time as a category,637-8;
after-images,645,648;
on color-contrast, II. 17 ff.;
on sensation, 33;
on cochlea, 170;
on convergence of eyes, 200;
vision with inverted head, 213;
on what marks a sensation, 218 ff., 243-4;
on entoptic objects, 241-2;
on contrast in seen movement, 247;
on relief, 257;
on measurement of the field of view, 266 ff.;
on theory of space-perception, 279;
on feeling of innervation, 493, 507, 510;
on conservation of energy, 667
Hemiamblyopia, I.44
Hemianopsia, I.41,44; II. 73
Hemispheres, their distinction from lower centres, I.20;
their education,24,67;
localization of function in,30;
the exclusive seat of consciousness,65;
effects of deprivation of, on frogs,17,72-3;
on fishes,73;
on birds,74,77;
on rodents,74;
on dogs,70,74;
onprimates,75;
not devoid of connate paths,76;
their evolution from lower centres,79
Henle, J., II. 445, 461, 481
Herbart, I.353,418,603,608,626
Hereditary transmission of acquired characters, seeinheritance
Hering, E., on attention, I.438,449;
on comparing weights,544;
on pure sensation, II. 4;
on color-contrast, 20 ff.;
on roomy character of sensations, 136 ff.;
on after-images and convergence, 200;
on distance of double images, 230;
on stereoscopy, 252;
on reproduction in vision, 260 ff.;
on movements of closed eye, 510
Herzen, I.58;
on reaction-time from a corn,96;
on cerebral thermometry,100;
on swooning,273
Hitzig, I.31
Hobbes, T., I.573,587,594 ff.
Hodgson, R., I.374,398
Hodgson, S. H., on inertness of consciousness, I.129-30,133;
on self,341,347;
on conceptual order,482;
on association,572 ff.,603;
on voluntary redintegration,588-9;
on the 'present' in time,607
Höffding, H., I.674; II. 455
Holbrook, M. H., I.665
Holmes, O. W., I.88,405,582
Holtei, von, I.624
Horopter, II. 226
Horsley, V., I.35,59,63
Horwicz, I.314,325-7
Howe, S. G., II. 358
Human intellect, compared with that of brute, II. 348 ff.;
depends on association by similarity, 353 ff.;
various orders of, 360;
what brain-peculiarity it depends on, 366, 638
Hume, I.254;
on personal identity,351-3,360;
association,597;
due to brain-laws,564;
on mental images, II. 45-6;
on belief, 295-6, 302;
on pleasure and will, 558
Hunting instinct, II. 411
Huxley, I.130-1,254; II. 46
Hyatt, A., II. 102
Hylozoism, seeMind-stuff theory
Hyperæsthesia, in hypnotism, II. 609
Hypnotism, I.407; II. 128, 351;
general account of, Chapter XXVII;
methods, II. 593;
theories of, 596;
symptoms of trance, 602 ff.;
post-hypnotic suggestion, 618
Hysterics, their so-called anæsthesias, and unconsciousness, I.202 ff.
Ideal objects, eternal and necessary relations between, II. 639, 661.
Seeconception
'Ideas,' the theory of, I.230;
confounded with objects,231,276,278,399,521;
they do not exist as parts of our thought,279,405,553;
platonic,462;
abstract,468 ff.;
universal,473 ff.;
never come twice the same,480-1
Ideation, no distinct centres for, I.564; II. 78
Identity, sense of, I.459;
three principles of,460;
not the foundation of likeness,492
Identity, personal, I.238,330 ff.;
based on ordinary judgment of sameness,334;
due to resemblance and continuity of our feelings,336;
Lotze on,350;
only relatively true,372
Ideo-motor action the type of all volition, II. 522
Idiosyncrasy, II. 631
'Idomenians,' II. 214
Illusions, II. 85 ff., 129, 232 ff., 243-66.
Seehallucination
Images, double, in vision, II. 225-30
Images, mental, not lost in mental blindness, etc., I.50,66; II. 73
Images, are usually vague, II. 45;
visual, 51 ff.;
auditory, 160;
motor, 61;
tactile, 165;
between sleep and waking, 124-6
Imagination, Chapter XVIII:
it differs in individuals, II. 51 ff.;
sometimes leaves an after-image, 67;
the cerebral process of, 68 ff.;
not locally distinct from that of sensation, 73;
isfigured, 82
Imitation, II. 408
Immortality, I.348-9
Impulses, morbid, II. 542 ff. Seeinstincts
Impulsiveness of all consciousness, II. 526 ff.
Inattention, I.404,455 ff.
Increase, serial, I.490
Indeterminism, II. 569 ff.
Ingersoll, R., II. 469
Inheritance of acquired characters, II. 367, 678 ff.
Inhibition, I.43,67,404; II. 126, 373;
of instincts, 391, 394;
of one cortical process by another, 583
Innervation, feeling of, II. 236, 493;
it is unnecessary, 494 ff.;
no evidence for it, 499, 518
Innervation, collateral, seevicarious function
Insane delusions, I.375; II. 113
Insistent ideas, II. 545
Instinct. Chapter XXIV;
defined, II. 384;
is a reflex impulse, 385 ff.;
is neither blind nor invariable, 389;
contrary instincts in same animal, 392;
man has more than other mammals, 393, 441;
their transitoriness, 398;
special instincts, 404-441;
the origin of instincts, 678
'Integration' of feelings, Spencer's theory of, I.151 ff.
Intelligence, the test of its presence, I.8;
of lower brain-centres,78 ff.
Intention to speak, I.253
Interest, I.140,284 ff.,402-3,482,515 ff.,572,594; II. 312 ff., 344-5, 634
Intermediaries, the axiom of skipped, II. 646
Introspection, I.185
Inverted head, vision with, II. 213
Jackson, Hughlings, I.29,64,400; II. 125-6
Janet, J., I.385
Janet, Paul, I.625; II. 40-1
Janet, Pierre, I.203 ff.,227,384 ff.,682; II. 456, 614
Jastrow, I.88,543,545; II. 44, 135, 180
Jevons, W. S., I.406
Joints, their sensibility, II. 189 ff.
Judgments, existential, II. 290
Justice, II. 673
Kandinsky, V., II. 70, 116
Kant, I.274,331,344,347;
his 'transcendental' deduction of the categories,360;
his paralogisms,362;
criticised,363-6;
on time,642;
on symmetrical figures, II. 150;
on space, 273 ff.;
on the real, 296;
on synthetic judgmentsa priori, 661,
and their relation to experience, 664
Kinæsthetic feelings, II. 488 ff., 493
'Kleptomania,' II. 425
Knee-jerk, II. 380
Knowing, I.216 ff.;
psychology assumes it,218;
not reducible to any other relation,219,471,688
Knowledge, two kinds of, I.221;
of Self not essential to,274;
the relativity of, II. 9 ff.;
the genesis of, 630 ff.
Knowledge-about, I.221
König, I.542
Kries, von, I.96,547; II. 253
Krishaber, I.377
Kussmaul, A., I.684
Ladd, G. T., I.687; II. 3, 311
Lamarck, II. 678
Landry, II. 490, 492
Lange, A., I.29,284
Lange, C., II. 443, 449, 455, 457, 460, 462
Lange, K., II. 111
Lange, L., on reaction-time, muscular and sensorial, I.92
Lange, N., on muscular element in imagination, I.444
Language, as a human function, II. 356-8
Laromiguèire, I.247
Laughter, II. 480
Lazarus, I.624,626; II. 84, 97, 369, 429
Le Conte, Joseph, II. 228, 252, 265
Léonie, M. Janet's trance-subject, I.201,387 ff.
Levy, W. H., II. 204
Lewes, on frog's sp. cord, I.9,78,134;
on thought as a sort of algebra,270;
on 'preperception,'439,442;
on muscular feeling, II. 199;
on begging in pup, 400;
on lapsed intelligence, 678
Lewinski, II. 192
Liberatore, II. 670
Liebman, O., on brain as a machine, I.10; II. 34
Liégeois, J., II. 594, 606
Light, effects of, on movement, II. 379
Likeness, I.528
Lindsay, T. L., II. 421
Lipps, on 'unconscious' sensations, I.175;
on theory of ideas,603;
time-perception,632;
on muscular feeling, II. 200;
on distance, 221;
on visual illusions, 251, 264;
on space-perception, 280;
on reality, 297;
on effort, 575
Lissauer, I.50
Local signs, II. 155 ff., 167
Localization, in hemispheres, I.30 ff.
Localization, II. 153 ff.;
of one sensible object in another, II. 31 ff., 183 ff., 195 ff.
Locke, J., I.200,230,247,349,390,462,483,553,563,679; II. 210, 306, 644, 662-4
'Locksley Hall,' I.567
Locomotion, instinct of, II. 405
Loeb, I.33,44; II. 255, 516, 628
Logic, II. 647
Lombard, J. S., I.99
Lombard, W., II. 380
Lotze, I.214;
on immortality,349;
on personal identity,350;
on attention,442-3;
on fusion and discrimination of sensations,522;
on local signs, II. 157, 495;
on volition, 523-4
Louis V., I.388
Love, sexual, II. 437, 543;
parental, 439;
Bain's explanation of, 551
Lowell, J. R., I.582
Luciani, I.44-5-6-7,53,60
McCosh, I.501
Mach, E., on attention, I.436;
on space-feeling,449;
on time feeling,616,635;
on motion-contrast, II. 247;
on optical inversion, 255;
on probability, 258;
on feeling of innervation, 509, 511
Magnitude of differences, I.530 ff.
Malebranche, II. 9
Manouvrier, II. 496
Mania, transitory, II. 460
Man's intellectual distinction from brutes, II. 348 ff.
Mansel, H. L., I.274
Mantegazza, P., II. 447, 479, 481
Marcus Aurelius, I.313,317; II. 675
Marillier, L., I.445; II. 514
Marique, I.65
Martin, H. N., I.99; II. 3
Martineau, J., I.484 ff.,506; II. 9
Maudsley, H., I.113,656
Maury, A., II. 83, 124, 127
Mechanical philosophy, the, II. 666 ff.
Mechanismvs. intelligence, I.8-14
Mediate comparison, I.489
Mediumship, I.228,393 ff.
Mehner, I.618
Memory,Chapter XVI:
it depends on material conditions, I.2;
the essential function of the hemispheres,20;
lapses of,373 ff.;
in hysterics,384 ff.;
favored by attention,427;
primary,638,643;
analysis of the phenomenon of Memory,648;
the return of a mental image is not memory,619;
memory's causes,653 ff.;
the result of association,654;
conditions of good memory,659;
brute retentiveness,660;
multiple associations,662;
improvement of memory,667 ff.;
its usefulness depends on forgetting much,680;
its decay,683;
metaphysical explanations of it,687 ff.
Mentality, the mark of its presence, I.8
Mental operations, simultaneous, I.408
Mercier, C., on inertness of consciousness, I.135;
on inhibition, II. 583
Merkel, I.542-3-4
Metaphysical principles, II. 669 ff.
Metaphysics, I.137,401
Meyer's experiment on color-contrast, II. 21
Meyer, G. H., II. 66, 97-8
Meynert, T., his brain-scheme, I.25,64,72
Mill, James, I.277,355,470,476,485,499,597,651,653; II. 77
Mill, J. S., I.189;
on unity of self,356-9;
on abstract ideas,470;
methods of inquiry,590;
on infinitude and association,600;
on space, II. 271;
on belief, 285, 822;
on reasoning, 331;
on the order of Nature, 634;
on arithmetical propositions, 654
Mills, C. K., I.60
Mimicry, its effects on emotion, II. 463-6
Mind, depends on brain-conditions, I.4,553;
the mark of its presence,8;
difficulty of stating its connection with brain,176;
what psychology means by it,183,216
Mind-Stuff theory,Chapter VI:
a postulate of evolution, I.146,176;
some proofs of it,148;
author's interpretation of them,154;
feelings cannot mix,157 ff., II. 2, 103
Miser, associationist explanation of the, II. 423 ff.
Mitchell, J. K., II. 616
Mitchell, S. W., I.381; II. 38-9, 380
Modesty, II. 435
Moll, A., II. 616
Molyneux, II. 210
Monadism, I.179
Monism, I.366-7
Monkey's cortical centres, I.34-5,46,59
Montgomery, E., I.158
Moral principles, II. 639, 672
Morris, G. S., I.365
Mosso, on blood-supply to brain, I.97-9
plethysmographic researches, II. 378;
on fear, 419, 483
Motor centres, I.31 ff.
'Motor circle,' II. 583
Motor strands, I.38;
for special muscles, I.64
Motor type of imagination, II. 61
Movement, perception of, by sensory surfaces, II. 171 ff.;
part played by, in vision, 197, 203, 234-7
the, Production of, Chap. XXII
requires guiding sensations, 490
illusory perception of, during anæsthesia, 489;
results from every kind of consciousness, 526
Mozart, I.255
Müller, G. E., I.445,456-8; II. 198, 280, 491, 502, 508, 517
Müller, J., I.68; II. 640
Müller, J. J., II. 213
Müller, Max, I.269
Munk, H., I.41-3-4-5-6,57-8-9,63
Münsterberg, on Meynert's scheme, I.77;
on reaction times with intellectual operation,432:
on association,562;
on time-perception,620,637;
on imagination, II. 74;
on muscular sensibility, 189;
on volition, 505;
on feeling of innervation, 514;
on association, 590
Muscles, how represented in nerve-centres, I.19
Muscle-reading, II. 525
Muscular sense, its cortical centre, I.61;
its existence, II. 189 ff., 197 ff.;
its insignificance in space-perception, 197-203, 234-7
Music, its accidental genesis, II. 627; 687
Mussey, II. 543
Mutilations, inherited, II. 627
Myers, F. W. H., I.400; II. 133
Mysophobia, II. 435, 545
Nature, the order of, its incongruence with that of our thought, II. 634 ff.
Naunyn, I.55
Necessary truths are all truths of comparison, II. 641 ff., 651, 662.
Seeexperience,a priori connections, etc.
Neiglick, I.543
Neural process, in perception. I.78 ff.;
in habit,105 ff.;
in association,566;
in memory,655;
in imagination, II. 68 ff.;
in perception, 82 ff., 103 ff.;
in hallucination, 122 ff.;
in space-perception, 143;
in emotion, 474;
in volition, 580 ff.;
in association, 587 ff.
Nitrous oxide intoxication, II. 284
Nonsense, how it escapes detection, I.261
Normal position in vision, II. 238
Nothnagel, I.51,60-1
Number, II. 653
Obersteiner, I.87,445
Object, use of the word, I.275,471;
confusion of, with thought that knows it,278
Objective world, known before self, I.273;
its primitive unity,487-8;
ditto, II. 8
Objectsversus ideas, I.230,278
Old-fogyism, II. 110
Orchansky, I.95
'Overtone' (psychic), I.258,281-2
Pain, I.143,
its relations to the will, II. 549 ff., 583-4
Paneth, I.64,65
Parallelism, theory of, between mental and cerebral phenomena, seeAutomaton-theory
Paresis of external rectus muscle, II. 236, 507
Parinaud, II. 71
Partiality of mind, seeinterest,teleology,intelligence,selection,essences
Past time, known in a present feeling, I.627;
the immediate past is a portion of the present duration-block,608 ff.
Patellar reflex, II. 380
Paths through cortex, I.71;
their formation,107-12; II. 584 ff.;
association depends on them, 567 ff.;
memory depends on them, 655 ff., 661, 686
Paulhan, F., I.250,408,670; II. 64, 476
Pedagogic remarks: I.121-7; II. 110, 401-2, 409, 463, 466
Perception. Chapter XIX:
compared with sensation, II. 1, 76;
involves reproductive processes, 78;
is ofprobable objects, 82 ff.;
not an unconscious inference, 111 ff.;
rapidity of, 131
Perception-time, II. 131
Perez, B., I.446; II. 416
Personal equation, I.413
Personality, alterations of, I.373 ff.
Pflüger, on frog's spinal cord, I.9,134
Philosophies, their test, II. 312
Phosphorus and thought, I.101
Phrenology, I.27
Pick, E., I.669
Pitres, I.206
Planchette-writing, I.208-9,393 ff.
Plasticity, as basis of habit, defined, I.105
Platner, II. 208
Plato, I.462
Play, II. 427
Pleasure, as related to will, I.143; II. 549, 583-4
Points, identical, theory of, II. 222 ff.
Possession, Spirit-, I.393 ff.
Post-hypnotic suggestion, II. 613
Practical interests, their effects on discrimination, I.515 ff.
Prayer, I.316
'Preperception,' I.439
Present, the present moment, I.606 ff.
Preyer, II. 403
Probability determines what object shall be perceived, II. 82, 104, 258, 260-3
Problematic conceptions, I.463
Problems, the process of solution of, I.584
Projection of sensations, eccentric, II. 31 ff.
Projection, theory of, II. 228
Psychologist's fallacy, the, seeFallacy
Psychophysic law, I.539
Pugnacity, II. 409
Pure Ego, I.342
Putnam, J. J., I.61
Questioning mania, II. 284
Rabier, I.470,604
Rational propositions, II. 644
Rationality is based on apprehension of series, II. 659
Rationality, postulates of, II. 670, 677
Rationality, sense of, I.260-4; II. 647
Reaction-time, I.87;
simple,88;
what it measures is not conscious thought,90;
Lange's distinction between muscular and sensorial,92;
its variations,94-7;
influenced by expectant attention,427 ff.;
after intellectual process,432;
after discrimination,523;
after association,557;
after perception, II. 131
Real size and shape of visual objects, II. 179, 237 ff.
Reality, the Perception of, Chapter XXI;
not a distinct content of consciousness, II. 286;
various orders of, 287 ff.;
every object hassome kind of reality, 291 ff.;
the choice of, 290;
practical, 293 ff.;
means relation to the self, 295-8;
relation of sensations to, 299;
of emotions, 306
Reason, I.551. SeeLogic
Reasoning, Chapter XXII;
its definition, II. 325;
involves the picking out of essences, or sagacity, 329;
and abstraction, 332;
its utility depends on the peculiar constitution of this world, 337 ff., 651;
depends on association by similarity, 345
Recall, I.578,654
'Recepts,' II. 327, 349, 351
Recognition, I.673
Recollection, voluntary, I.585 ff.
Redintegration, I.569
'Reductives,' II. 125, 291
Reflex acts, I.12;
reaction-time measures one,90;
concatenated habits are constituted by a chain of,116
Reid, Thomas, I.609,78; II. 214, 216, 218, 240, 309
Relating principle, I.687-8
Relation, feelings of, I.243 ff.;
space-relations, II. 148 ff.
Relations, inward, between ideas, II. 639, 642, 661, 671;
the principle of transferred, 646
Relief, II. 254-7. Seethird dimension
Renouvier, Ch., I.551; II. 309
Reproduction in memory, I.574 ff.,654;
voluntary,585 ff.
Resemblance, I.528
Respiration, effects of sensory stimuli upon, II. 376
Restitution of function, I.67 ff.
Restoration of function, I.67 ff.
Retention in memory, I.653 ff.
Retentiveness, organic, I.659 ff.;
it is unchangeable,663 ff.
Retinal image, II. 92
Retinal sensibility, seevision,space,identical points,third dimension,projection, etc.
Revival in memory, I.574 ff.,654
Reynolds, Mary, I.381
Ribot, Th., I.375;
on attention,444,446,680, 682
Richet, Ch., I.638,644-6-7
Riehl, A., II. 32
Robertson, G. C., I.461; II. 86
Romanes, G. J., II. 95, 132, 327-9, 349, 351, 355, 397
Romantic and classic, II. 469
Rosenthal, I.78
Ross, J., I.56-7
Royce, J., I.374; II. 316-7
Royer-Collard, I.609
Rutherford, II. 170
Sagacity, II. 331, 343
Sameness, I.272,459,480; II. 650
Schaefer, W., I.35,53,59,63
Schiff, M., I.58,78,100
Schmid, I.683
Schmidt, H. D., II. 399-400
Schneider, G. H., on Habits, I.112,118-20;
on perception of motion, II. 173;
on evolution of movements, 380;
on instincts, 387-8, 411, 418, 439
Schopenhauer, II. 33, 273
Schrader, I.72 ff.
Science, the genesis of, II. 665-9
Sea-sickness, susceptibility to, an accident, II. 627
Seat of consciousness, I.65;
of Soul,214;
of sensations, no original, II. 34
Sciences, the natural, the factors of their production, II. 633 ff.;
a Turkish cadi upon, 640;
postulate things with unchangeable properties, 656
Sciences, the pure, they express results of comparison exclusively, II. 641;
classifications, 646;
logic, 647;
mathematics, 653
Secretiveness, II. 432
Seguin, I.48,75
Selection, a cardinal function of consciousness, I.284 ff.,402,594; II. 584;
of visual reality, II. 177 ff., 237;
of reality in general, 290, 294;
of essential quality, 333, 370, 634
Self, consciousness of,Chap. X:
not primary, I.273;
the empirical self, I.291;
its constituents,292;
the material self,292;
the social self,293;
the spiritual self,296;
resolvable into feelings localized in head,300 ff.;
consciousness of personal identity,330 ff.;
its alterations,373 ff.
Self-feeling, I.305 ff.
Self-love, I.317;
the name for active impulses and emotions towards certainobjects; we do not love our bare principle of individuality,323
Self-seeking, I.307 ff.
Selves, their rivalry, I.309 ff.
Semi-reflex acts, I.13
Sensation, does attention increase its strength? I.425;
terminus of thought,471
Sensation, Chapter XVII;
distinguished from perception, II. 1, 76;
its cognitive function, 3;
pure sensation an abstraction, 3;
the terminus of thought, 7
Sensations, are not compounds, I.158 ff.; II. 2;
their supposed combination by a higher principle, I.687; II. 27-30;
their influence on each other, II. 28-30;
their eccentric projection, 31 ff., 195 ff.;
their localization inside of one another, 183 ff.;
their relation to reality, 299 ff.;
to emotions, 453;
their fusion, seeMind-stuff theory
Sensationalism, I.243;
criticised by spiritualism,687
Sensationalism, II. 5;
in the field of space-perception, criticised, 216 ff.;
its difficulties, 231-7;
defended, 237 ff., 517
Sergi, II. 34
Serial increase, I.490; II. 644
Series, II. 644-51, 659 ff.
Seth, A., II. 4
Sexual function, I.22
Shadows, colored, II. 25
Shame, II. 435
Shoemaker, Dr., I.273
Shyness, II. 430
Sight, its cortical centre, I.41 ff.,66
Sign-making, a differentia of man, II. 356
Signs, local, II. 155 ff.
Sigwart, C., II. 634-6
Sikorsky, II. 465
Similarity, I.528
Similarity, association by, I.578; II. 345, 353
Skin, discrimination of points on, I.512
Sleep, partial consciousness during, I.213
Sociability, II. 430
Somnambulism, seehypnotism,hysterics
Soul, theory of the, I.180;
inaccessibility of,187;
its essence is to think (according to Descartes),200;
seat of,214;
arguments for its existence,343 ff.;
an unnecessary hypothesis for psychology,350;
compared with transcendental Ego,365;
a relating principle,499
Space, the perception of, Chapter XX;
primitive extensity in three dimensions, II. 134-9;
spatial order, 145;
space-relations, 148;
localization in, 153 ff.;
how real space is mentally constructed, 166 ff.;
part played by movement in, 171-6;
measurement of extensions, 177 ff.;
synthesis of originally chaotic sensations of extension, 181 ff.;
part played by articular surfaces in, 189 ff.;
by muscles, 197 ff.;
how the blind perceive space, 203 ff.;
visual space, 211-268;
theory of identical points, 222;
of projection, 228;
difficulties of sensation-theory expounded and replied to, 231-268;
historical sketch of opinion, 270 ff.
Spalding, D. A., II. 396, 398, 400, 406
Span of consciousness, I.405,640
Speech, the 'centre' of, I.55;
its misleading influence in psychology, I.194;
thought possible without it,269.
SeeAphasia,Phrenology
Spencer, his formula of 'adjustment,' I.6;
on formation of paths in nerve-centres,109;
on chasm between mind and matter,147;
on origin of consciousness,148;
on 'integration' of nervous shocks,151-3;
on feelings of relation,247;
on unity of self,354;
on conceivability,464;
on abstraction,506;
on association,600;
on time perception,622,639;
on memory,649;
on recognition,673;
on feeling and perception, II. 113, 180;
on space-perception, 272, 282;
on genesis of emotions, 478 ff.;
on free-will, 576;
on inheritance of acquired peculiarities, 620 ff., 679;
on 'equilibration,' 627;
on genesis of cognition, 643;
on that of sociality and pity, 685
Spinoza, II. 288
Spir, A., II. 665, 677
'Spirit-control,' I.228
Spiritualist theory of the self, I.342; II. 5
Spiritualists, I.161
Stanley, Henry M., II. 310
Starr, A., I.54,56
Statistical method in psychology, I.194
Steiner, I.72-3
Steinthal, I.604; II. 107-9
Stepanoff, II. 170
Stereoscope, II. 87
Stereoscopy, II. 223, 252. Seethird dimension
Sternberg, II. 105, 515
Stevens, I.617
Stevens, E. W., I.397
Story, Jean, I.263
Stream of Thought,Chapter IX:
schematic representations of, I.279-82
Stricker, S., II. 62 ff.
Strümpell, A., I.376,445,489,491
Strümpell, Prof., II. 353
Stuart, D., I.406,427
Stumpf. C, on attention, I.426;
on difference,493;
on fusion of impressions,522,530-3;
on strong and weak sensations,547;
on relativity of knowledge, II. 11;
on sensations of extent, 219, 221
Subjective sensations, I.516 ff.
Substance, spiritual, I.345
Substantive states of mind, I.243
Substitution of parts for wholes in reasoning, II. 330;
of the same for the same, 650
Subsumption, the principle of mediate, II. 648
Succession, not known by successive feelings, I.628;
vs. duration,609
Suggestion, in hypnotism, II. 598-601;
post-hypnotic, 613
Suicide, I.317
Sully, J., I.191; II. 79, 221, 272, 281, 322, 425
Summation of stimuli, I.82;
of elements of feeling,151;
the latter is inadmissible,158
Superposition, in space-measurements, II. 177, 266 ff.
Symbols as substitutes for reality, II. 305
Sympathy, II. 410
Synthetic judgmentsa priori, II. 661-2
Systems, philosophic, sentimental, and mechanical, II. 665-7
Tactile centre, I.58
Tactile images, II. 65
Tactile sensibility, its cortical centre, I.34,61,62
Taine, H., on unity of self, I.355;
on alterations of ditto,376;
on recollecting,658,670;
On projection of sensations, II. 33;
on images, 48, and their 'reduction,' 125-6;
on reality, 291
Tàkacs, II. 490
Tarde, G., I.263
Taylor, C. F., II. 99
Tedium, I.626
Teleology, created by consciousness, I.140-1;
essence of intelligence,482
involved in the fact of essences, II. 335;
its barrenness in the natural sciences, 665
Tendency, feelings of, I.250-4
Thackeray, W. M., II. 434
Thermometry, cerebral, I.99
'Thing,' II. 184, 259
Thinking, the consciousness of, I.300 ff.
Thinking principle, I.342
Third dimension of space, II. 134 ff., 212 ff., 220
Thompson, D. G., I.354; II. 662
Thomson, Allen, I.84
Thought, synonym for consciousness at large, I.186;
the stream of,Chapter IX:
it tends to personal form,225;
same thought never comes twice,231 ff.;
sense in which it is continuous,237;
can be carried on in any terms,260-8;
what constitutes its rational character,269;
is cognitive,271;
not made up of parts,276 ff., II. 79 ff.;
always partial to some of its objects, I.284 ff.;
the consciousness of it as a process,300 ff.;
the present thought is the thinker,369,401;
depends on material conditions,553
'Thought reading,' II. 525
Time, occupied by neural and mental processes, seereaction-time
Time, unconscious registration of, I.201
Time, the perception of,Chapter XV;
begins with duration, I.609;
compared with perception of space,610 ff.;
empty time not perceived,619;
its discrete flow,621,637;
long intervals conceived symbolically,622 ff.;
variations in our estimate of its length,623 ff.;
cerebral process underlying,627 ff.
Tischer, I.524,527
Touch, cortical centre for, I.58
Trance, seehypnotism
Transcendentalist theory of the Self, I.342,360 ff.;
criticised,363 ff.
Transitive states of mind, I.243 ff.
Tschisch, von, I.414,560
Tuke, D. H., II. 130, 413
Taylor, E. B., II. 304
Tympanic membrane, its tactile sensibility, II. 140
Tyndall, I.147-8
Ueberweg, I.187
Unconscious states of Mind, proofs of their existence, I.164 ff.;
Objections,164 ff.
Unconsciousness, I.199 ff.;
in hysterics,202 ff.;
of useless sensations,517 ff.
Understanding of a sentence, I.281
Units, psychic, I.151
Unity of original object, I.487-8; II. 8, 183 ff.
Universal conceptions, I.473. Seegeneral propositions
Unreality, the feeling of, II. 298
Valentin, I.557
Varying concomitants, law of dissociation by, I.506
Vennum, Lurancy, I.397
Ventriloquism, II. 184
Verdon, R., I.685
Vertigo, II. 89;
Mental vertigo, 309;
optical, 506
Vicarious function of brain-parts, I.69,142; II. 592
Vierordt, I.616 ff.; II. 154, 172
Vintschgau, I.95-6
Vision with head upside down, II. 213
Visual centre in brain, I.41 ff.
Visual space, II. 211 ff.
Visualizing power, II. 51-60
Vocalization, II. 407
Volition, seeWill
Volkmann. A. W., II. 198, 252 ff.
Volkmann, W. von Volkmar, I.627,629,631; II. 276
Voluminousness, primitive, of sensations, II. 184
Voluntary thinking, I.583
Vulgarity of mind, II. 370
Vulpian, I.73
Wahle, I.493
Waitz, Th., I.405,632; II. 436
Walking, in child, II. 405
Walter. J. E., I.214
Ward, J., I.162,454,548,562,629,633; II. 282
Warren, J. W., I.97
Wayland, I.347
Weber, E. H., his 'law,' I.537 ff.
On space-perception on skin, II. 141-2;
on muscular feeling, 198
Weed, T., I.665
Weissmann, A., II. 684 ff.
Wernicke's convolution, I.39,54-5
'Wheatstone's experiment,' II. 326-7
Wigan, Dr., I.390,675; II. 566-7
Wilbrand, I.50-1
Will, Chapter XXVI;
involves memory of past acts, and nothing else but consent that they shall occur again, II. 487-518;
the memory may involve images of either resident or remote effects of the movement, 518-22;
ideo-motor action, 522-8;
action after deliberation, 528;
decision, 531;
effort, 535;
the explosive will, 537;
the obstructed will, 546;
relation of will to pleasure and pain, 549 ff.;
to attention, 561;
terminates in an 'idea', 567;
the question of its indeterminism, 569;
psychology must assume determinism, 576;
neural processes concerned in education of the will, 579 ff.
Will, relations of, to Belief, II. 320
Wills, Jas., I.241
Witchcraft, II. 309
Wolfe, H. K., I.674,679
Wolff, Chr., I.409,651
World, the peculiar constitution of the, II. 337, 647, 651-2
Writing, automatic, I.393 ff.
Wundt, on frontal lobes, I.64;
on reaction-time,89-94,96,427 ff.,525;
on introspective method,189;
on self-consciousness,303;
on perception of strokes of sound,407;
on perception of simultaneous events,411 ff.;
on Weber's law,534 ff.;
association-time,557,560;
on time-perception,608,612 ff.,620,634.
on local signs, II. 155-7;
on eyeball-muscles, 200;
on sensations, 219;
on paresis of ext. rectus, 236;
on contrast, 250;
on certain illusions, 264;
on feeling of innervation, 266, 493;
on space as synthesis, 276;
on emotions, 481;
on dichotomic form of thought, 654
Zöllner's pattern, II. 232